Since GUHP’s founding in 2017, it has supported scholarship that stretches the boundaries of the field of urban history. Programming such as the Dream Conversations have encouraged investigations of cities as creations and creators of large-scale historical phenomena while also widening the diversity of voices active in the field. Recorded online events, available on our YouTube channel (GUHPVids), have engaged interested scholars worldwide in our discussions.
For our second in-person conference, we invite scholars to present work in English that further 'Stretches the Limits of Global Urban History.' Some of the questions we are interested in include, but are not limited to:
Geographically: How can global urban history elucidate or critique larger-scale spatial concepts such as “global,” “planetary,” “hinterlands,” and “world.” As incidents of war-time urbicide increase, how do we handle the dialectics of spatial creation and destruction? What new models of connectivity and integration can our field offer?
Temporally: What new temporal frameworks can global urban history explore and what can we gain analytically from them? How can global urban history rethink continuity, contingency, and disruption over time, including the longue duree?
Politically: How can global urban history help to explain inequalities of power, wealth, knowledge, and representation? How can it elucidate histories of race, ethnicity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, sexual liberation, and emotion?
Spatially: What new understandings of urban space and the built environment, urban planning and the natural environmental can global urban history offer? How can we rethink resource and energy frameworks in global urban history?
Methodologically: How do global urban historical epistemologies enhance or reinvent our engagement with the archives? What new cross-discipline collaborations can we pursue to make new interventions in urban studies?
