Erik Swyngedouw at the School of Environment and Development offers us the following intervention into on-going debates over the place of public space in the enactment of politics. A longer version is forthcoming in Political Geography.

Tiananmen square, Place de la Bastille, Red Square, Alexanderplatz, Tahrir square, Assaha-al-Khadra, Syntagma Square, Green Square, Wenceslas square: these are just a few of the public spaces that have become engrained in our symbolic universe as emblematic sites of revolutionary geographies. Their names stand as points de capiton that quilt a chain of meaning through signifiers like democracy, revolution, freedom, being-in-common, solidarity, emancipation. The emergence of political space, these examples suggest, unfolds through a political act that stages collectively the presumption of equality and affirms the ability of ‘the people’ to self-manage and organize its affairs. It is an active process of intervention through which (public) space is reconfigured and through which – if…

Good afternoon,

We would like to invite you to a continuation of a series of events that the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona has launched in Virtual Reality for the academic year of 2015-2016. They will take place at Cibola, the Department’s home in Second Life. Next conversation will be between Malcolm Compitello (The University of Arizona), Susan Divine (College of Charleston), Juliana Luna Freire (Framingham State University), Megan Saltzman (West Chester University) and the new Cibola Manager Laura Vazquez Blazquez (ABD, The University of Arizona). It will be about the relationships between urban studies and Hispanic culture. Everyone is welcome!

For Thursday, 1/21, we will be discussing Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. If you need the text, please let us know. We will meet  at 5:00 p.m. Tucson time (7p.m. EST). 

We hope to see you at the event. In order to access Cibola, you will need to install Firestorm in your computer…