The course is taught in cooperation between the European Humanities University (EHU) and the American University of Beirut (AUB). The networked format will allow the course to not only draw on the expertise of professors with different disciplinary backgrounds (Siarhei Liubimau: sociology, urbanism and civic experimentation / Elizabeth Saleh: social anthropology), but also to situate their learning within both a global intellectual context and within their local urban contexts. Within joint seminars, students will work in groups to study their urban environments; and then use this shared research, in groups, for experimentation with the formats of research based narrative and collage (with Miro platform). Besides this, the course includes field visits in Vilnius (with specific focus on green and blue infrastructures) and a range of guest speakers.
This course explores cities as laboratories for social, political and infrastructural change. On one hand, the course is an archive of urban studies. It discusses the most researched urban transformations and breaking points in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, as well as looks at the powerful theories and conceptual ensembles born through situated urban research. Lectures and seminars thus move among other sites through Manchester, Paris, Vienna, Chicago, Los Angeles, the EU as the post-modern socio-spatial entity, and through the spatial outcomes of multi-sited digital infrastructures. Students will be acquainted with prevalent conceptual approaches in urban studies as they converge with topics that include urban growth, urban planning and public goods, socio-spatial differentiation, poverty and inequality, intersections of race, class, and gender, globalisation, mobilities, as well as digitalisation and virtual space. On the other hand, the course critically re-visits this archive by the professors’ own situatedness and research of changing trends and patterns of the so-called Second and Third World urbanisation. The notions of (Post-)Soviet city, (Post-)Socialist city, Islamic City or Middle Eastern City are critically revisited and interrogated theoretically and empirically in order to develop a shared vocabulary and toolkit of multi-sited de-centered urban studies.