Topic
Remaking the City from Below: Collaborative Writing Initiatives in Multilingual Spaces
Complementing traditional accounts of the city as a dehumanizing entity (Simmel, Engels), this paper defines the city as a space that enables social encounters across languages and cultures, where solidarity and mutual understanding may be formed. Situated within postclassical approaches to literary urban studies and going beyond questions of representation and canonical texts, the paper conceives of cities as material spaces of everyday literary production. We explore collaborative literary projects across Europe that aim to co-construct alternative forms of community by bringing together writers with multiple belongings and different degrees of literary capital to foreground stories of migration and social displacement. We argue that these small-scale initiatives, which are often city-based and redefine the social fabric of urban spaces through actual conviviality, counter the abstract, imaginary bonds that sustain the nation-state (Anderson). We consider these literary projects as microcosms of the city, encapsulating different views and experiences of urbanity. Focusing on multilingual cities as “translation zones” (Cronin & Simon), we take a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to two particular projects located in Barcelona and Brussels that use writing as a means to claim the right to the city (Harvey). Combining ethnographic research and literary analysis, we illustrate how writing together, both as a social practice and a published product, redefines urban imaginaries, actively structures belonging in the city, and constitutes a rights-claiming activity.
Núria Codina (KU Leuven)
Núria Codina is an assistant professor at the Translation Studies Department at the University of Leuven (Belgium). She is also the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “COLLAB: Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature. How Collaboration Is Changing the Cultural Field” (2023-2028), which looks at collaborative practices of making literature in contexts of migration and displacement. Her previous research, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), studied the role of refugee writing, multilingualism, and minor languages in contemporary world literature. She is the author of Verflochtene Welten. Transkulturalität in den Werken von Najat El Hachmi, Pius Alibek, Emine Sevgi Özdamar und Feridun Zaimoglu (2018). She has also published in journals such as Interventions, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Research in African Literatures, MELUS, and Textual Practice.
Marialena Avgerinou (KU Leuven)
Marialena Avgerinou is a PhD researcher at the Department of Translation Studies and a member of the COLLAB project led by Núria Codina Solà. Her ethnographic research focuses on small-scale multilingual literary projects by writers with multiple belongings, in different European cities, considering them as both literary and political initiatives within their social contexts. She studied History and Philosophy (University of Dundee) and Comparative Law (IUC-University of Turin). Before this academic position she worked as an EFL teacher and English<>Greek and Italian>English translator. Her broader interests include marxist feminism, process philosophy, and multilingualism.
Sonja Faaren Ruud (KU Leuven)
Sonja Faaren Ruud is a postdoctoral researcher with the COLLAB project at the University Leuven, where she studies collaborative literary projects around migration and multilingualism in cities across Belgium, Spain, and Germany. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, where her doctoral research explored the transition to fare-free public transport in Luxembourg through the intersecting perspectives of mobility, labor, and value. She is currently co-convenor of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Anthropology and Mobility (AnthroMob) network.