Faranak Miraftab

During the CASBS fellowship, Faranak Miraftab will work on a project that coproduces knowledge by activists and academics to understand how urban movements nurture hope and activate imagination of an alternative future through practices of radical care. Gathering digital stories and direct narratives of urban activists in global sites including Brazil, South Africa, and Spain, this project examines how, in marginalized communities with women at their center, the daily practices of radical care help to open up the possibility for what Miraftab calls “humane urbanism,” whereby urban policies center on life, not profit. This project is a culmination of Miraftab’s scholarship on grassroots practices of citizenship, whether by displaced migrant workers in the US or racialized and impoverished residents in South African townships.

Miraftab is professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Her transnational and feminist urban scholarship concerns urban citizens’ struggle for dignified life and livelihood in regions around the world. Her Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking (Indiana University Press, 2016) received the American Sociological Association’s Global & Transnational Sociology Award and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Davidoff book award. It was a Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills book award finalist. 

For more information see https://urban.illinois.edu/people/profiles/faranak-miraftab/ and her CV .