Biographies

Nasser Abourahme is an urban planner and writer currently working on a community-based urban planning project in two West Bank refugee camps. Trained in urban development planning (MSc) in London at the Development Planning Unit, University College, his general research interests revolve around the nexus between space and politics in colonial contexts. Currently he is engaged in a number of research projects that coalesce around issues of power, subjectivity and extraterritoriality, including ongoing research into spatial production, political subjectivication and the reformulation of refugeehood in Palestinian refugee camps and a ‘(re)-reading’ of Jerusalem that, breaks with dominant conceptualizations of ‘divided cities’, to examine the convergence of colonial and neoliberal spatial forms, discourses and imaginaries. He is also co-founder of Ramallah Syndrome a research/art project that tries to problematize the contemporary meaning and role of the city of Ramallah in lieu of its restructuring as the ‘capital’ of the ‘state to come’ [http://www.ramallahsyndrome.blogspot.com].

Asef Bayat , Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, holds the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and non-movements, religion-politics-everyday life, Islam and the modern world, to urban space and politics, and international development. His books include Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997), Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007), Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2010), and (with Linda Herrera) Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Hiba Bou Akar is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the spatial practices of political parties and religious organizations in post-wars Beirut, and the implications of such urban processes on the changing geographies of the city. Hiba was trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and conducted her masters studies in the Department of Urban Studies and planning at MIT, where she wrote her master’s thesis on “Displacement, Politics, and Governance: Access to Low-Income Housing in a Beirut Suburb” (2005). She is currently conducting her dissertation field research in Beirut and teaching an urban theory course on “Geographies of Exclusion” at AUB.

Teresa Caldeira is Professor at the Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley. Her research spans across diverse areas of urban theory and ethnography across the global south, looking at issues of spatial segregation, violence, citizenship, democracy, youth and gender. Her current research projects seek to investigate new formations of urban life and city space as they intersect with new technologies of the public, new forms of governance, and new paradigms of urban planning. Key publications in English include: City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press (2000), “Marginality, Again?!” International Journal of Urban Regional Research. 33(3):848-853, (2009), and Worlds Set Apart. In South American Cities: Securing and Urban Future, edited by Urban Age. London: London School of Economics. Pp. 54-55, (2008).

Omar Dewachi is a graduate of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University in 2008. He is trained in medicine and public health at the University of Baghdad and the American University of Beirut respectively. His dissertation work explored the role of medicine and politics in Iraq from the British mandate period until the present day in relation to questions of governability, biopolitics, citizenship and empire. He has also worked on HIV/AIDS and male sexuality in Lebanon, as well as the early 20th century history of the anthropology of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. His current research is on humanitarian interventions on displaced Iraqis in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the department of anthropology at the Université de Montréal and a visiting lecturer in Public Health at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut.

Mona Fawaz is Assistant Professor in the Masters in Urban Planning and Policy/ Masters in Urban Design at the American University of Beirut. Her research is motivated by a keen interest in making cities more inclusive. This has translated into an investigation of the modalities in which low-income urban groups take part in making the city and the ways in which urban planning interventions facilitate or block their efforts. Recent publications include: “Hezbollah as Urban Planner? Questions to and from Planning Theory”, Planning Theory 20(4): 323-334, (2009); “Neo-liberal Urbanity: A View from Beirut’s Periphery”, Development and Change 40(5): 827-852. (2009); “Contracts and Retaliation: Securing housing exchanges in the interstice of the formal/informal Beirut (Lebanon) housing market”, Journal of Planning Education and Research; (2009); and “The State and the Production of Illegal Housing: Public practices in Hayy el-Sellom, Beirut-Lebanon”, in K. Ali and M. Rieker (eds.), Comparing Cities: The Middle-East and South Asia, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 197-220, (2009).

Mustafa Dikeç is Lecturer at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include space and politics, urban policy and politics, histories of space and time, and hospitality. His current research focuses on policies and geographies of asylum in Europe, and the politics of distribution of time in nineteenth century Paris. He is the author of Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy (Blackwell, 2007), and editor (with N Clark and C Barnett) of Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time (Edinburgh University Press, ‘Paragraph’ Special Issues Series, 2009).

