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Joint Webinar on Zoom with the African Centre for Cities

Presentation of the upcoming book:

Worlding Home: An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC

This book opens up and interrogates the socio-spatial dynamics of contingent camps inhabited by United Nations peacekeepers in and around the city of Goma, DRC. Between 2017 and 2019, the city of Goma and two adjacent towns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo accommodated UN peacekeepers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in over 20 different camps. This study brings the productive tension between these camps and the city to life through an ethnographic study of peacekeepers as urban, social actors who make and re-make their camps and the city itself, and who frame and re-frame what it means to be at home and what it means to be in the world. In setting off from a novel starting point for global urban studies research, it proposes an analytic of camping to not only think cities through elsewhere, but as elsewhere. More information and an open access version of the book is available here.

Speaker:

Maren Larsen is an urban anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Basel, where she chairs its Pedagogy Committee and coordinates the Critical Urbanisms M.A. program. She will join the University of Zurich’s Geography Department in 2026 as an Ambizione Fellow working on climate-induced, planned relocation in Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Discussant: Laurent Fourchard, Research Professor, CERI, Sciences Po

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