MA Geography Speaker Series
A Feminist-Intersectional Analysis of Urban Spaces in a Neoliberal Era: Emerging Subjects and Subjectivities
Dr. Ebru Ustundag
Department of Geography, Brock University
Friday January 23, 2:00-4:00, MC C405
(light refreshments will be served)
Abstract: Over the last decade, neoliberal, neoconservative and patriarchal discourses have transformed urban landscapes, altering the formations and contestations of subjects, subjectivities and subjection in and through urban spaces. Feminist inquiry and praxis have been influential in mapping out the tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions that have arisen in this period of neoliberalization and neoconservatism. In this presentation, I examine the urban geographies of citizenship that result, by reviewing recent geographical research about the gendered production of social vulnerability in diverse urban spaces. The review returns to the questions of livelihoods and materiality of everyday life that dominated initial work in feminist urban geography. The analysis considers studies that have examined how contemporary subjectivities have been influenced by intersectionalities, the suburban/urban dichotomy, debates concerning resistance versus the right to the city, and technology. I aim to investigate how the production of gendered neoliberal subjects is placed and the role that socio-spatiality plays in heightening the gendered inequities that are central to the contemporary feminist urban question.
Ebru Ustundag holds BSc (Political Science and Public Administration) and MSc (Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments) degrees from Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and a Ph.D. (Geography) from York University. Her research interests include urban geography, citizenship studies, feminist geographies, geographies of sex work, geographies of health and addiction, and scholarly activism and research as resistance. Dr. Ustundag is presently working on two research projects, titled “Witnessing Social Citizenship: Microgeographies of Street Level Sex Workers in St. Catharines” and “Understanding Emergency Department Reliance in St. Catharines, Ontario: A Collaborative Research project between NHS, Quest and Brock University.”
This presentation is open to all members of the Brock community and the public.
