A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

academy is mired in a racial politics of gatekeeping and instrumentalization, wherein the use of decolonial language by non-Indigenous and white academics serves to reproduce coloniality by galvanizing the very structures of white supremacy that reinstate white privilege (see also Duarte and Belarede-Lewis 2015; Noxolo 2017; de Leeuw and Hunt 2018).

      Feminist urban theory must be capable of critically engaging with these persistent historical and political realities if it is to avoid colluding with a politics of co-option, disempowerment, and reinstatement of racial (and particularly white) privilege and serve as a transformative tool for enacting decolonization. Reflexive analyses of positionality have gone some way in addressing these realities; as methodological strategies they underscore the need to remain continually vigilant to enduring erasures and new occlusions that might be constituted, even as the ethics and politics of research, representation, reflexivity, reciprocity, responsibility, and solidarity are being attended to in ever more nuanced ways through the work of scholars who elaborate feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional approaches to knowledge production and praxis (Faria and Mollett 2014, 2018; Daigle 2019; Nagar 2019).

The diverse research designs that contributors to this volume have deployed also highlight how they grapple with these methodological dilemmas of doing research as they seek to produce non-totalizing narratives of the urban. They fall into three (not mutually exclusive) clusters of: non-extractive praxis-oriented research; relational multi-sited research; and research based on a use of mixed methods.

      The contributions by Katsikana (Chapter 4), Angel (Chapter 5), Karunanthan (Chapter 7), and Gillespie and Hardy (Chapter 11) favour ‘non-extractive’ collective feminist praxis to generate knowledge that can ‘resource’ struggles and be useful to movement actors. In pursuit of this goal, Angel navigates through the responsibility of his dual identity as a scholar and activist, and ultimately ‘resources’ the struggles he engages in by drawing upon his bilingual skills to translate movement literature and by seeking to build solidarity between activists located in the UK and Spain, such that these activist groups can reinforce and lend support to each other. For their part, Gillespie and Hardy elaborate a ‘dialogic collaboration’ method, which grants epistemic privilege to movement actors and deploys comparison to design research that, through ongoing dialogue, asks research questions that are relevant to movement actors, thereby ‘co/produc[ing] knowledges that “speak” the theoretical and political languages of communities’ (Ali and Nagar 2003, p. 365). Karunanathan, too, embodies a scholar activist praxis as she seeks to resource Solidaritas Perempuan Jakarta, by amplifying their local struggle to the international media, standing with them as an ally to highlight their role as knowledge producers. Finally, Mantha Katsikana (Chapter 4) addresses persistent contradictions and conflicts arising in Greek anti-authoritarian movements, spaces, and struggles in which she actively participated, directing the reader’s attention to the everyday praxis of the ‘personal is political’, especially as it shapes an urban commons that is all too often figured as implicitly, if not exclusively, masculine.

A further set of approaches, broadly encompassing comparative, relational and multi-sited, are at work in the chapters by Miraftab (Chapter 6), Muelle, Ojeda, and Fleischer (Chapter 9), and Gillespie and Hardy (Chapter 11). Such relational methods are important to knowledge production in urban studies; beginning from multiple places and tracing the relational trajectories of the evolution of places is to displace the epistemic primacy that has been given to the global North, while ‘rejecting any notion of pre-given “cases” or variants of a presumed universal/general process’ (Hart 2018, p. 373). In Chapter 11, Gillespie and Hardy embrace ‘dialogic collaboration’ to link and think through their participation in a sex worker union campaign in Córdoba and a single-mother housing campaign in London. They weave elements of feminist standpoint theory, social ontology, and activist/participatory methodologies together, both to reflect on their movement-centric and historically differentiated collaborations and to create explicit linkages and dialogues between and amongst contexts that might otherwise diverge under the weight of facile distinctions between global North and South. In Chapter 6, Miraftab’s relational approach introduces multiple temporal and spatial standpoints – as opposed to the single axis of a here-and-now approach that is common in social reproduction theories – to analyse the post-colonial racialized capitalist global hierarchies between the global South and North. Anchoring her research in the specific location of the US rustbelt city, Beardstown, Miraftab seeks to theorize the global restructuring of social reproduction through flows of migrants between Mexico and Togo. Similarly, Esguerre Muelle, Ojeda and Fleischer (Chapter 9) undertake a decade-long, relational multi-sited collaborative research project between South American and Spanish cities to delineate uneven geographies of care access and provision.

Unsurprisingly, and most commonly, a mix of traditional social science qualitative methods are employed by the contributors. In Chapter 8, Aruri deploys mixed methods in novel ways. In order to critically analyse the real estate development in the city of Ramallah she deploys such standard methods as semi-structured interviews, focus groups, discourse analysis of legal documents, and commentary on social media. But crucially, building upon her training as an architect, she combines these with a visual method that pays particular attention to the architectural and morphological elements of Ramallah. The value of this combination of methods not only enables her to demonstrate the importance of public space to social reproduction but also allows her to offer suggestions that have the potential to expand the imagination of Ramallite designers, planners, and spatial entrepreneurs to build ‘antispaces’ that reconfigure public space in such a way that new orders and modes of decolonial social reproduction can be achieved. In Chapter 4, Katsikana, draws upon interviews, participant observation, and content analysis as well as her own personal experience, in order to understand how the affective and collective labour of resistance within anti-authoritarian/anarchist movements contributes to social reproduction in Athens. While the contributors to this volume, like many other critical urban researchers, largely favour such qualitative methods, there are also those that employ quantitative methods; to produce partial, situated knowledges does not imply that qualitative methods are always privileged over quantitative methods, as methods themselves are not ipso facto feminist (Lawson 1995; Peake 2015). Dodson and Riley (Chapter 20), for example, deploy the data generated from quantitative surveys interpolated with those gathered from qualitative interviews to highlight the gendered nature of both the urban food system and urban food poverty in the three African cities where they work. By mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, Dodson and Riley point to the generative capacity of mixed methods feminist urban research.

      The Limits of Social Reproduction

      While social reproduction helps us generate deepened analyses of urbanization processes, the formation of the urban, and the lived struggles of urban residents, we recognize, that like all concepts, it has limits, including those we already discussed in relation to the imperatives of decolonizing feminist urban knowledge. As with all attempts to make theoretical sense of worlds in transformation it is wise to be circumspect about the uses of the conceptual frameworks we nurture and to both acknowledge and set our sights beyond their limits. We argue that feminist theory needs to reflect on the limitations of its main concepts and its processes and politics of knowledge production.

      One such limitation concerns the collapse of social reproduction into social ontology. Social reproduction eschews the question of social ontology by presenting itself as life-making, the problem being that life is a metaphysical concept, even though it is the