Think and Drink
In cooperation with the Department of Urban Sociology our Think and Drink colloquium takes place every semester, at which national and international academics speak on various topics of urban research. All events this semester will take place on the 4th floor of Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße 41, 10117 Berlin, Room 408
Summer Semester 2026
Monday, the 13th of April 2026, 18 o'clock
Günter Gassner
Cardiff University
Queer Antifascism as Liberatory Urban Praxis
Monday, the 20th of April 2026, 18 o'clock
Michaela Büsse
Technische Universität DresdenMaking Land: Reclamation, Speculation, and the Engineering of Futures
In this talk I trace the shifting logics, scales, and imaginaries of land reclamation—from its historical role as a localized strategy of flood protection to its contemporary incarnation as a speculative enterprise at the center of a multibillion-dollar global industry. Drawing on fieldwork in the Netherlands, Singapore, and Malaysia, I follow the making of new land across interconnected sites: hydraulic engineering laboratories where new techniques are tested, urban design exhibitions where reclaimed landscapes are imagined, and the ruins of “eco-smart” cities that stand as monuments to failed speculation. I show how land reclamation not only reshapes coastlines but also reorganizes economic geographies, redefines environmental relations, and unsettles the meaning of the ground beneath our feet. Rather than treating reclamation as a purely technocratic solution, the talk examines the material politics through which particular visions of the future are engineered into the landscape, and how the afterlives of these projects might destabilize the futures they were meant to secure.
Monday, the 27th of April 2026, 18 o'clock
Anna Zhelnina
Utrecht University
Urban redevelopment projects are often framed as technical solutions to housing shortages and urban decline. Yet for residents, they can unfold as profound social and personal crises. Drawing on the case of Moscow’s large-scale Renovation program, this talk examines how state-led redevelopment transforms the everyday lives of residents and turns private homes into sites of political struggle.
When the future of one’s home becomes uncertain, routines, relationships, and life plans are suddenly destabilized. What appears as a policy reform from above can be experienced from below as a crisis that disrupts the boundaries between private life and public action. In response, residents who had little prior experience with activism begin to mobilize, organize, and engage with political institutions.
This talk is based on a book published in 2026 by Temple University Press.
Monday, the 4th of May 2026, 18 o'clock
Apoena Mano
Universidade de São Paulo
Polycrisis from Below: Power, Conflict and Inequality in Latin America
Latin American cities are often interpreted through their long-standing constellations of urban inequality. In contemporary debates, a range of broad analytical frameworks has been mobilized to examine global urban dynamics, from militarized and climate urbanism to poverty entrepreneurship and, more recently, the idea of ‘polycrisis’. While these perspectives offer important insights, ethnographic work brings into view both their limits and their potential for refinement.Starting from this critique, this presentation conceptualizes multiscalar frictions as dialectical urban situations in which global logics of governance and power intersect with situated practices of appropriation, negotiation, and contestation, giving rise to reconfigured forms of conflict and political action. Empirically, it draws on two research projects. The first is a book in progress, grounded in over a decade of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and a mobile ethnography in Medellín, examining how pacification policies generate violence, social differentiation, and new profiles of community leadership. The second is an ongoing postdoctoral project in São Paulo, which explores how climate change discourses are mobilized within governance frameworks to legitimize evictions, thereby reproducing and reshaping urban inequalities.
Monday, the 11th of May 2026, 18 o'clock
Ayşe Erek
Kadir Has Üniversitesi Istanbul
Urban Cultural Ecologies and Independent Art Initiatives in Istanbul
This presentation examines how urban spatial dynamics shape the everyday practices and organizational strategies of independent art initiatives in Istanbul within the context of an emerging polycrisis. I explore how access to space, property relations, temporary arrangements and economic constraints intersect with broader conditions of economic precarity, political pressure and institutional instability in the city. Grounded in art ecology and neighbourhood economy frameworks, the study situates Istanbul’s art initiatives within locally embedded networks of material resources, labour and exchange, highlighting their role in navigating interdependent urban crises.
