Please note that times will be set to accommodate time zone of participants
Submissions
Send 250-300 word abstract to untranslatableworkshop-group@sheffield.ac.uk by May 23rd 2025.
Please also include a 200 word positionality/reflexive statement on the themes of the call and brief statement of why you’d like to participate.
Please include your name, title, institution and career stage.
Southern urban theory is playing a critical role in challenging epistemic hierarchies and systems of domination that have favoured hegemonic ways of seeing and knowing the city. To date, such work has focussed largely on challenging what is researched, how and with whom, bringing attention to undervalued and recognised experiences and the plurality of ways of inhabiting the urban in the context of the traditionally totalising gaze of Western thought.
Within this body of work, there is an emerging recognition that concepts, language and words matter - that language does not merely represent but actively produces urban social reality (Hastings, 1999; Fairclough, 2001; St. Pierre 2017), and implicates the users of such language in relative positionalities of valuation viz a viz one another (Angermuller, 2018). In this, the linguistic dominance of English perpetuates epistemic violence. Hence, we see the increasing use of ‘original’ language terms - ‘untranslatables' - within English published texts. This multi-lingual flavouring can be seen both as an act of minor resistance to translational impulses that seeks to explain complex concepts in simple terms, and also simply as a declaration of a lack of adequate linguistic expression within the English corpus, given the genealogies of differentiated linguistic development in various regions, especially those under English colonization.
We contend, however, that this practice has not been fully theorised within Southern urban theory. Furthermore, there remains a strong tension between the decolonising impulses of Southern urban theory and research practices, and their discursive and textual representations. The relationships between the experiences of everyday living in urban spaces and their forms of representation through words, language and concepts require further interrogation - so that acts of linguistic description (which themselves imply active forms of discursive production) do not constitute new epistemic harms to those communities and groups whose ‘voices’ are intended to be centred, by misrepresenting, misquoting, or mis-producing their reality. This raises some key questions. What kinds of linguistic performances, representations, and productions are embedded, naturalized, and commonsensical (van Dijk, 2008) in English academic texts? What becomes invisibilised in such processes? What harms are rectified or perpetuated through avoiding acts of translation, leaving words or concepts from the field within texts to speak for themselves? When we translate elements, practices and ideas from one place or time to another, are we simply reinforcing the language of the colonisers given the emphasis on English as the working language of the state in many contexts? What are the ramifications of our work for how power and control are mediated by language - the appropriation of urban knowledge through (linguistic) power, and the normalization of particular urban discourses (Richardson, 1996)?
New and emerging scholars influenced by Southern urban theory and a commitment to a decolonial praxis are particularly challenged by these concerns. Language actively reproduces the world whilst discourses shape subject formation, power politics and what gets seen or not seen, included or excluded. Language cannot always capture practices on the ground, yet also has performative value in reshaping power relations through epistemic valorisation or neglect. Words alone cannot fully capture the different urban life-worlds people inhabit, yet focusing only on practice or action undermines the critical role that scholarship can play in impacting the world, and more importantly, the fact that words and worlds are mutually concomitant. Both concepts and actions are required. What do we do when practice on the ground is ‘untranslatable’ yet there remains political value in making certain experiences ‘visible’ within a world in which the dominant language of governing and decision-making elites remains English? When are there adequate synonyms across vernaculars, dialects and languages and when are there not?
Informed by debates on the role of language in identity and subject formation - particularly, the discursive production of urban subjects and objects through various acts of linguistic practice - this call is for participation in an online workshop to theorise the epistemic politics of Southern urban theory through a specific focus on words, language and concepts, as understood performatively rather than simply being representational.
We are interested in papers which make a strong theoretical contribution, informed by scholars’ reflexive experiences of trying to navigate these issues as they move from engagement in the field to its representation. We are particularly interested in essays which reflect on:
- The decisions taken on which words, concepts or language to mobilise for academic representation in relation to different regimes of knowledge, as well as decisions to retain certain words and phrases as fundamentally ‘untranslatable’
- The tensions, glitches and discomforts experienced in undertaking acts of translation, and the conscious compromises and payoffs in these acts
- The implications and limitations of translation, both from an English conceptual framework to the Southern field, as well as back from the field to integrate into the broader body of existing urban literature in English
- Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a methodological approach to investigate linguistic peculiarities and translations in various kinds of Southern urban research
- Creative forms of representation (multi-media, performative, visual, sensory) within or beyond text, or parallel modes of representation: where the written word falls short, what other modes of representation can help translate or convey a similar meaning?
- The adequacy/inadequacy of existing concepts within Southern / urban theory to describe and valorise everyday urban experiences
- The epistemic harms/violence resulting from these linguistic decisions
- The politics of citation within southern / urban theory when how certain concepts, even from southern scholars, are referred/not referred.
- The implications for Southern urban theory building and research practice
Who should apply?
We welcome contributions from scholars around the world at any stage of career - including senior academics, established researchers, early career researchers and post-graduate students.
We are particularly interested in contributions grounded in places where English has become the official language as a result of historic processes of colonialism, but where pockets of ‘linguistic resistance’ remain. We are also keen to challenge centre-periphery relations within as well as beyond southern discourses and contexts.
The workshop will be in English as the working language across different contexts (we recognise the irony!). However we welcome contributions from those for whom English is, and isn’t, their first language, so we can discuss different kinds of translations from and into different dialects and registers.
Schedule
We will also offer an online drop in with workshop organisers on April 22nd @ 11am BST (optional). We will notify accepted participants by mid June.
We will then ask for extended abstracts of 1500 words to be submitted by September 1st 2025.
Organisers
This workshop is co-organised by the University of 91Ö±²¥ (Urban Institute & Southern Theorising Group), Karachi Urban Lab/IBA Karachi, and Lund University, Department of Human Geography, initiated by the Urban Institute’s theme on ‘Urban Epistemics’. The organising team includes:
Adam Abdullah, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at IBA Karachi and Co-Director of Karachi Urban Lab. Adam investigates Pakistan’s fragmented urbanscapes through critical discourse analysis, maps socio-spatial trajectories, and teaches urban studies, planning theory and urban mental health.
Beth Perry, Director of Urban Institute and Professor of Urban Epistemics at the University of 91Ö±²¥. Her work on ‘urban epistemics’ bridges between urban studies, science and technology studies, political science and geography, and focuses on the politics and practices of knowledge production in society and its potential for place-based transformation.
Glyn Williams, Professor of Development Geography at the Department of Human Geography, Lund University. Glyn’s work uses everyday governance as a lens to evaluation development interventions and practices and is co-editor of as well as an honorary Associate Professor at the University of Witwatersrand.
Tanzil Shafique, Lecturer of Urban Design at School of Architecture and Landscape/Urban Institute Associate, University of 91Ö±²¥. Tanzil co-convenes the Southern Theorising Group. His recent monography is City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh (2024, Bloomsbury).
References
Angermuller, J. (2018). Accumulating discursive capital, valuating subject positions. From Marx to Foucault. Critical Discourse Studies. doi:10.1080/17405904.2018.1457551
Hastings, A. (1999). Discourse and Urban Change: Introduction to the Special Issue. Urban Studies, 36(1), 7-12.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power (2nd ed.). Harlow, England: Longman Group UK Limited.
Richardson, T. (1996). Foucauldian discourse: power and truth in urban and regional policy making. European Planning Studies, 4(3), 279-292.
St Pierre, Elizabeth Adams (2017). Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (11):1080-1089.
van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and Context: A sociocognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.