Book Launch
Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism
Wednesday, 10 May 2023
15:00 – 17:00 BST
Board Room, ICOSS, University of Sheffield and online
Join Claudia Fonseca Alfaro (Malmö University and University of Sheffield) for a conversation with Lindsay Sawyer (University
of Sheffield), Jonathan Silver (University of Sheffield) and Simone Vegliò (Malmö University) to discuss her new book, Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism from
the Antipode Book Series, Wiley. There will be an opportunity for an open discussion and debate followed by a drinks reception.
About the book:
Challenging the ways we understand urbanization in the global South, Producing Mayaland examines the boom-to-bust story of maquiladoras in Yucatán—the south of Mexico—to reveal the political, colonial, and racial dynamics
at play.
About the participants:
Claudia Fonseca Alfaro is a postcolonial and feminist urban scholar who is interested
in studying the way urbanization unfolds and how global capitalism actually happens on the ground in the inconspicuous places of the global South. Her research interests include global commodity chains, comparative urbanism, and the nexus between infrastructure
and racial capitalism.
Lindsay Sawyer is a scholar whose research is concerned with confronting urban
theory, especially related to informality, with the grounded realities of African urbanism. Her work looks to build new theories and concepts from grounded research, and exploring comparative methods as a way to do this.
Jonathan Silver is an urban geographer who is interested in the uneven ways
in which infrastructure has come to be planned, operationalized and experienced. His expertise includes a range of cities across global Norths and Souths. He has generated a postcolonial mode of theorizing paying attention to the ways in which finance, urban
politics, everyday interactions and visions of futurity come to shape the infrastructural terrain.
Simone Vegliò is a scholar whose research sits at the intersection between Urban
Geography and Political Geography. After working on urban transformations in Latin America from a historical perspective, his current research explores the socio-spatial and (geo)political impacts of neo-extractive and logistical infrastructure in South America's
River Plate basin.
This is a hybrid event organized by the Urban Institute, The University of Sheffield. Please register to attend in person or online.
To register in person: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-producing-mayaland-in-person-tickets-621689147977
To register online: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-producing-mayaland-online-tickets-621692247247
Claudia Fonseca Alfaro
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute for Urban Research (IUR)
Department of Urban Studies
Malmö University
+46 40 665 79 82
