Call for papers RGS-IBG AC2025, University of Birmingham (26-29 August 2025)
Session title: Urban Omissions: Untranslated concepts and debates in urban studies
Session convenors: Paroj Bannerjee, University College London; Ulises Moreno-Tabarez, SECIHTI-Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero; Lindsay Sawyer, University of Sheffield; CITY Journal
We invite contributions on urban debates, ideas, concepts or movements that are missing from or under-reported in current English-language urban studies journals.
In recent years, a growing awareness of the knowledge politics that shape global academic exchange has prompted urgent reflections on how concepts, arguments and theories travel—and fail to travel—across linguistic, cultural and geographical borders. In considering geographies of knowledge production, we not only confront how ideas circulate in a polyglot academic world where English has long functioned as the dominant lingua franca, but also how gatekeeping mechanisms—be they editorial norms, peer review expectations, pay-to-publish models that impose prohibitive and exorbitant costs on Global South scholars or ranking metrics—favour particular forms of knowledge production over others. Particularly regarding the dominance of English in the field of urban studies, certain critical debates and intellectual traditions risk remaining underrepresented, overlooked, and completely sidelined. In turn, these processes can create epistemic silos in which lively debates unfolding in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, or other linguistic contexts remain largely invisible to Anglophone audiences, thereby constraining the conceptual horizons of the field as a whole. As such, ‘untranslated’ includes and goes beyond language to address the power geometries in anglophone academia.
To address these challenges, scholars across disciplines have begun to highlight the citational politics at play—politics that Sarah Ahmed (2013) has eloquently dissected in terms of gender and race, and which also apply to linguistic and geographical inequalities. Citational politics are not only about who is cited, but how, where, and for what purpose. Works by feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thinkers such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Walter D. Mignolo (2000; 2011), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) have underscored the uneven topographies of knowledge that emerge from the Euro-American hegemony in academia. Mignolo’s concept of “epistemic disobedience” and Santos’s emphasis on “cognitive justice” encourage us to imagine intellectual exchanges less tethered to any single language, inviting a more pluriversal approach to theorising the urban. Similarly, cultural theorists like Spivak (1988) and translation scholars like Emily Apter (2013) have shown that what is lost, gained, or transformed in translation is never merely linguistic—these are also political and conceptual transactions that shape the legibility and legitimacy of ideas. Patricia Daley and Amber Murray use Mignolo’s idea of disobedience to highlight the need for “defiant scholarship” that works outside of colonial parameters of knowledge production and brings in rich African intellectual traditions (2022).
Within this broader terrain of knowledge geopolitics, we might ask: How can those of us in English-dominant forums, such as CITY, better recognise and amplify urban debates conducted in other linguistic, cultural or political spheres? What would it mean to practice “citation as translation,” intentionally seeking out thinkers and texts beyond Anglophone canons, and acknowledging the distinct urban lexicons that shape local research agendas, policy discussions, and grassroots activism? When we consider multiple linguistic genealogies into these conversations, we pluralise our analytical categories and broaden the interpretive frameworks through which we understand urban experiences. In doing so, we also resist the subtle “epistemicides” (De Sousa Santos, 2014) that occur when entire traditions are left off the anglophone scholarly map.
This initiative proposes not just a corrective reading of global urban scholarship, but also a re-imagining of how academic knowledge is organised and mobilised. By foregrounding polylingual archives, centering networks of scholars and practitioners who operate in other languages and knowledge traditions, and employing translation as a tool of intellectual hospitality, we can cultivate a more genuinely pluriversal conversation. CITY invites contributions to a panel session that spotlights urban debates, ideas, concepts or movements that are missing from or under-reported in current English-language urban studies journals. There will be a second panel session with contributors, CITY editors and the CITY collective to further the conversation. With this effort, we strive to think collectively about how CITY can become a hub for practical experiments that we may put to action in this endeavour. Through these measures, we strive not only to enrich our understanding of the urban, but also to challenge the hierarchies that shape what, and whose, knowledge is considered authoritative.
Although the session will be held in English, the language of the conference, we will be exploring multilingual and/ or collective outputs.
Please email your abstracts or proposals of no more than 250 words to l.sawyer@sheffield.ac.uk; p.banerjee@ucl.ac.uk and umoreno11@gmail.com by monday 3 march 2025. We welcome visual and non-traditional formats as well as standard paper presentations. The session will be hybrid.
Ahmed, S. (2012) On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Apter, E. (2013) Against world literature: On the politics of untranslatability. London: Verso.
Daley, Patricia O., and Amber Murrey. ‘Defiant Scholarship: Dismantling Coloniality in Contemporary African Geographies’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 43, no. 2 (May 2022): 159–76.
Mignolo, W.D. (2011) The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Smith, L.T. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.
Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313.
