The urban polycrisis is at the heart of global discussions on adaptation, resilience, and transformative action. The crises of genocide, climate change, resource extractivism, shrinking economies, political upheaval, housing crisis and unequal pathways to development are increasingly manifesting across the globe and especially in cities of the Global South that carry the enduring impact of colonial exploitation. Against this backdrop, feminist/and decolonial methodologies are challenging the ways we understand, evaluate, politicise and respond to urban crises (Ortiz and Millan, 2022; Beveridge & Davidson, 2025; Coelho et al., 2025; Shafique, 2025). While these ongoing interventions offer examples of transformation that respond to polycritical cities and unsettle the conventions of academic expression, they remain largely marginal to mainstream academic production.
The objective of the panel is to build on the works of feminist/and decolonial scholars and to cultivate more public and accessible anthropological engagements with cities through visual methods (Pink, 2025). Responding to Hanson et al.’s (2020) call to “heighten the readers’ audibility” to different possibilities of knowing than “Eurocentric methodologically produced stories”, the session invites contributions that may include films, graphic narratives, photography, soundscapes, zines, and other participatory methods that explore, politicise, articulate and tackle facets of urban crises, offering rich, affective, and deeply political accounts of the city that depart from conventional academic formats.
We welcome submissions that respond to one or more of the following questions through empirically grounded research:
- What is an urban polycrisis, and why do we need alternative methods and pedagogies to understand this?
- What possibilities do feminist/and decolonial methods offer in the way we understand, research, politicise and articulate urban crises?
- How can creative storytelling open new pathways to explore different facets of a polycritical city?
- What are the challenges and key ethical considerations in adopting these experimental pedagogies?
If you are interested in joining the in-person ISA session, please submit a (maximum) 300-word abstract by 14 October, 2026 through the ISA Congress system: https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/wc2027/cfp.cgi
ISA also provides registration grants to attend the event. More information here: https://www.isa-sociology.org/isa-events/xxi-world-congress-of-sociology/congress-guidelines/registration-grants
For any queries, you can reach out to: nianpaul2012@gmail.com; rainaghosh@hotmail.com.