In the age of proclaimed post-industrialism, relations between cities and (their) industries are being reconfigured in the face of global warming, demographic decline, infrastructural decay and other crises of capitalism. Such reconfigurations are changing citizens' daily lives, professional urban planning practices and envisioned urban futures. They materialize, for instance, in the abandonment of both: no longer effective strategies of urban governance that are based on expectations of industrial growth, and previous urban lifestyles determined by industrial production rhythms. We refer to the ongoing reconsiderations of established ways of knowing, urban governing and planning the relations between cities and industries as "endpoints" and understand them as moments of fundamental reorientation. These endpoints are accompanied by sentiments of change and a diversity of intended and unintended social and urban effects. This special issue assembles a variety of ethnographic examples that shed light on these contemporary processes of urban governance, allowing for global comparisons that extrapolate different practices of contesting and changing dominant modes and systems of power. It also aims to reveal the epistemic prevailing notions of linear progress inherent in terms such as "urban development" and the "postindustrial."

Last Wednesday, June 14, the Seminar für Ethnologie of the MLU invited to a public lecture by Kim Fortun in the seminar room of the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research. Fortun spoke about "Late Industrial Ethnography Redoubled - Form Politics to Methods and back." Her research and teaching focus on environmental health, injustice and disaster; experimental ethnographic methods; and the poetics and politics of data infrastructure.

This project, in which Siarhei Liubimau - member of the CityIndustries-Network - participates, nurtures place-specific formats of applied, negotiated, never finished memorialization and meaning making in and about disrupted towns (with the primary focus on mono-functional towns after their productive phase). It blends the registers of institutions, rituals, communities, infrastructures, individuals, artifacts, dreams, media and norms, in order to open up spaces where memory and meaning making can strengthen each other.

Feminist speculations and interventions are not necessarily part of the canon of ethnographic methodology, but they are gaining importance in the wake of an increasing critique of postcolonial and hegemonic epistemic processes of knowledge production. In this talk, Kathrin Eitel from the University of Zürich, will explore where the potentials (and pitfalls) lie for epistemic methods as creative resistance. Join this talk in St. Gallen or Online!

This projects examines transregional relationships between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Golf in the context of port infrastructures and transport corridors. It aims to build and strengthen long-lasting academic relationships between Europe, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

Upcoming talk by Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge, Geography) at Hs 1b Lecture Hall (Habelschwerdter Allee 45 / Rostlaube), FU Berlin on May 20, 2022 at 6 pm.