Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Abstract

In this short intervention addressing the impact of crises on geographical knowledge practices, we, members of GenUrb (a multi-sited, longitudinal, partnered urban research project), ask, “what counts as crisis?”, sketching out epistemological and methodological points about our project's engagement with this call. We query the adeptness of dominant Eurocentric epistemologies in addressing crises, adopting the work of Bedour Alagraa, who places crises firmly within a historical–geographical colonial framing that conceptualizes crises not through rupture but through continuation. We illustrate the utility of this epistemological framing of crisis, honing in on the everyday violence that women continually experience, with our research in the cities of Cochabamba, Delhi, Georgetown, Ibadan, Ramallah, and Shanghai, showing that one in every two women participants had experienced intimate partner violence. We further ask what crises mean for the methodologies we adopt, specifically concerning questions of the co-production of knowledge and methods.