Coordination [A-Z]

Cristina Barrial (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

Francisco Fernández-Trujillo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Valentina González Alzola (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)

Ana Santamarina (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)

Contact:

Abstract

The changes and transformations that have reshaped the contemporary city have affected the development of everyday life. This has profoundly determined the forms of social reproduction and care in recent times. Both the regimes and the structures of social reproduction have adapted to these new realities. Factors such as migration processes, the development of technologies and algorithms, and the reconfiguration of family structures outline a new scenario in this regard, to which we want to pay attention.

This panel addresses three fundamental dimensions of contemporary urban reality: caring, inhabiting, and working. Rather than adopting sectoral approaches, the proposal starts from the need to analyze how these spheres intertwine in the everyday organization of life and in the production of urban inequalities, delving into the gray areas between work and the absence of economic mediation; formal and informal work; and what lies between community and the individualization of everyday life and care. The panel is oriented toward research that examines the concrete ways in which households, neighborhoods, family networks, and workers sustain life in contexts of growing social uncertainty, care crises, intensified mobility, and labor fragmentation.

Special attention will be paid to experiences shaped by migration, the feminization of reproductive labor, the unequal distribution of time, and unequal access to urban space. In these processes, we understand migration processes and their geographies, as well as platform mediation, as central elements in this regard.

Coordination

Marta Ill-Raga holds a PhD in Political Science from Ghent University (2024). She is currently a researcher in the Social and Urban Cohesion area at Institut Metròpoli. She is a substitute lecturer at UAB, a collaborating lecturer at UOC, and collaborates with the Barcelona Institute for Urban Research (IDRA). Contact:

Pablo Pérez Ruiz holds a degree in History and Politics (University of Edinburgh) and a Master’s in Global Studies (University of California, Berkeley). He is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at UNED. He researches new forms of trade unionism within the housing movement. Contact:

Lucas Vaquero Álvarez holds a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (UAM) and a Master’s in Applied Sociology (UCM). He is currently a predoctoral researcher in Social Psychology at UCM. His research focuses on forms of organizing community resistance within the housing movement. Contact:

Teresa Tiburcio: Social anthropologist, PhD from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (2025) and Master’s from Freie Universität Berlin (2015). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology at the CSIC. Her research interests lie at the intersection of urban anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Email:

Alberto Crespo: Holds a degree in Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He currently works as a research staff member at UNED for the LOG-COMMONS project and is completing his doctoral thesis at the same university. His research focuses on housing, the transformation of gentrification processes, and the new forms of resistance that emerge in this context. Email:

Abstract

In an urban context marked by the advance of rentier capitalism, the financialization of housing, and the growing technological mediation in urban management, this panel proposes to explore the responses articulated by community logistics and housing rights movements in the face of the technosustainable city. By community logistics we understand the set of material, organizational, and affective operations that make it possible to sustain everyday life in contexts shaped by inequality and conflict: from the circulation of food, care, and knowledge to the collective management of spaces and infrastructures that make social reproduction possible outside, and often against, hegemonic frameworks.

At a time when technosustainability is presented as the only possible path for urban production, this promise reproduces and expands inherited urban planning logics linked to colonialism, hygienism, and securitization. The digitalization of housing, the expansion of real estate platforms, and the increasing centrality of data infrastructures are reshaping both urban markets and the conditions of organization and social control.

In contrast to this horizon, movements for the right to housing, in their various forms—notably through the recent rise of tenants’ unions—are redefining contemporary forms of urban conflict. From Madrid, London, and Los Angeles to new experiences across Europe and Latin America, these organizations deploy repertoires of collective action to build sustained power against urban regimes shaped by rentier capitalism. These practices intersect with community logistics and urban commons, forming counter-governance infrastructures that challenge the financialization of space and algorithmic governance.

The panel invites contributions that analyze, from ethnography and other theoretical-methodological approaches, both the organizational innovations and the logistics emerging from the maintenance of urban commons: practices of mutual aid, neighborhood infrastructures, autonomous digital networks, or mechanisms of territorial self-organization. Overall, the aim is to reflect on how these practices open up spaces of conflict and possibility, where the meanings of inhabiting, sustaining, and governing the city are contested beyond neoliberal techno-utopia. It also seeks to explore how these practices are embedded in broader tensions related to social reproduction, inequalities of class, race, gender, and migration status, and everyday forms of resistance to neoliberal urbanization.

