Geography Seminar - Prof Eugene McCann - Publics / Space: A tentative agenda for researching publicness & the political

Prof Eugene McCann Seminar - Publics / Space: A tentative agenda for researching publicness & the political
Thursday, March 2, 2023 - 16:00 to 17:30
Rocque Lab, Rhetoric House and via Teams

Maynooth University Department of Geography invites you to attend a Seminar presented by Prof Eugene McCann, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Canada. 

Join us via Teams if you can't join us in person. 

While geographers and other urban scholars have long discussed the character and politics of public space, its conceptualization is by no means settled.  The last few years have seen ongoing discussions of what public space means for contemporary urbanism, architecture, design, placemaking, and planning.  This presentation outlines some preliminary thoughts and questions I am developing that address the spatialities of publicness.  Drawing on examples from my ongoing research projects, I will attempt to put geographic and urban studies literatures on public space in conversation with political theorizations of publics, publicness, and the political.  Specifically, the presentation will think through how we might continue to study public space by focussing on how publics and counterpublics form in and produce space, whether those spaces are officially designated as public by the state.
 
Bio:  Eugene McCann is a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.  He researches policy mobilities, harm reduction, urban public space, development, governance, and planning. He has published in numerous journals and is co-editor, with Kevin Ward, of Mobile Urbanism: Cities & Policymaking in the Global Age (Minnesota, 2011), Cities & Social Change, with Ronan Paddison (Sage, 2014), and is co-author, with Andy Jonas and Mary Thomas, of Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Wiley, 2015).  He is managing editor of EPC: Politics & Space, a journal of critical research on the relations between the political and the spatial.