[Un]Grounding – Post–Foundational Geographies

Post-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the "spatial turn" in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationalism as radical approach to urban studies. This approach enables us to think about space not only as socially produced, but also as crucially marked by conflict, radical negativity, and absence. The contributors undertake a (re-)reading of key spatial and/or post-foundational theorists to introduce their respective understandings of politics and space, and offer examples of post-foundational empirical analyses of urban protests, spatial occupation, and everyday life.

Friederike Landau (Dr.), born in 1989, is a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. She works on modes of political agency and (self-)organization in the field of arts and culture. Her dissertation "Agonistic Articulations in the "Creative" City - On New Actors and Activism in Berlin's Cultural politics" (Routledge 2019) provides a post-foundational analysis of the emergence of a new political actor. Lucas Pohl (M.A.), born in 1989, is research fellow at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He was a PhD candidate at the Department of Human Geography of Goethe University in Frankfurt. He works on the interstices between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and urban geography. Nikolai Roskamm (Dr.), born in 1967, is a professor for planning theory, history of urban planning, and urban design at the University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt. In his work, he mingles political theory and philosophy, history of ideas, and urban phenomena.