Day-long International Symposium and Book Launch
Understanding Urban Dispossession in the Global South: A Social Justice Perspective
Banglar Pathshala Foundation’s International Symposium & Book Launch
Understanding Urban Dispossession in the Global South
A Social Justice Perspective — a day-long international symposium and book launch built around Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South: A New Debate
Date & Time
Thursday, October 8, 2026
10:00 AM – 7:00 PM
10:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Venue
Nabab Nawab Ali Chowdhury Senate Bhaban
University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh
University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Format
In-Person Symposium
Day-long event
Day-long event
✦ Program
The programme follows the book’s three-part analytical architecture, closing with a roundtable
Note: Keynote speakers, session chairs, and discussants are still being invited and confirmed. Session themes are shared below; full speaker details will be announced as confirmations are received.
| # | Session Theme | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |
Formal Regimes of Dispossession
How law, planning, development projects, and state institutions facilitate urban dispossession
|
Case studies: Honduras, Nigeria, India |
| 2 |
Informal Regimes of Dispossession
Informality, patronage, coercion, criminalization, and everyday governance
|
Case studies: Bangladesh, Brazil, Uganda |
| 3 |
Subaltern Regimes of Dispossession
Urban struggles, resistance, social movements, and alternative urban politics
|
Case studies: Lebanon, Brazil |
| 4 |
Closing Roundtable
Future research directions, urban policy, and democratic urban governance
|
Open discussion |
Guiding Discussion Questions
- How has urban dispossession become a dominant urban (dis)order experienced by much of the urban population in the Global South?
- How do the three regimes of dispossession interact to produce and reproduce urban marginality, injustice, and inequality?
- In what ways do dispossessed communities resist dispossession and reclaim urban space?
- What lessons does the volume offer for understanding Bangladesh’s rapidly urbanizing cities?
- How do the volume’s insights contribute to building democratic, inclusive, and just urban societies?
Featured Publication
Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South: A New Debate
This edited volume develops a theoretical framework — urban regimes of dispossession — for understanding how urban actors organize dispossession and govern the urban dispossessed, how the dispossessed arrange, experience, and resist it, and how urban dispossession contributes to expanding capitalist systems or transforming urban societies in the Global South. Eighteen scholars draw on empirical evidence from seven countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
📖 View the Book on Brill
About the Symposium
Introducing a major new scholarly contribution to Bangladesh’s academic and policy community
The Banglar Pathshala Foundation is pleased to organize a day-long international symposium centered around this book — introducing it to academics, researchers, students, policymakers, urban planners, civil society leaders, and development practitioners in Bangladesh, while fostering critical dialogue on one of the defining questions of contemporary urbanization: how are cities concurrently making development and producing dispossession in the Global South?
Rather than functioning as a conventional book launch, the symposium creates an interdisciplinary forum where scholars from sociology, economics, political science, law, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban planning, and development studies can critically engage with the book’s theoretical innovations and empirical findings, and explore their implications for Bangladesh and the wider Global South.
Rather than functioning as a conventional book launch, the symposium creates an interdisciplinary forum where scholars from sociology, economics, political science, law, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban planning, and development studies can critically engage with the book’s theoretical innovations and empirical findings, and explore their implications for Bangladesh and the wider Global South.
✦ Editors & Contributors
Eighteen scholars bring empirical and theoretical perspectives from across the Global South
LM
Lipon Mondal, PhD
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dhaka
Has published nearly a dozen articles in leading journals, including Urban Studies, the Journal of World-Systems Research, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Research focus: global political economy, world-systems analysis, urban sociology, and labour control.
DB
David L. Brunsma, PhD
Professor of Sociology, Virginia Tech
Founding co-Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and its companion book series at the University of Georgia Press. Studies race, racism, whiteness, and racialization.
Book Contributors
SA
Shapan Adnan
OS
Orlando Alves dos Santos Jr.
FB
Fred Bidandi
TF
Tarcyla Fidalgo Ribeiro
LJ
Lakshmi Jahnavi
MK
Marie Kolling
AK
Ana Maria Kumarasamy
BL
Barbara Lipietz
AM
Adrian Murray
JN
John Nagle
VO
Victor Udemezue Onyebueke
TS
Taísa Sanches
KS
Karen Spring
SS
Susan Spronk
LV
Luanda Vannuchi
JW
Julian Walker
✦ Concept Note & Objectives
Summarized and reorganized from the Concept Note shared for this project
1
Background & Rationale
Rapid urbanization is one of the defining characteristics of the twenty-first century. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities are expanding at unprecedented rates, intensifying struggles over land, housing, livelihoods, infrastructure, and citizenship. While dispossession has long been studied within agrarian political economy, far less attention has gone to how it unfolds specifically in urban contexts.
The book is particularly timely for Bangladesh, where rapid urbanization, informal settlements, climate-induced migration, land acquisition, and housing inequality continue to reshape the social and spatial landscape of Dhaka and other cities.