1st Edition
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.
Introduction
S. Nombuso Dlamini and Angela Stienen
Section 1: Confronting Racialisation in the Multicultural City
1. De-constructing socio-spatial injustices: urban poverty among Blacks in Toronto
Cynthia Kwakyewah
2. Engaging youth creativity through PhotoVoice in the multicultural city
A.J. Lowik, S. Nombuso Dlamini & Uzo Anucha
Section 2: Disputing Urban Territories of Injustice: Arts and Public Pedagogy
3. Dreaming as repertoire: Three drawing practices that resist matter-out-of-space in the contemporary city
Martha Newbigging
4. Embodying the city through the arts, community engagement, and political mobilization: Agua, Sol y Sereno’s collective theater and cultural agency in contemporary Puerto Rico
Mareia Quintero Rivera
5. Lament Poetry: Voices of Protest
Laura Wiseman
6. Recovering and remaking a site of horror in post-dictatorship Buenos Aires
Mario Di Paolantonio
Section 3: Contesting and Reproducing Spatialised Injustice in the City through Schooling
7. Between Responsibility and "Responsabilization:" The everyday making of school in Buenos Aires slums
Silvia Grinberg
8. An integrative approach to the educational experiences of immigrant students in urban settings
Yvette Daniel
9. Educational Borderlands: Teachers’ Experiences and Intentions: Crossing Borders into a High-Status School Subject
Sarah Barrett
Biography
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.