Coordination

Malet, Dani (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)

Milano, Claudio (Universitat de Barcelona)

Morell, Marc (University of the Balearic Islands)

Abstract

Tourism and urban mobility are no longer organized through traditional means nor are they autonomous from the hegemony of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016). Digital applications such as Airbnb, Booking, or TripAdvisor do not merely mediate between providers and consumers; rather, they actively manage supply, prices, visibility, and the reputation of economic, social, and symbolic exchanges. Through mechanisms such as dynamic pricing, geolocation, ranking systems, user reviews, arbitrary account suspension, or productive consumption on social networks, these platforms, through algorithms, establish “practices of governance” (Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008) that deeply restructure tourism and urban space.

We therefore propose to critically explore how the digitalization of tourism influences the transformation of the city (Sequera 2024), with algorithmic trends that direct flows of people and capital in unequal ways while deepening processes of elitization, displacing uses and social groups. At the same time, we seek to address the labor that sustains this model of rentier society (Durand 2021), as well as the struggles against deregulated labor regimes in which exploitation is obscured behind a rhetoric of flexibility and entrepreneurship, reproducing hierarchies of gender, “race,” and class. In sum, we focus on the algorithm which, far from being a neutral technical innovation, updates and expands the predatory logics of extraction, exploitation, and control characteristic of neoliberal capitalism, becoming a tool serving the financialization of experience, territory, and labor.

Bibliografia

Durand, C. (2021). How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy. Londres: Verso Books.
Kingfisher, C., i Maskovsky, J. (2008). “Introduction: The limits of neoliberalism”, Critique of Anthropology, 28(2), 115-26.
Sequera, J. (ed.) (2024). La ciudad de las plataformas. Transformación digital y reorganización social en el capitalismo urbano. Barcelona: Icaria Editorial.
Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press

Coordination

Caterina Borelli (Università Ca’ Foscari)

Corina Tulbure (University of Barcelona)

Abstract

In the current context of the neoliberal city, a model of governance based on technosustainability and neo-hygienism is being imposed. This paradigm seeks, through algorithms and different forms of surveillance (police, social, digital), to eliminate uncertainty and standardize the uses of public space. In response to this ambition of absolute control, this panel proposes to reclaim volatility and informality not as transitional states or deficiencies of development, but as constitutive and resistant dimensions of contemporary urbanity.

We use here the concept of volatility in the sense proposed by Krause and Eriksen, as an analytical perspective to “think with people and ecologies from the margins” (2023:1). The volatile city escapes administrative fixation on legibility (Scott 1999) and functions as a critical counterpoint to the rigidity of technological control. We are interested in exploring how practices of self-construction, the occupation of interstitial spaces, and informal settlements generate logics of inhabiting that exceed the maps of official planning. These ways of life, marked by material precarity but also by high relational density, constitute true “zones of opacity” in the face of the panoptic gaze of the Smart City. Informal practices and the connections created through them generate social and urban thresholds (Stavrides 2019) where the collective is redefined and neoliberal standardization is challenged.

We invite submissions that analyze, from an ethnographic or critical perspective, the following axes:

1. Strategies of occupation and self-construction as forms of urban production outside state control and market logics.

2. The management of uncertainty and temporality in contexts of housing precarity.

3. Everyday interferences: practices that challenge surveillance and algorithmic governance from informality.

4. Conflicts arising from hygienist pressure on “volatile” ways of life.

5. Dimensions of intimacy that emerge in informal and resistant spaces.

6. Imaginaries about the future in contexts of volatility.

The aim is to discuss how informality and volatility make it possible to imagine a city that does not surrender to automation, prioritizing everyday life and conflict as drivers of the commons.

Coordination

Martín Boy. National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Gino Germani Research Institute, University of Buenos Aires (IIGG, UBA), Institute of Social Studies in Contexts of Inequality, National University of José C. Paz, Argentina (IESCODE, UNPAZ) -

Dianela Gahn. National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Litoral, National University of the Litoral (IHUCSO LITORAL) -

Francesca Brunori. Sapienza University of Rome -

Lucía Elena Cavalo. National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Gino Germani Research Institute, University of Buenos Aires (IIGG, UBA) -

Abstract

Since the late 20th century, gender has proven to be a particularly productive analytical category in urban studies. It has made it possible to shed light on differing uses, experiences, and appropriations of cities, as well as differential exposure to various forms of urban violence and to processes of stratification, exclusion, and invisibilization. More recently, this category has been used to understand processes of urban digitalization, examining how infrastructures, platforms, and techno-digital devices not only mediate but actively configure gendered urban experiences.

In this context, technologies do not operate as neutral tools, but as sociotechnical assemblages shaped by power relations, values, and representations that influence the (re)production of gender inequalities in urban space.

This panel invites empirical or theoretical contributions that prioritize gender as an analytical category and/or central variable, in intersection with the use, appropriation, design, and governance of technologies in relation to cities, proposing a space for discussion on topics such as:

- The ways in which digital technologies (applications, social networks, platforms) mediate and (re)configure gendered urban experiences in differentiated ways, including experiences of design and technological activism from critical (such as feminist) perspectives, aimed at rearticulating the relationships between gender, technology, and the city.

- Gender-based violence in digital environments and its impacts on urban experience (such as the non-consensual dissemination of images or data affecting safety and mobility, and the role of emerging technologies such as AI).

- The ways in which gender identities and representations are (re)produced or contested in digital environments linked to the city. In this way, an interdisciplinary dialogue is proposed on the co-constitution of urban and technological configurations and gender relations, paying attention to situated experiences and political struggles that shape how cities and their technologies are designed, used, and transformed.

Coordination

Martin Lundsteen, University of Barcelona,

Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi Arrazola, Independent researcher,

Rationale

This Working Group proposes to critically analyze the convergence between emerging urban technologies—especially artificial intelligence, algorithmic systems, and surveillance infrastructures—and the contemporary reconfiguration of borders within urban space. We start from the hypothesis that these devices do not constitute a rupture with previous forms of urban governance, but rather update and intensify neo-hygienist, securitarian, and colonial logics characteristic of urban modernity.

In this sense, technosustainability operates as a legitimizing framework that articulates efficiency, security, and sustainability with practices of classification, exclusion, and differential control of populations, particularly those that are racialized and precarized. Through mechanisms such as datafication, social scoring, or predictive surveillance, new forms of bordering are established that not only delimit access to urban resources—housing, mobility, services—but also redefine the very possibilities of inhabiting the city.

The panel aims to explore how these processes are embedded in broader dynamics of racial capitalism and urban financialization, as well as in the growing entanglement between civil technologies and military infrastructures. At the same time, it emphasizes emerging forms of resistance that, from everyday life, overflow or reconfigure these dispositifs: practices of sabotage, technological reappropriation, urban solidarities, and alternative forms of spatial production.

Finally, the panel invites reflection on the possibilities of articulating academic research, activism, and collective organization to challenge the algorithmic governance of the city and open emancipatory horizons. The aim is to contribute to a critical debate on how urban borders are produced today and which forms of urban life are made possible—or impossible—under these emerging regimes.

Coordination

Joaquín Benítez (CONICET/IIGG-Universidad de Buenos Aires)

María Agustina Peralta (IIGG-Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Barbara Brollo (Sapienza University of Rome)

Víctor Riesgo (Uva/Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia-Uva)

Emilia Tamburri (CONICET/IIGG-Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Rationale

The expansion of digital technologies and platforms has consolidated a model of accumulation based on data and algorithms that is reshaping labor relations. Under promises of flexibility, innovation, and autonomy, new forms of platform-mediated work have emerged: from precarious modalities of the gig economy to configurations associated with highly qualified technological workers who adopt mobile lifestyles, grouped under the notion of digital nomadism.

Far from constituting disconnected phenomena, these positions can be analyzed as part of a continuum shaped by new forms of control, evaluation, and labor organization. Through algorithmic devices for task allocation, monitoring, and reputation, platforms update logics of precarization, self-exploitation, and discipline, even in contexts presented as autonomous. In this sense, digital nomadism can be understood as an extended form of platformized work, where mobility is assembled with digital infrastructures that enable and regulate these forms of life and work.

These transformations also imply a reconfiguration of labor subjectivities: the valorization of autonomy, the entrepreneurial imperative, individual risk management, and the internalization of performance logics operate as central mechanisms in the production of worker subjectivities. Although they affect different positions in distinct ways, they share a common normative horizon of self-optimization and permanent availability.

Within this framework, the panel proposes to explore these dynamics and tensions, inviting contributions that address, among others, the following themes:

- Transformations in employment modalities and labor relations in contexts of platformization.

- Changes in labor subjectivities: autonomy, self-exploitation, entrepreneurship, and risk management.

- Inequalities, segmentations, and hierarchies in platform-mediated work.

- Forms of state regulation and disputes over labor rights.

- Experiences of collective organization, resistance, and new forms of action.

- Articulations between digital platforms, urban space, and everyday life.

Coordination

Gabriela Navas Perrone (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, OACU)

Stefano Portelli (Grupo de Estudios Críticos Urbanos, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid)

Muna Makhlouf

Abstract

This panel aims to critically analyze the phenomenon of major sporting and cultural events as a fundamental component of the capitalist predation of cities, operating as technical and administrative devices to conceal their contradictions. This has been recently exposed by the deficit of more than 3 million euros caused by the 2024 America’s Cup in Barcelona, highlighting how discursive strategies and economic lobbying surrounding mega-events can subordinate even the least corrupt administrations. However, the economic issue is only a symptom of a deeper pathology: the organic link between mega-events and corruption, neoliberal urban policies, and human rights violations, including evictions and forced displacements.

Despite this systematic accumulation of evidence —including two decades of reports by the United Nations and other transnational structures— the institutional rhetoric promoting mega-events generates a narrative immunity that neutralizes any critical perspective. Under this shield, the Olympic “legacy” continues to be associated with the unifying role of Barcelona 1992 as a founding myth for both the city and mega-events themselves, overlooking their long-term social, political, and urban impacts. This discursive hegemony manages to remove from public debate traumatic realities such as the financial collapse following the 2004 Olympics in Greece; the 2004 Forum of Cultures as a driver of speculation in Barcelona; the destruction of the traditional urban fabric of central Beijing for the 2008 Olympics; the social fracture of Marseille 2013 “capital of rupture”; the rise of police violence in Rio de Janeiro after the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics; Expo Milan 2015 as a speculative bubble; or the current deployment of the “bulldozer state” in Morocco in preparation for the 2030 World Cup. While gentrification, touristification, and population displacement no longer enjoy much legitimacy, much of the hegemonic discourse on mega-events continues to appeal to their “urban development” legacy, ignoring decades of research on their harmful effects conducted by journalists, local committees, and academics.

In times of genocide, ecological catastrophe, and massive forced displacements, it is necessary to understand mega-events as a social phenomenon capable of connecting the value-extraction machinery of neoliberal capitalism with the ideology of spectacle, simulacrum, and the conflict-free public sphere of global power. Studying “how mega-events think” and “what they see,” applying a political anthropology to make visible the legacy of past mega-events and their current imminent risks, allows us to develop critical perspectives capable of collectively confronting this predatory logic. Contributions are welcome on:

- Local comparative reflections on the social and urban consequences of major events

- Broader discussions on their political and social implications

- The role of mega-events in neocolonial geopolitical imbalances, and in the increasing persecution and marginalization of racialized or dissident populations

- Mega-events as “platforms” or drivers of technological innovation, emulating the model of 19th-century world exhibitions

- Their role as spaces of exception that capture festive culture, popular rituals, and institutional ideologies about public space

- Analyses of living conditions and labor regimes of the workforce that sustains mega-events, as well as the contradiction between the monumentality of the works and the vulnerability of those who build them.

- Discursive reconfigurations that turn mega-events into key techniques of collective amnesia, operating as drivers of urban transformation and social and political restructuring across diverse geographical contexts

- The legacy of the contradiction between ephemeral events and permanent structures in the current use of spaces produced during mega-events.

References

ARF (Assemblea de Resistència al Fòrum 2004), Espai en Blanc, Col.lectiu Ariadna Pi de l’ICA. 2004. La otra cara del Fòrum de les Cultures S.A.. Barcelona: Bellaterra.

Cage International. 2024. The Games of Shame: Can the 2024 Paris Olympics Whitewash Genocide and Widespread Exclusion? Https://cage.ngo.

COHRE, 2007. "Fair play for housing rights. Mega-events, Olympic Games and evictions".

Comitê Popular da Copa 2014. Megaeventos e Violações dos Direitos Humanos no Rio de Janeiro: Dossiê do Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas do Rio de Janeiro. https://memoriaaudiovisual.org/wp-content/uploads/tainacan-items/5/2469/2014_dossie_copa_comite_rio.pdf

Douglas, Mary. 1996. Cómo piensan las instituciones. Madrid: Alianza.

HRW, 2004. Demolished: forced evictions and the tenant's rights movement in China", Human Rights Watch, vol.16, Nº 4.

Mallon, Bill. 2000. “The Olympic Bribery Scandal”. Journal of Olympic History May, 11-27.

Mascarenhas, Gilmar; Bienenstein, Glauco; Sánchez, Fernanda (orgs.). 2011. O jogo continua. Megaeventos esportivos e cidades. Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro.

OHCHR, 2010. Report: Mega-events and the right to housing. A/HRC/13/20. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing. https://docs.un.org/A/HRC/13/20.

ONU, 2021. “Major Sports Events and Corruption”, in Global Report on Corruption in Sports, pp.271-297. https://www.unodc.org/res/safeguardingsport/grcs/22-03221_SPORTS_CORRUPTION_2021_Full_report.pdf

ONU, 2025. Salvaguardar el Deporte de la corrupción: enfoque en los países de las Américas y el Caribe. https://www.unodc.org/documents/Safeguardingsport/Publications/Focus_on_countries_in_the_Americas_and_the_Caribbean_spanish.pdf

Le Revers de la Médaille. 2024. Rapport final. 4 Novembre. https://lereversdelamedaille.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Rapport-final-Le-revers-de-la-medaille-4_11_24_compressed-1.pdf

Rodríguez, Jesús. 2024. “La ‘Directa’ destapa l’enginyeria comptable que falseja les dades de la Copa Amèrica”. La Directa 599, https://directa.cat/la-directa-destapa-lenginyeria-comptable-que-falseja-les-dades-de-la-copa-america/

Sánchez, Fernanda; Bienenstein, Glauco; Leal de Oliveira, Fabricio y Novais, Pedro (orgs.). 2014. A Copa do Mundo e as cidades. Políticas, projetos e resistências. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Scopp, Megan. 2025. The Role of Major Sporting Events in Human Rights Violations: FIFA, the Olympics, and Beyond. Human Right Research Center, April 10. https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-role-of-major-sporting-events-in-human-rights-violations-fifa-the-olympics-and-beyond

Scott, James. 2021. Lo que ve el estado. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Simson, VYV and Andrew Jennings, 1992. The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics. Simon & Schuster.

Coordination

Luana Pfeifer Raiter, Universidade De Estado de Santa Catarina-PPGT, CAPES-PDSE; ERRO Grupo,

Pedro Diniz Bennaton, ERRO Grupo; OACU, CPC,

Description

The truth is that this proposal is simply a way to subvert the call issued by OACU for its conference and to slip in, through a form of dissimulation and as a moving act, a street action that might provoke some form of urban conflict so that we can observe its possible anthropological perspectives during the days of the conference. For this reason, this proposal could also be linked to all the thematic axes of the conference, anthropophagically swallowing all the axes and all the panels proposed so far.

In other words, a person who wants to register for a conference and is not sure which track to choose (and this often happens with interdisciplinary academics) finds themselves in a shifting situation: when they think of choosing one track, a reason soon emerges to choose another, or worse, an even stronger reason appears not to choose the one they had selected. In the end, the person wants to choose more than one track, or all tracks, and at the same time ends up choosing none, or feels unhappy for having chosen a track that does not correspond to them. And when presenting their paper, they end up feeling like an alien at the conference, displaced, like a tourist, an immigrant, someone who does not belong to what they have chosen.

The moving table penetrates all the panels; it is slippery, displaced, as it proposes another way of doing what has long been done: a table, one person speaking, and others listening while looking at them head-on. The moving table seeks to break with this dull arrangement of bodies in academic events by attempting to move through the city while a presentation is delivered. The device that displaces this moving table is as simple as this proposal itself: to change these long-standing dynamics of static panels, confined within the university, closed off from the city, phallic. The moving table is in motion: the speaker trembles through the streets, their voice trembles, people are intervened by this trembling discourse, by this mobile object, the bodies that listen to this trembling discourse see the table, or not, and intervene in this shifting movement.

The city inhabits the table and the table inhabits it. After all, we are at an OACU conference, and every conference—like this one in memory of our Juli—can also be a rite of passage. And its panels can also pass, stroll, slide, move through urban space. We could say that the moving table is the very détournement of this OACU conference. This détournement, which also implies a dérive with the moving table, is an attempt at relocation and resignification.

We intend for this rite to take place primarily with the participants of the panel, but especially with this object so intimate to academics: the table, through a table that moves through the streets. With the aim of creating a different attitude toward our lives at tables, a new way of experiencing the table, we imagine a table directly connected to everyday life in order to provoke a direct engagement with reality in its immediacy.

For this reason, we propose this moving table in order to attempt, in a peripatetic way, between thinking, speaking, and walking, an experience to practically perceive some of the meanings of what a “conference” is: a meeting or congress; a span of working time; a journey regularly undertaken in a day’s travel; in theater, each of its acts; the span of life and its end; the journeys kings made to royal sites; the transition of the soul from this life to the eternal…

This panel is the most wandering contribution we were able to conceive to mark, and celebrate, this OACU moment and this tribute to Juliana Marcús.