Nasser Yassin holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment at University College London, an MSc in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Population Studies from the American University of Beirut. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut where he teaches population studies. His research interests are mainly centered on studying urbanization and conflict, social relations and community development. His latest publications and conference presentations include: Violent Urbanization and Homogenization of Space and Place: reconstructing the story of sectarian violence in Beirut in Beall, J, Guha-Khasnobis, B and Kanbur, R (eds) Urbanization and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Oxford University Press (In Press, 2010); Health and Human Security in the Arab World in Nuwayhid et al (eds.) Public Health in the Arab World, Cambridge University Press (with Jabbour, S, Dewachi, O and Nuwayhid, I forthcoming in 2010); Can Urbanism Heal the Scars of Conflict? City 12:3,398-401 (2008); and others.

Adriana Valdez Young is an urban lifestyle researcher and mallographer. Her projects consider the mall as a securitized city; and the fantasy city as a mall. She holds a M.A. in International Affairs from The New School and a B.A. in Slavic Studies and Latin American History from Brown University. She once lived in the Providence Place Mall. She now lives in New York City, where she is an adjunct professor at the Parsons School of Design and a teaching artist at various youth arts and technology institutes across the City.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University writing a dissertation based on transgression and banditry in Brazilian cinema. Her research interests are spread across discourses of progress in Latin America and the Middle East. She has previously published “Everything You Can Imagine is Real”: Labor, Hype and the Specter of Progress in Dubai’ in The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century (ed. Ahmed Kanna. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Spring 2009). She has also written about Lebanon/Palestine for the Electronic Intifada, maintains a blog called South/South (www.southissouth.wordpress.com). Ghavari is also a working filmmaker, with her last film Inessential based in Gaza.

Derek Gregory is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver where he is a Distinguished University Scholar. His work has been distinguished by a focus on processes of historical and geographical change – on periods of crisis and transformation – and by its attention to critical theories capable of illuminating the ways in which place, space and landscape are implicated in the operation and outcome of social processes. His first major book, published before he completed his PhD thesis was entitled Ideology, science and human geography (1978). Since then, Gregory as published extensively, fulfilling amply his ambitious agenda for the development of a critical human geography. His recent books include Geographical imaginations (1994); The colonial present (2004), described by the Los Angeles Times as ‘must-read heresy’ and by David Harvey as a ‘must read for all those concerned with peace and justice in our time’. His forthcoming books are War cultures and Killing spaces.

Anke Hagemann , studied Architecture at the TU Berlin. She is a founding member of the critical magazine An Architektur and worked as a researcher in the exhibition project Shrinking Cities; until January 2009 she has been teaching Architecture Theory at the ETH Zurich; currently she is teaching Urban Design at the HafenCity University in Hamburg. Anke graduated with an analysis of access regulation in football stadia; in cooperation with the Rote Fabrik Zurich she organized a public program on the urban impacts of football mega events in 2008 (www.fancity2008.ch).

Ayse Onçu is Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University (Istanbul). Her current research centres on the relationship between cultural politics and media in Turkey. She has published extensively in various international journals and co-edited various volumes, focusing on questions of space, culture and power in globalizing cities, with special emphasis on Istanbul. She has also been involved in research networks in the Middle East, such as GURI, Meawards, MERC and engaged in collaborative research with partners in the region. Her work is situated in the intersection of sociology and cultural theory. Key publications include “Consumption, Gender and The Mapping of Istanbul in the 1990s”, in D. Kandiyoti and A. Saktanber eds. Fragments of Culture: The Everyday in Modern Turkey, I.B. Tauris, 2002 and Space, Culture, Power: New Identities In Globalizing Cities, London: Zed, 1997 (contributor and co-editor with Petra Weyland).

AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist in the broad sense that his work focuses on various communities, powers, cultural expressions, governance and planning discourses, spaces and times in cities across the world. Simone is presently Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has taught at New School University, the University of Khartoum, University of Ghana, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, and the City University of New York, as well as working for several African NGOs and regional institutions, including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. Key publications include: In Whose Image?: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago Press, 1994), For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Four African Cities (Duke University Press,2004), and City Life for Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2009)