Calcutta Research Group (www.mcrg.ac.in) will conduct an online orientation course on the city of our time, under the specific theme “Making and Unmaking of Cities”. This online certificate course will be held in February-March 2025. It will have twelve lectures (two lectures per one day a week) encompassing accounts of making and unmaking of cities in South Asia and the world, issues of urban autonomy and sovereignty, struggles for rights and urban justice, as well as dominant stories that cities tell of themselves. Some of the discussions will be anchored in a political-economy perspective throwing light on forms of labour in global South, which include cities of South Asia. These cities as urban centres have always been sites of dispossession, eviction, migration, statelessness, relocation, forcible assimilation, mega projects, rising homelessness, and struggles for political reclamations. The online course will explore the process of urbanisation ideologically, sociologically, economically, and politically - cities that have been built and rebuilt in the wake of violence, epidemics, climate disasters, modernisation and planning, cities that are “futuristic” and smart, cities of refuge and creativity, cities expanding and containing their complexities and tensions, cities bulldozed and recreated, cities home to crime and labour mobilisation, cities trapped in narratives of tragedy, decline as well as progress, encountering their own fetishization, vanishing and mushrooming. "Making and Unmaking of Cities" is an online course designed to present radical engagements with urbanity and its excess.

The following six will be among the broad themes:

● City and Infrastructure;

● Climate Change and the City;

● Conflicts and Protests for justice in Urban Spaces

● Representations of the City in Transition

● Urban Divides;

● Labour and Economy in the Making and Unmaking of Cities

This online course is being introduced with the support of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) fellowship grant to Professor Ranabir Samaddar, Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, for “Humanity’s Urban Future” Programme.

Applications are invited for enrolment in the course. Applicants may be research scholars, teachers, journalists, legal activists, journalists and media activists, and urban rights activists with a minimum of three years of experience. Please apply through the Google form link - https://forms.gle/rKequ9Yzud93qwzG6

The last day of application is 7 November 2024. The Course will be held during the months of February-March 2025.

To find details about the application process please find the attached documents.

We would highly appreciate it if you could kindly share the Call for Applications with your peers and networks.

Thank you

Calcutta Research Group!