The Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy: Democratizing Power
Release Date: 11/09/2023
Graduate student hunger: Just Us dinners and food resources with Ashanee Kottage
Cities@Tufts Lectures
The Just Us Graduate Student Dinners emerged from a recognition of the quiet crisis of food insecurity and isolation that many graduate students—especially Global Majority, low-income, first-generation, and international students—experience. Academia often disembodies students, extracting them from their cultural food traditions and support networks while offering little institutional concern for whether they are nourished in mind and body. Just Us was conceived with a dual goal: to surface mutual aid networks that already exist among students while also advocating for...
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Defining environmental justice communities when ‘equity’ is a banned word with Marcos Luna
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Since the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement, maps have been pivotal tools in revealing patterns of environmental and social inequality, in legitimizing what many communities already knew – that power and oppression shape the landscape of opportunity and risk. Mapping remains critical to Environmental Justice activism, research, and policy. Maps are often employed as tools of accountability, and as a result, mapping is both a technical and a political act, facing both technical and political challenges. Within the current political climate, these challenges have been...
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The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In her recent book, The Cities We Need (MIT Press), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani's evocative images illuminate what's at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal,...
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The Pointillistic City: Well-Being and Equity in Communities and their Places with Dan O'Brien
Cities@Tufts Lectures
The Pointillistic City extends the classic observation that “neighborhoods matter” for health and well-being, arguing that we need to pay more attention to the other geographic scales that we live at—including streets within neighborhoods and even properties within streets—and how they each affect us. This is analogous to a pointillistic painting, which is similarly organized into dots within objects and objects within a full image. This “pointillistic perspective” surfaces microspatial inequities, or disparities between people living in the same neighborhood, as a pressing and...
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Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and Institution Building with Monica White
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Dr. Monica M. White presented Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and Institution Building." The presentation provided context for understanding agriculture as a strategy of resilience and resistance for African Americans. It will offer a perspective of the labor and commitment to agriculture from those in southern Black rural communities to those building community-based food systems in urban spaces. About Monica White Dr. Monica M. White is the Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies, associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,...
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Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona with Megan Saltzman
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Megan Saltzman presented her new book--Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona--which explores how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, walking, etc.) challenge the increase of top-down control in the global city. Public Everyday Space focuses on post-Olympic Barcelona—a time of unprecedented levels of gentrification, branding, mass tourism, and immigration. Drawing from examples observed in public spaces (streets, plazas, sidewalks, and empty lots), as well as in cultural representation (film, photography, literature), this book exposes the quiet...
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A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Canada was founded on enslavement and dispossession, most exemplified by its assimilationist ideologies and policies, the displacement, subjugation and oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures, and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The colonial theft of land and the accumulation of capital have been foundational to Canada’s wealth. In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron uses settler colonial theory to examine environmental racism in Canada to highlight the symbolic and material ways in which the geographies of Indigenous and Black peoples have been characterized by...
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Local Leadership for Climate Justice with Hessann Farooqi
Cities@Tufts Lectures
This talk explores how and why city governments can step up to lead on climate action and how resident organizing is critical in making this happen. This talk also explores how to build and sustain the political coalition to ensure climate justice policies can be passed and implemented. Hessann Farooqi is the Executive Director of the Boston Climate Action Network. He is the youngest person and the first person of color appointed to lead BCAN. Hessann studied economics at Boston University, worked in the United States Senate under Sen. Ed Markey, and served on various federal, state, and local...
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From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Climate policy increasingly relies on techniques to remove CO2 from the environment as a supplement to cutting emissions: counter-balancing residual emissions in ‘net-zero’ and reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to safer levels. In this talk, Duncan will survey how cities are engaging with carbon removal – reviewing the realistic scope of possibilities such as carbon negative building materials, and carbon removal through urban waste management; and suggest ways in which urban carbon removal could be governed to contribute to goals of justice and sustainability. Duncan McLaren is...
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Solidarity Cities: Examining Solidarity Economies at the Urban Level with Maliha Safri
Cities@Tufts Lectures
Contemporary urban discourse is caught in a binary between the Gentrified City, and the Disinvested City. Maliha Safri’s new book presents an alternative urban imaginary: the Solidarity City. Her new co-authored book Solidarity Cities. Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation introduces an alternative spatial imaginary highlighting solidarity relations as definitional features of urban life. In contrast to profit-motive and competition, solidarity economies and the corresponding international movement have commitments to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion. The movement is...
info_outlineWelcome to the second episode of the Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy: Democratizing Power.
This a special series of episodes that we've been sharing over the summer until Cities@Tufts officially resumes for our fourth season in the Fall.
Over the course of our lecture series, we’ve talked a lot about the crucial role that community plays in building alternatives to capitalistic models of access, resource distribution and social equity. We are living through a historic moment where the common crises - from climate change to the erosion of democracy, virulent racism and fascism — are constantly emerging and evolving.
It’s without blame, and fairly common, to get trapped in a kind of hopelessness that another world is attainable in the face of ever-growing systems of oppression. But we believe two things. Not only that another world is possible, but that it’s often already here. We believe that the world that our planet and everyday people need is often within reach, waiting for us to take hold, take root, take action and to re-shape our everyday lives through radical collaboration, collective activism and a world of care.
This week we are joined by Hillary Renick, Kristania De Leon, and Naveen Agrawal to hear about different ways that power is being democratized - in finance, in municipal or community governance, and in recognizing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for resource management.
Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman and host Tom Llewellyn.
Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from The Kresge Foundation, Barr Foundation and SHIFT Foundation.
Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistant Deandra Boyle. Roame Jasmin is our producer, Robert Raymond is our audio editor, the graphic recording was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.
“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and Caitlin McLennon created this episode's graphic.