Against this backdrop, this research argues that art initiatives develop adaptive, cooperative and spatially grounded practices that respond to overlapping crises. The findings position these initiatives asking whether and how they offer alternative infrastructures for engaging with the ongoing heterogeneous urban condition.
Monday, the 18th of May 2026, 18 o'clock
Des Fitzgerald
University College Cork
In this talk. I will try to connect a series of interlinked topics that I've been thinking about for some time: first is the idea that there is something psychologically problematic about urban life, that the physical and social texture of the city is, increasingly, an affective challenge in need of some kind of remediation -for example through nature therapy; second is the relationship of this idea to questions of the natural environment more generally, and to a sense that, in an age of climate catastrophe, and environmental degradation there is a growing need to green or to naturalize the kinds of spaces that humans live and work in; third is a growing interest in ecological and urban questions among the European far right, and the sense that the city, symbolic of the social and moral ruination of capitalist modernity, is in need of a firm ecological fix, whether through a return to smaller-scale, and more 'traditional' urban structures. Across these topics, I will argue that, in an age of counter-modern ecofascism, and against a longstanding tradition of seeing urban ecology as a kind always entangled nature-culture, urban scholars may need to start taking the question of an antagonism between the symbolic poles of 'nature' and 'the city' seriously again - and, thereof, to make an explicitly political decision about which side they stand on.
Monday, the 1st of June 2026, 18 o'clock
Willem Schinkel & Rogier van Reekum
Erasmus University RotterdamThe social science of migration: between complicity, critique, and abolition
In this talk, we seek to contribute to ongoing ways of rethinking what ‘migration’ is, and how ‘migration studies’ is implicated in it. We seek to do three things: 1) to show that ‘migration’ becomes an object of concern (i.e., an object of science but also an object of government) only as an effect of accounting, of the registration of comings and goings within the reference space of the international system of nation-states, amidst which colonial divides are reproduced in part through the registration and visualization of ‘migration’; 2) to put forward a perspective in which migration appears as a modality of debt. ‘Migration’ becomes the outstanding debt of those whose presence on European soil is tolerated because, in the accounting of migration, migrants are people who might not have been there; 3) to lay out possible paths for social science by asking what the role of 'reflexivity' and/or 'critique' is or might be once 'migration' becomes the object of study, and to consider abolition as an alternative.
Monday, the 8th of June 2026, 18 o'clock
Philipp Knopp
Technische Universität Chemnitz
Surveillance Experiments: From Controlling Urban Life to Real-world Laboratories for Data Extraction
With the advent of automated surveillance, police and AI developers are increasingly redefining public space. Places labelled as “dangerous” and requiring police monitoring are now reappropriated as environments for real-world experiments. The rise of surveillance experiments in everyday life marks a renewed entanglement of two key modern forms of organizing the world-control- knowledge nexus. Diving into the deployment of behavioral recognition technologies for CCTV, the presentation will examine how these entanglements shape normative frameworks and regimes of justification, professional roles, and requirements for the built environment, as well as the very purposes, the subject/objects, and the social relations inherent in surveillance practices. However, the presentation also emphasizes that surveillance experiments constitute time-spaces of critique in which new forms of objectual resistance to counter-experiments with body-material relations emerge.
