Alexa Färber Lecture: Enduring the city? How to do social change with promises

Hot on the heels of the last year’s inaugural lecture and the online conference, CESCAME invites you to an exciting series of three guest lectures on the city, sustainability, urban practices and politics, everydayness and informality and their potential for social change.

Enduring the city? How to do social change with promises

Alexa Färber

Institute of European Ethnology, University of Vienna

The attraction of cities stems between others from a multitude of promises. These urban promises typically appear as promises of urbanity – imbued with ethical imaginations of freedom, equality (access to infrastructures, to consumption and, most important, to work) and, therefore, care and opportunities. Concerning these cultural representations, urban anthropology may add insights into the lived disparities they entail and question their potential for social change. More profoundly, the analysis of everyday situations may help to complicate indealised visions of urban promises and shed a light on the quality of time, space and social bonds emerging from the city as promissory assemblages.

The lecture will be held on 20 September, 15:30 - 17:30 CET, Institute of Sociology, room 207 and on Zoom.

For both online and offline participation, please register here.