RESEARCH

To understand global interconnections in people’s lives and struggles I use single-site and multi-sited ethnographic approaches. In my current writing project, I push my prior methodologic approaches, using auto-ethnography to include my personal field experiences. I believe that the sincerity, honesty, and courage involved in auto-ethnography allows the reader a deeper engagement with knowledge and its processes of co-production.

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I am a transnational feminist urban scholar. My work examines the relationship between cities and citizenship under the conditions of global patriarchal-racial-capitalism. Through a transnational feminist lens, I seek to understand how people shape cities, make their homes and neighborhood, defend, and assert their humanity through overt and covert practices of resistance vis-a-vis the onslaught of unfair urban policies and professional planning decisions.  Stressing the local and global connections in understanding of urban spaces, my work seeks to expose how local planning and policy decisions are nestled in the global agenda of capitalism facilitating the interests of the elite.  In understanding this relationship most of my work has focused on the everyday practices of marginalized people—at their center, the everyday practices of care by women: how they make life, how they fight back against unfair policies and formal urban planning decisions, and how they resist their dehumanization by the authorities that persistently seek their displacement for greater profit.  

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My scholarship, the kind of questions I ask, the methodologies I use, and the insights I aspire to offer to the public are all greatly influenced by my activist past and complicated life in exile. I started as a refugee in Europe and became an immigrant in the US, taught in Canada, Australia, US, and using qualitative ethnographic methodologies did research in Chile, Mexico, South Africa, the United States and, most recently, Togo and Spain, positioning me today as an interdisciplinary scholar of urban and transnational studies. 

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While my earlier work focused on survival strategies of the poor, prominently women in marginalized communities and their practices of care for livelihood, over the last two decades I have also studied the practices of the grassroots to challenge structures of oppression, what I call radical care. Documenting the underworld of care and livelihood in poor communities, I witness the struggle they wage to assert their right to cities and urban citizenship. I conceptualize their practices, often ignored by the scholarship that is focused on formal politics, as participation asserted through “invited” and “invented” spaces of action, widening the “cracks” within the system to dismantle structures of oppression.  I theorize these grassroots practices as insurgent practices of planning.  Over the years, and in collaboration with activists and colleagues, I have advocated for an urban future, centered on life, not profit, as humane urbanism —an alternative to the dominant current profit-centered bully urbanism, where winner takes-all.

My critical interventions in the field of urban planning, to promote inclusive cities by recognizing insurgent planning practices of grassroots movements in the development of cities and citizenship, contribute to the growing epistemic shift of theorizing based on experiences of subordinate groups (also referred to as a Southern anti-colonial turn in social sciences) that rethinks position and means in knowledge production. Moreover, using digital methodologies in humanities and social sciences, my work seeks to co-produce knowledge with urban movements responding to their demand: nothing about us without us.