[artinfo] Lectures of Edward Soja

[zoran eric]

Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Monday 25th of September at 6 PM 

In the framework of the research project of the 
Centre for Visual Culture MOCAB titled 
Differentiated Neighbourhoods guest lecuturer 
professor Edward W. Soja will give a talk on the 
topic of:

SPATIAL JUSTICE IN THE POSTMETROPOLIS

About the lecture:

The modern metropolis has been experiencing 
far-reaching changes over the past thirty years. 
One of the major features of this 
postmetropolitan transformation, as I will 
describe it, has been intensifying economic 
inequalities and social polarization, or, in 
other words, increasing social and economic 
injustices.  I will discuss the growing 
importance of understanding justice from a 
critical spatial perspective both in theory and 
in political practice.  Social movements seeking 
spatial justice have begun to emerge at many 
different scales, from the global justice 
movement to the emergence of community-based 
struggles over the “rights to the city,” reviving 
Henri Lefebvre's old idea of “le droit a la 
ville.”

Second lecture of professor Soja with the title:

THE SPATIAL TURN IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES

(National Library of Serbia, Tuesday 26th of September at 7 PM)

About the lecture:

A look at the remarkable diffusion of spatial 
thinking across nearly all the social sciences 
and humanities, after at least a century and a 
half during which time and history were 
ontologically and epistemologically privileged 
over space and geography.  Particular attention 
will be given to the creative reconfigurations of 
spatial thinking developed in the works of Henri 
Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, and to more recent 
approaches to understanding the generative effect 
of cities and other examples of spatial causality.

The lecturer:

Professor Soja teaches in the Regional and 
International Development (RID) area of Urban 
Planning at UCLA. He also teaches courses in 
urban political economy and planning theory. Over 
the last twenty years Edward Soja has focused his 
research and writing on urban restructuring in 
Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical 
study of cities and regions. His wide-ranging 
studies of Los Angeles bring together traditional 
political economy approaches and recent trends in 
critical cultural studies. Of particular interest 
to him is the way issues of class, race, gender, 
and sexuality intersect with what he calls the 
spatiality of social life, and with the new 
cultural politics of difference and identity that 
this generates.

In addition to his work on urban restructuring in 
Los Angeles, professor Soja continues to write on 
how social scientists and philosophers think 
about space and geography, especially in relation 
to how they think about time and history. His 
latest book brings these various research strands 
together in a comprehensive look at the 
geohistory of cities, from their earliest origins 
to the more recent development of what he calls 
the "postmetropolis." His policy interests are 
primarily involved with questions of regional 
development, planning and governance, and with 
the local effects of ethnic and cultural 
diversity in Los Angeles. 


Selected Publications: 

Soja, E.W. Postmodern Geographies: The 
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. 
London: Verso Press, 1989.

Scott, A.J and E.W. Soja, eds. The City: Los 
Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the 
Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of 
California Press. 1996.

Soja, E.W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles 
and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil 
Blackwell. 1996.

Soja, E.W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of 
Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.