This webinar is the first in a series of urban discussions organised by Southern Urbanism Research Group Ensemble (SURGE). This series brings together Southern scholars, practitioners and activists from the global South. (Featured image via the NOAA Photo Library).
The webinar seeks to develop a located understanding of the global climate crisis as it relates to and manifests in situated practices to create knowledge of different parts of the global South. By addressing this topic through the themes of political ecology, vulnerability, community agency and resilience, we endeavour to advocate for a more divergent, post-colonial, and transformative vision of Southern Urbanism.
It will take place virtually and in conversation with three brilliant panelists: Marvi Mazhar, Muna Dajani and Naxhelli Ruiz.
Marvi Mazhar's practice combines research, spatial advocacy and design interventions. Her present ongoing research focuses upon the representation and production of Karachi’s Urban Coastal Periphery, and its Ecology. She recently has been awarded research grant from British Council 'Saahil ki Kahanian' (Stories from the Coast) to research an investigative documentation on Delta (province Sindh’s estuary), where residents and speculative land development lead to debates on continuities and transformations regarding indigeneity, capitalism, representation, and land right.
Muna Dajani holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her research focuses on documenting water struggles in agricultural communities under settler colonialism. She is a Senior Research Associate at the Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC) where she works on a project entitled “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability” (T2GS), exploring grassroots initiatives of intergenerational holistic groundwater governance. She has contributed to numerous studies on the hydropolitics of the Jordan and Yarmouk River Basins. She also co-led a collaboration project documenting the story of the occupation of the Syrian Golan through developing an online knowledge portal featuring collective memories of the popular struggle that took place there.
Naxhelli Ruiz is is a social scientist based at the Institute of Geography, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She holds a PhD in Development Studies (University of East Anglia), as well as other degrees in Ethnology and Regional studies. Naxhelli has worked on academic projects spanning a variety of aspects of social vulnerability, from inequality and segregation to disaster risk reduction policies and politics. Her academic work focuses on urban vulnerabilities and risks, disaster prevention and management, recovery, and public communication of risk science. She co-authored the first collection of climatic risk maps in Mexico that were designed to inform metropolitan planning processes (in Guadalajara, Mexico).
She is also a member of disaster risk reduction advisory board for the Federal Government of Mexico and leads the technical committee on urban and territorial resilience of the Resilience Council of Mexico City. She also coordinates UNAM Seminar of Socio-environmental Risks (SURSA), an initiative for interdisciplinary research and outreach.
Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScSnqCJHOrNawS-5kN1LzS-gFpQ-fsgSrMULJqzyPNiikA2sg/viewform