Doing Otherwise: Tracing Feminist Urban Methodologies

This workshop brings together a group of scholars working across feminist, decolonial, and critical methodologies to share reflections on the challenges, ethics, and possibilities of doing research ‘otherwise’ — often in complex and contested urban and social spaces.

Framed by the Urban Lab’s commitment to critical, creative, and collaborative inquiry, the workshop explores how feminist and critical researchers navigate institutional, community, and activist settings to generate new forms of knowledge and action. Drawing on diverse experiences in participatory, interdisciplinary, and activist research, speakers will offer brief provocations on issues such as:

• Navigating power and positionality in the research process
• Working across institutional, community, and activist spaces
• Addressing care, accountability, and reciprocity in knowledge production
• Innovating feminist and critical praxis, including digital and co-creative methodologies

The session will take the form of a roundtable, with each participant offering a short reflection (approx. 10 minutes) to open a wider conversation. The goal is to create an open, dialogic space to explore shared concerns, exchange strategies, and imagine new possibilities for feminist, critical, and interdisciplinary research that engages with the pressing social and spatial challenges of our time.

This event is part of a series of activities celebrating 20 years of UCL Urban Lab.

Speakers

Jordana Ramalho is an Associate Professor at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL. Spanning the fields of urban geography, development studies and feminist political ecology, her research explores the gendered and wider intersectional trajectories of sustainable development and resilience-building interventions in informal settlements. Jordana has over 15 years of professional experience working with NGOs in the UK, Canada, East Africa, the Philippines and Latin America, building institutional capacities to work with marginalised groups and to apply and embed an intersectional approach to their development practice. She is currently leading currently leading a three year research project, Listen Learn and Leap, exploring the potential for nature-based solutions to advance equitable and sustainable forms of climate resilience in East African cities.

Shannon Philip is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality, University of Cambridge. Shannon is a queer-feminist sociologist of colour. His research focuses on the relationship between masculinities, femininities and sexualities in cities of the Global South. He has carried out long-term ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork in New Delhi and Johannesburg exploring questions of men’s violence towards women and queer people, embodied performances of class, gender and sexuality, as well as the transforming articulations of heteropatriarchal and heteronormative power. Shannon’s research is intersectional, focusing on how race, class, caste, sexuality and gender operate in everyday social processes and their many consequences. 

Neem Talhouk is Vice Chancellor Research Fellow in the School of Design and Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. She is interested in working with humanitarian innovators to understand their practices and work towards integrating design methodologies and principles into humanitarian innovation practices. She has conducted research in the Middle East, Europe and Australia on the role of technologies in improving refugee and asylum seekers’ health, wellbeing and their everyday sense of security.

Myfanwy Taylor is Lecturer (Teaching) in Urban Economies and Planning at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. She is a community- and policy-engaged academic interested in questions of value, power and democracy in local, urban and regional economies and their implications for planning policy. Myfanwy’s academic work to date has focused on commercial displacement and anti-displacement struggles, the community value of traditional retail markets and bottom-up economic planning and development. Recent projects include Economic Development from Below (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) and Markets4People (ESRC funded). Her research on markets (with Professor Sara Gonzalez) has informed national and local debate via key industry and policy fora as well as several market strategies and projects, including recently the London Assembly’s report on social value in planning and regeneration.

Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows is an architect, academic, and design practice researcher. She is also a spatial and climate justice design consultant. Tumpa utilises feminist embodied architectural practice, as an active agent of socio-spatial decolonisation for environmental, climate and spatial justice. Her research and creative practice are tools for activism that also inform Tumpa’s teaching of architectural design at several universities in London. She is the co-founder of the practice Our Building Design, the charity Mannan Foundation Trust and the founder of (Female Architects of Minority Ethnic) - FAME Collective. Tumpa is the author of the research project: ‘Exposing the Barriers in Architecture, from a FAME perspective’. Tumpa is the recipient of several awards, including the RIBA President’s Award for Research 2019 (commendation) and the Aga Khan Award 2022 (nomination).

Chairs 

Kate Maclean is an Associate Professor in Global Prosperity at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity.  She is a feminist geographer with a wide range of research interests – including rural credit, urban violence reduction and Indigenous fashions – and has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in philosophy, politics and women’s studies. Her regional focus is Latin America and she has conducted consultancies in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ciudad Juárez. She is the Chair of the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society, and Editor of both Gender, Place and Culture: A journal of feminist geography and the Journal of Latin American Studies.

Catalina Ortiz is Professor of Critical Urban Pedagogy and Director of UCL Urban Laboratory. She is an urbanist who is passionate about spatial justice. Her research uses decolonial and critical urban theory through knowledge co-production methodologies mainly in Latin American cities. Her work revolves around urban pedagogies, planning for equality and southern urbanisms. Her articles have been published in several journals including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, Environment and Urbanization, Urban Studies, City, Cities, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She is one of the editors of Urban Studies and a trustee of the charity, Latin Elephant.

Image: Photography by Catalina Ortiz