Book launch: Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities

About

Join us in person for the launch of Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities: Multidisciplinary interpretations. 

This edited volume presents a nuanced and revealing picture of how urban violence manifests and operates in multiple and unprecedented ways, challenging the common conception of urban violence as solely criminal physical acts performed by predictable perpetrators.

The volume blurs geographical borders through a synthesis of Global South and North perspectives, focusing on a range of marginalised communities. The chapters are inventively crafted as local-meets-global case studies, with a broad regional sweep from Brazil, the US, the UK and Ukraine to India, South Africa and Palestine.

The event will include a short discussion with Andrew Feinstein, author of the volume’s foreword, followed by brief introductions to each chapter by the contributing authors and editors. It will be chaired by Sabina Andron.

Speakers

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram is Reader in Global Cinemas at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of the world’s first book trilogy on new Indian Indie films. His cross-disciplinary research publications traverse representations of gender and caste-based violence, urban spatialities, cultural heritage, popular geopolitics, soft power and subalterns in global megacities. He contributed the article ‘Framing police-related urban violence: Cinematic crosscurrents from the Global South’ to a British Academy special collection in 2021. Ashvin is Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival (UKAFF). He is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Connecting Creative Industries and Cultural Heritage: India-UK Film Festival Federation, Youth Curation and Community Co-Creation’ (2024–7).

Stamatis Zografos is an architect and Associate Professor in Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is also a co-founder of Incandescent Square—an interdisciplinary platform for research—and a founding member of the Institute of Psychoanalytic Studies in Architecture (iPSA). His research lies at the intersection of architecture, critical heritage studies and psychoanalysis, engaging with the element of fire through an interdisciplinary lens. He is the author of Architecture and Fire: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Conservation (UCL Press, 2019).

Márcio Júlio da Silva Mattos is a sociologist and Associate Professor in the Higher Institute of Police Sciences in Brasília. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Political Science Institute at the University of Brasília. Márcio holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Brasília. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Boston, funded by the Fulbright Commission. He is also a senior police officer with over 20 years of experience in Brasília, having held leadership positions in public security at both federal and state levels.

Zoe Holman is an Australian/British author, freelance journalist and researcher, based between Athens and London. She has a history PhD on British foreign policy in the Middle East from the University of Melbourne/SOAS, and her writing has been published in outlets including the London Review of Books, The Economist, Jacobin, New Internationalist, Al Jazeera and Open Democracy. She is the author of Where the Water Ends: Seeking Refuge in Fortress Europe (Melbourne University Publishing, 2021) and is currently working on another book through a creative writing PhD at Queen Mary University of London.

Andrew Feinstein, a former African National Congress (ANC) MP, is author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (Penguin Books, 2012) and After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future (Verso Books, 2009), and co-editor of Monstrous Anger of the Guns (Pluto Press, 2024). He is Executive Director of Shadow World Investigations and an antimilitarist, anti-racist campaigner and activist.

Sabina Andron is an interdisciplinary urban scholar working on the visual cultures of cities. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities, leading the project “Visual governance in the city: rethinking graffiti and public images”. Her first monograph, Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City, was shortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award in 2024.

Image credit: Panos Pictures, Gaza City, Palestine. Interior of a shelled building destroyed by Israeli forces in January 2009, forcing all families to leave.