Spatialized Injustice in the Contemporary City: Protesting As Public Pedagogy

This volume documents research illustrating public dissents and interventions to injustice in modern-day cities. Authors present everyday occurrences of city life and place making; still, they show how the ordinary city grows from historical dimensions of injustice, violence and fear. Yet, ordinary citizens continue to make the city their own, to contribute to the creation of city structures and to contest those practices of spatial demarcation, which limit rather than uplift their everyday social livelihood. Chapters show how marginalized populations, from racial, to gendered, to the working poor, are part of the apparatus that makes the city function. However, their contributions to city arrangement and endurance are perpetually at the margins, and city spaces continue to be designed in ways that ignore and negate the existence of those who protest inequity.

Novel to the volume are chapters that document and illustrate contestations of city spaces through artistic representation. Public spaces like schools, art galleries and museums are presented as central to projects of inhabiting, remembering and reimagining (in) the just city. Still, ordinary city spaces, like the public washroom, illustrate issues of gender inequity, spatial bias and other art-based protests.

City dwellers interested in learning about ‘the making’ of the city; and those interested in the city as a space of possibilities – and the good life, will benefit from this volume. Scholars of geography, space, art and social justice will marvel and simultaneously be appalled by the everyday minute, yet shocking descriptions of the complexity – and unfairly structured city spaces in which they dwell.

Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

S. Nombuso Dlamini is Associate Professor, Faculty of Education at York University. She is known for her youth-based projects, including the 2018 Youth in Politics, funded by the Ontario Ministry of Education. She served as the Jean Augustine Chair, York University after her tenure as Research Leadership Chair, University of Windsor. Dlamini’s research focuses on youth activism, youth identities; and on gender experiences of Canada’s racialized populations. She teaches in the area of youth culture, identity and civic engagement. Dlamini’s publications include the acclaimed Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa, and the 2021 co-edited volume, Global Citizenship Education: Challenges and Successes.

Angela Stienen is Professor in the Centre for Research and Development at the University of Education in Bern, Switzerland. She directs the research program Migration/Mobility and Global Learning and coordinates the research cooperation between Bern University of Education and Antioquia University in Medellín, Colombia on Planetary Pedagogy – knowledge production beyond North-South binaries. She teaches in the area of anthropology and geography of education. Since the 1990s she has been conducted extensive research in Colombia and Switzerland, from which she has widely published manuscripts on globalization, migration, and territorial transformation, particularly of urban contexts. Her recent publications include the 2020 article (Re)claiming territory: Colombia's "territorial-peace" approach and the city, and the 2019 co-edited special issue, Youth ‘doing politics’ in the contemporary city.