Austin Zeiderman
Austin Zeiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the cultural and political dimensions of urbanization, development, and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a specific focus on Colombia. Austin holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University as well as a Master of Environmental Science degree from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Colgate University.
Austin’s first book, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (2016, Duke University Press), examines the everyday workings of the state to protect poor and vulnerable citizens in areas recently declared at “high risk” of landslide, flood, and earthquake. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Endangered City shows what happens when security and risk become dominant logics of engagement between urban citizens and the state. While the politics of security and risk in Bogotá are inextricably bound up with Colombia’s colonial and postcolonial history, the book intervenes in global debates surrounding the imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future threats, and the implications of that imperative for cities and urban life.
Austin’s current research moves beyond the city to examine large-scale social and environmental transformations in Colombia. He has written on racialized displacement linked to port expansion and climate change adaptation and on efforts to counter displacement pressures by Afro-Colombian activists and settlers. This research also led to a methodological intervention into conceptual debates in urban theory. More recently, Austin has written about the process of building a “concrete peace” in Colombia through large-scale infrastructure projects. This has led him to undertake a long-term research project focusing on plans to create a multimodal logistics corridor along Colombia’s Magdalena River between the Andean interior and the Caribbean sea. This project seeks to intervene in debates on capitalism, security, race, and nature while experimenting with new ways of thinking and writing about environmental politics in our rapidly changing world.
Austin’s first book, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (2016, Duke University Press), examines the everyday workings of the state to protect poor and vulnerable citizens in areas recently declared at “high risk” of landslide, flood, and earthquake. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Endangered City shows what happens when security and risk become dominant logics of engagement between urban citizens and the state. While the politics of security and risk in Bogotá are inextricably bound up with Colombia’s colonial and postcolonial history, the book intervenes in global debates surrounding the imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future threats, and the implications of that imperative for cities and urban life.
Austin’s current research moves beyond the city to examine large-scale social and environmental transformations in Colombia. He has written on racialized displacement linked to port expansion and climate change adaptation and on efforts to counter displacement pressures by Afro-Colombian activists and settlers. This research also led to a methodological intervention into conceptual debates in urban theory. More recently, Austin has written about the process of building a “concrete peace” in Colombia through large-scale infrastructure projects. This has led him to undertake a long-term research project focusing on plans to create a multimodal logistics corridor along Colombia’s Magdalena River between the Andean interior and the Caribbean sea. This project seeks to intervene in debates on capitalism, security, race, and nature while experimenting with new ways of thinking and writing about environmental politics in our rapidly changing world.
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Books by Austin Zeiderman
Journal articles by Austin Zeiderman
this question at a global scale, it examines the place of urbanization within the development of the modern/colonial order, accounting for the imagined futures that have supported this world-historical process. Three thematic sections—idealization, capitalization, and securitization— frame the discussion. Capturing desires for societal betterment alongside attempts to extract economic value and imperatives to govern anticipated threats, these heuristics provide insight into forms of urban future-making and future-thinking that continue to reverberate across contemporary projects, debates, and struggles. This lays the groundwork for the critical analysis of urban futures that identifies what is at stake in imagining the future of cities in one way rather than another.
Book chapters by Austin Zeiderman
this question at a global scale, it examines the place of urbanization within the development of the modern/colonial order, accounting for the imagined futures that have supported this world-historical process. Three thematic sections—idealization, capitalization, and securitization— frame the discussion. Capturing desires for societal betterment alongside attempts to extract economic value and imperatives to govern anticipated threats, these heuristics provide insight into forms of urban future-making and future-thinking that continue to reverberate across contemporary projects, debates, and struggles. This lays the groundwork for the critical analysis of urban futures that identifies what is at stake in imagining the future of cities in one way rather than another.
Read the entire collection of essays at: http://societyandspace.org/2017/11/28/endangered-city-by-austin-zeiderman-and-hydraulic-city-by-nikhil-anand-review-forum/
Contributors: Dr. Suzanne Hall, Associate Professor in Sociology and Director of the Cities Programme, LSE; Dr. Austin Zeiderman, Associate Professor of Geography, LSE; Dr. Clive James Nwonka, Fellow International Inequalities Institute, LSE
But even through war, one thing that never seemed to stop was the shipping of goods through the Magdalena River.
This river is an ever-changing fluid highway of bends, sandbars, and channels that can only be navigated by the expert hands of the captains and crews of Colombia's barge convoys.
It is a world dominated by men, where strangers are rarely permitted.
Please join us as Professor Kevin Lewis O’Neill sits down with Professor Austin Zeiderman to discuss his trip aboard a shipping barge along the Magdalena River.
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This podcast is sponsored by the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.
Our Host is Professor Kevin Lewis O'Neill.
Between, Across, & Through is produced, edited, and mixed by Ianeke L Romero