CUSP: Urban Political and Creative Storytelling – A feminist/and decolonial approach to urban pedagogies

The urban polycrisis is at the forefront of global debates against the backdrop of unfolding crises of genocide, climate change, resource extraction, economic contraction, political turmoil, housing shortages, socio-political marginalisation, and uneven development trajectories—especially in cities of the Global South, which continue to bear the legacies of colonialism. Urban scholarship reveals that these crises are intricately embedded in daily spaces, routines, practices, and interactions. Engaging with the ‘everyday urban’ demands a contextually grounded methodological approach. Creative works like Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and films such as City of God (2002), Not Just Roads (2020), and Natura Urbana (2017), have shed light on urban realities through journalistic, graphic, visual, and cinematic storytelling—offering vivid, emotionally resonant, and politically engaged accounts that challenge traditional academic conventions. At the same time, while decolonial and feminist interventions in research methodologies have questioned the primacy of academic writing, alternative forms of communicating urban politics still remain largely marginal within mainstream scholarship.

The event series seeks to collaboratively explore two sets of questions that concern contemporary urban scholarship:

1. How do we decolonise the way we understand, research, politicise and articulate urban crises as a part of critical urban research?
2. What possibilities do feminist and decolonial creative methods offer for experimenting with a more epistemically sound praxis of engaging with the urban?

This project unfolds through a series of interconnected events that bring together researchers, artists, practitioners, and grassroots activists to explore the sociopolitical dynamics of urban life. The series features two knowledge-mobilisation labs (Delhi and online) and a conference panel (Gwangju, Korea) in 2027, both designed to deepen public understanding of urban crises and foster new forms of engagement. We envision the lab as an experimental space for knowledge mobilisation that treats the pluriversality of methods, including visual, artistic, sensory, and community-based practices, as legitimate ways of knowing the urban. These approaches can make visible forms of urban life, power, and experience that text-based scholarship often obscures or flattens.

CUSP addresses the multifaceted urban polycrisis unfolding especially in cities of the Global South through two knowledge mobilisation labs and an international conference panel. It challenges conventional academic approaches by promoting creative and decolonial methods for researching and communicating urban issues. The series focuses on two central questions: how to decolonise urban research and knowledge production, and how feminist and creative methods can enrich urban scholarship and praxis. The lab will serve as an experimental space bridging research, creative practice, and public engagement, culminating in events (panels and workshops) and deliverables (an anthology and a documentary).

Planned Activities (March-September 2027)

a) Knowledge Mobilisation through collaborative workshops: In its first phase, to facilitate a contextually grounded dialogue on Indian cities, the project will bring together illustrators, activists, artists and grassroots collectives through a two-day workshop series (online and in-person) to collectively brainstorm and develop pathways to decolonise the way conventional methodologies (textual and visual) have dominated academic and policy discourses of urban spatial politics. The knowledge mobilisation labs will bring together researchers, artists, grassroots collectives, and practitioners to discuss, through their research and on-the-ground interventions, a compendium of practices and methods shaping urban research in India. The outcome aims to cultivate an urban pedagogical approach rooted in inclusive, situated, and creative methodologies. 

b) International conference panel: To continue the conversations from India, we will organise a USF-supported in-person open session at the International Sociological Association (ISA) conference in Gwangju, Republic of Korea, in 2027. The conference theme, ‘Global Sociology in Turbulent Times’, underscores how academic disciplines can address the challenges of a polycritical world.

TEAM

Funding Organisation