GKAT Lecture Transitionalist Pragmatism: Re-assembling History, Materiality, and Identity for a better future

Who are we? What are we made of? Who are we known as? While such questions seem personal and irrelevant to public life, pragmatists see them as elemental to moral inquiry that must guide the actions that we take in the future. In this talk, I elaborate on “transitionalist pragmatism”, which radically transforms the role of researcher from a passive documentarist of the truth to an active participant in reconstructing problematic situations. As researchers on the topics of urban studies and social justice, we are often torn between the politics of redistribution, which focuses on the history of unequal material consequences, and the politics of recognition, which celebrates plurality in subjectivity formation—i.e., how each of us makes sense of the world. History, materiality, and identity become the objects of our investigation, in which the accuracy in representing them is pursued as the goal of knowledge production. But what if we embrace contingency as an unescapable reality, or the idea that the stories we tell ourselves about us and our pasts constitute the trajectories we make for our future? I reflect on three urban scenarios that I have studied in Melbourne, Chicago, and Bristol, and discuss how transitionalist pragmatism can help us reframe the politics of urbanisation not as an atemporal research object but as a continually-evolving subject in which we remain as active participants in its making. Learning from how twentieth-century pragmatists interpreted and responded to the harms of modernity and capitalism, I chart out how the twenty-first-century pragmatism can also respond to the historic harms of the mainstream narratives undergirding contemporary urban planning and development. By placing temporal consciousness at the heart of our moral inquiry, the role of vibrant materialities becomes a tangible resource for us in addressing broader structural constraints by way of reconstructing ourselves, our social situations, and our environmental surrounds.