Sina Kramer: Toward a Political Epistemology of the City

On February 19, women’s and gender studies professor Sina Kramer gave a talk entitled “Towards a Political Epistemology of the City” at Loyola Marymount University’s Friday Faculty Colloquium. In the talk, Kramer argues that a political epistemology of the city can help us understand how the hegemonic organization of the city is shaped by the concrete processes of neoliberalism in gentrification, urban politics, housing policy, and urban political economy. She claims that knowledge of the city, gained through lived experience, is shaped by political forces that are often or always invisible, and so must be confronted by a political epistemology that treats the city as a text – both material and symbolic – continually re-written by the shifting ideology of neoliberalism. Ultimately, Kramer hopes that a political epistemology of the city can help us to see the “unassimilated differences” that are necessary to city life, but disavowed by it.