Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism

Patricia García is a senior researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), where she currently leads a Ramón y Cajal project on urban peripheries in contemporary literature (2020-2025, Ministerio de Universidades, ES and European Social Fund) . Her research focuses on literary urban spaces, which she analyzes at their intersections with peripherality, gender and with representations of the supernatural. She is the author of The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (Palgrave, 2021) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2015). She has held fellowships and research grants from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and the British Academy. She directs the network Fringe Urban Narratives (urbanfringes.com). She is the Vice-President of ALUS: Association for Literary Urban Studies, a member of the Executive Committees of the European Society of Comparative Literature and part of the editorial board of BRUMAL: Research Journal on the Fantastic. She is co-editor of the Palgrave series Literary Urban Studies.Anna-Leena Toivanen is Academy Research Fellow at the School of Humanities at the University of Eastern Finland. Her current research project, funded by the Academy of Finland (2021-2025), focuses on the poetics of mobility in Francophone African literatures. She has held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Liège (2017-2019). Her monograph Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures was published by Brill in 2021, and she is currently working on her second book entitled Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan) She acts as the literary studies subject editor of the Nordic Journal of African Studies and has previously acted as the editor-in-chief of the Finnish literary studies journal Avain (2018-2019). She is in the editorial board of Mobility Humanities. She has co-edited a special issue entitled “European Peripheries” for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2021) and is currently guest-editing a special issue on public transport in African literatures for English Studies in Africa (forthcoming in 2024).

• “(Im)mobility, Peripherality, and the City: Theoretical Orientations and Concepts”, Patricia García; Anna-Leena Toivanen (University of Alcalá; University of Eastern Finland).- “Cihuateteo Wandering: navigating the Mexican Urban Space as a Woman”, Orly Cortés (UAM-Xochimilco).- “Urban Ambivalence: Work and Home at Delhi’s margins”, Anubhav Pradhan (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai).- “The Nomadic Subject in Teju Cole’s Open City”, Aristi Trendel (Le Mans University).- “Space, Mobility, and Belonging: Finding One’s Way through Pre-Apartheid Johannesburg”, Sophie U. Kriegel (Leipzig University).- “Moving Upward in the City: Modes of Transport and Social Mobility in New York, My Village: A Novel and Behold the Dreamers", Lena Englund (University of Eastern Finland).- “Delhi on the Move: a Literary Account on Urban Mobility”, Valentina Barnabei (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Heidelberg University).- “Abject Urban-Rural Mobilities by Public Transport in Ousmane Sembène's "Niiwam" and Yvonne Vera's Without a Name”, Anna-Leena Toivanen (University of Eastern Finland).- “'We take boundaries very seriously here at Positron!’: Transitions and Liminal Space in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last”, Olga Springer (Dublin City University).- “Space, Borders and Cognition in Urban Diasporic Fiction”, Johan Schimanski (University of Oslo).- “What Lurks in the Peripheries: The Unusual in Liminal Suburban Territories in Recent Short Story Collections”, Rosa-María Cobo (Universidad de Burgos).- “Moving on the Fringes of Literary Barcelona: Contemporary Novels from the Catalan Peripheries”, Patricia García (Universidad de Alcalá).- “Once upon a Queer: Sexual Monstrosity, Sexual Misery and the Metropolis”, Jean-Philippe Imbert (Dublin City University).- “From the Cartographic Fringes: Map Mobilizations and the Urban”, Tania Rossetto (University of Padova).- “Narratives of Border Crossing in Kati Horna’s Photographic Tales”, Karla Segura Pantoja (CY Cergy Paris Université).- “Urban//Rural: An Art Perspective”, Federica Mirra (Birmingham City University).- “The (Political) Power of Not Moving”, Inga Iwasiów and Maciej Kowalewski (University of Szczecin).