Tue
24
Mar
Seminars and Conferences
Making the case for hustle studies: Thinking with Nairobi | Tatiana Thieme
In this talk, Tatiana Thieme will discuss her recently published book Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
In Nairobi, “hustle” operates as both a narrative and an urban practice. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic engagement, Hustle Urbanism centres youth logics, perspectives, and inventive strategies for resisting the legacies of colonial violence and uneven urban development, while carving out opportunity spaces for themselves and their peers. Cautioning against fetishising hustle as social and economic uplift, the book advances a pluriversal urban theorisation that thinks with vernacular self-narrations oflife, labour, and learning the city.
Tatiana Thieme is Associate Professor of Geography at University College London. Drawing on longitudinal, multisituated, and patchwork ethnographic research, her work explores hustle economies, repair ecologies, and geographies of migration in cities shaped by continuities of coloniality, diasporic encounters, and city-making from below. She is the author of Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
To participate in person or online, you must register at this link.
The meeting is part of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series Spring 2026.
The Beyond Inhabitation Lab provides an infrastructure to facilitate a process of collective study around the shifting terrain and politics of inhabitation globally, and is directed by Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone.
More info Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series Spring 2026 at link Events – Beyond Inhabitation.
In Nairobi, “hustle” operates as both a narrative and an urban practice. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic engagement, Hustle Urbanism centres youth logics, perspectives, and inventive strategies for resisting the legacies of colonial violence and uneven urban development, while carving out opportunity spaces for themselves and their peers. Cautioning against fetishising hustle as social and economic uplift, the book advances a pluriversal urban theorisation that thinks with vernacular self-narrations oflife, labour, and learning the city.
Tatiana Thieme is Associate Professor of Geography at University College London. Drawing on longitudinal, multisituated, and patchwork ethnographic research, her work explores hustle economies, repair ecologies, and geographies of migration in cities shaped by continuities of coloniality, diasporic encounters, and city-making from below. She is the author of Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
To participate in person or online, you must register at this link.
The meeting is part of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series Spring 2026.
The Beyond Inhabitation Lab provides an infrastructure to facilitate a process of collective study around the shifting terrain and politics of inhabitation globally, and is directed by Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone.
More info Beyond Inhabitation Lab seminar series Spring 2026 at link Events – Beyond Inhabitation.