We are all political scientists trained at the Otto-Suhr-Institute (Freie Universität Berlin). We graduated a long long time ago (1993 and 1996) and went into a variety of research projects (politics of homelessness, labor-market policies, security regimes and urban surveillance) that more often than not had a comparative perspective. So the short ad hoc working definition is:

We do urban stuff!

That is the research side of things. On accounts of activism, we are not in the streets that much anymore. Some of us are still affiliated with alma mater (i.e. the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies and the Zentrum Technik und Gesellschaft) but we do a lot of our work outside academia these days - and sometimes we even get paid! Not for this conference though. This conference is one in a series (actually the third). The unifying themes of these conferences are:

• 1. An international, comparative urban perspective
• 2. A broad funding base outside the main academic sources
• 3. A publication a couple of month after the actual conference
• 4. A lot of fun with our international friends
• 5. (Self-) Exploitation
• 6. Lack of sleep

See this website for some of our publications (conferences and beyond) and this website for some others.

If you wish to contact us either use the contact form or this email.