Lecture by Michel Agier. From “Right to the City” to “City-Making:” the Margins, the Center, and the Anthropologist

(с) Sébastien Dolidon

Thursday, 6 October 2016, 19:00

Michel Agier: “My anthropology of the city is based on the ethnographic research and on reflexive understanding of situations, places and events that “make the city.” For the anthropologist the “city-making” means realization of the “right to the city,” here and now. According to this idea, some controversial and, perhaps, minor practices (intervention, occupation) take radical meaning, as they evoke – because of such notions as the margins, the frontiers, vulnerability, emptiness, and disorder – the desire and appeal to the creation of the virtual or ideal dream city. In such terms, the anthropology of the city does not refer to any normative definition of the city as such, or create a new one, but conceives the city as continuous process of its construction and deconstruction.”

The lecture continues the course City – Discrimination, Segregation, Integration – French Experience, developed by the French Institute in Ukraine, exploring these issues from historical, sociological, and demographic perspectives.

Michel Agier is an anthropologist, research fellow at the IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement) and EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). His research and teaching focus on the relationship between globalization, conditions and places of exile and the making of new urban contexts. He coordinates a new research program selected by the National Research Agency (ANR), “Babylon, city as frontier. What cities do for migrants, what migrants do for cities” (2016-18). In the year 2016-17 his seminar at EHESS is called “Anthropologies of hospitality.” Among his latest publications are: Migrants and Us. Understanding Babylon (CNRS Editions, 2016), and Anthropology of the City (PUF, 2015).

The lecture will be delivered in French with consecutive interpretation into Ukrainian.

Admission is free

In 2015 the course Migrations, Identities, Territories, developed by the French Institute, took place in Visual Culture Research Center as part of the School of the Displaced of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Organizer – l’Institut Français d’Ukraine

Supported by: ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation