Voices and Power: Academic-Activism and Writing from Anywhere Real (here, from Global East)

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• Dr Joanna Kusiak, University of Cambridge
• Monday 15 May 2023, 16:00-17:30
• Small Lecture Theatre (SLT), Department of Geography .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Danai Avgeri.

In this talk, I reflect on my experience – as a writer and as an editor of an Important Academic Journal – on bending the dominant writing style to express the particularities of one’s voice and urban experience. Can we realize critical urban studies’ vociferous ambition to expand geographies of theory-making, if we implicitly expect everyone to write in the same standardized format of Anglo-American research article? To which extent does the form determine the scope of what can be expressed? I argue that we should not only ‘include’ broader range of voices into our notions of excellence, but also actively create new models of excellence out of our diversity. While English, despite its colonial heritage, remains precious as our only real ‘Esperanto,’ we need to work together – native and non-native writers – to broaden the range of legitimate authorial styles so that it matches the real diversity of our thinking. However, to be able to do it we need to skilfully navigate the expectations of the neoliberal academia, bending the rules just enough to change them.

This talk is part of the Thinking from the East? Geographies of Postsocialism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Department of Geography
• Small Lecture Theatre (SLT), Department of Geography
• Thinking from the East? Geographies of Postsocialism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

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