Book Launch
Book Launch | Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco
- Date
- Friday 4 March 2022
- Time
- Address
- Faculty Club
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
On 4 March 2022, Cristiana Strava will present her recent monograph, Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco. Using rich ethnographic detail, Precarious Modernities offers an immersive account of the multiple scales and entangled actors involved in the objectification and instrumentalization of Casablanca's margins as part of ongoing and contingent processes of 'modernization'. Focusing on the everyday lives and spaces of a mythicized community, and its interaction with heritage activists, international development agendas and technocratic planning regimes, the book documents how the depoliticization of the urban margins aids the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial, and economic orders.
The result is a unique account of the political continuities, security logics, economic ideologies and competing forces that shape the possibilities open to precarious communities in a storied and sprawling metropolis. As marginalized inhabitants develop pragmatic ways of appropriating or resisting powerful agendas, unanticipated and novel forms of political engagement emerge. These signal the revival and reconfiguration of notions of class and open up creative and alternative spatial avenues for participation in an era of increasing authoritarianisms.
The launch will take the form of a conversation: Jasmijn Rana (Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University), Rivke Jaffe (Urban Geography, University of Amsterdam) and Judith Naeff (Middle Eastern Studies, Leiden University) will respond to different aspects of the book and invite Cristiana to expand and reflect.
Please register for the event via this registration form or via the blue button below. You can also join the livestream of this event via Zoom (click here).
The event will be followed by drinks.