Monday, the 15th of June 2026, 18 o'clock
Talja Blokland
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Standing by or standing back: Changes in urban fear and insecurity in urban public space
When a woman was racially attacked on a tram in Berlin, two lines of discussion followed from a simply tweet – both did not reflect what the newspaper article on which they drew had said: that the attacker was stopped by others. This talk reflects on how we learn to fear the urban by experience, and now we learn by socialization, and explores the role of the absence of the body for the bystander dilemma, when much of city life becomes a choice to consume and enjoy certain urban places while avoiding others for some of us, while others live in the permanency of grey zones in conditions of insecurity. It draws on examples from scholars working on Sao Paulo, Bogotá and Johannesburg to do so, looking from there back to urban life conditions in Berlin. The talk is the first presentation of a chapter of the book project Throwntogetherness and Trust in Public Space, funded by a Volkswagen Foundation Opus Magnum, which Talja Blokland, currently holder of the Max Weber Chair in German and European Studies at New York University, is trying to complete.Monday, the 22th of June 2026, 18 o'clock
Sören Carlson
Europa-Universität Flensburg
Gendered boundary work amongst female tech professionals in Dublin
As part of the current polycrisis, previous attempts to counter or even remove various forms of discrimination seem to be losing ground. One example of such tendencies can be found within the global tech industry. Against this background – and based on fieldwork with tech professionals in Dublin, one of the large tech hubs in Europe that attracts professionals of diverse national origins –, this talk examines the gendered boundary work some female participants engaged in by drawing clear distinctions between men and women in this industry. It appears that this specific kind of boundary work is facilitated by an organisational cultural repertoire that urges employees, especially within big multinational tech companies, to be wary of any kind of discrimination. By adhering to this cultural repertoire, however, this boundary work simultaneously creates new forms of inequality and tends to silence other forms of discrimination, as it draws implicitly on notions of “merit” and “deservingness” inherent to this repertoire.
Monday, the 6th of July 2026, 18 o'clock
Adrian Favell
University College CorkNorthern Exposure: Understanding the Polycrisis in Northern English Towns
The contemporary polycrisis suggests thinking (and drinking!) at a global or planetary scale. But the symptoms of the crisis can equally be found in "ordinary" places, at a local scale, where individuals and communities are struggling to make sense of a changing world and a hostile political environment. In my presentation, I will present and discuss some short extracts of a documentary film from the UK ESRC funded project, Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in "Ordinary" Towns and Cities after Brexit. The film, made by award winning film maker, Lucy Kaye, visualised aspects of the ethnographic and interviews based research made by a team of sociologists at the University of Leeds in small cities / large towns in the North of England, places that are thought to be the locus of the political disaffection driving the post-Brexit crisis in British politics. Glimpsing the intimate stories and positional viewpoints of a number of characters on location in Middlesbrough, Wakefield and Halifax, the talk will engage with themes of deprivation, precarity, racism, identity, nostalgia, community and hope, that is, the everyday phenomenology of the polycrisis in one corner of North Western Europe. It will also engage in discussion about the role of video documentary in urban research. While specific to place and context, the themes and issues raised are highly relevant to the question of social polarisation understood to be driving politics in the North Atlantic West, as well as the comparable issues found in other post-industrial regions and (so-called) "left behind places".
Monday, the 13th of July 2026, 18 o'clock
Karin Christof
University of Amsterdam
Prefigurative Politics in Urban Space: Citizen Professionals Redefining Urban Governance from Below
How can residents gain a meaningful voice in urban governance beyond conventional participation? This talk addresses the role of Citizen Professionals (CPs) as civic actors who engage with urban spaces in transition — less antagonistic than the squatter activism of the 1980s, yet less institutionalised than government-intermediated bodies. CPs combine local embeddedness with an entrepreneurial orientation, strategically deploying policy instruments while pursuing bottom-up scalar ambitions. They contribute to affordable sites of co-working and living while establishing self-managed collective neighbourhood spaces that enable more creative and equitable forms of collaboration among residents, market actors, and policymakers.
Drawing on the recent publication Citizen Professionals Reclaiming Collective Spaces, we will explore together how CPs engage with today's global polycrisis. Through the analytical lens of Berlin's Haus der Statistik Initiative, I invite us to think through whether prefigurative urban practices can function as techniques of futuring and whether they might help navigate overlapping crises of housing, urban governance, and democratic legitimacy.