The City Collaboratory at the University of Neuchâtel, supported by the University of Zurich, hosted a joint launch for two powerful new books that rethink how we understand cities, borders, conflict, and belonging: Dr. Jacob Geuder’s Between Streets and Screens and Dr. Maren Larsen’s Worlding Home (both available open access). Though their empirical settings differ, from Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town to UN peacekeeping camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the event revealed deep resonances in how both authors approach questions of inhabitation, violence, and the politics of visibility. Discussion on the books was led by Dr. Jasnea Sarma and Lucas Lerchs.
Recovering the Processes Behind Video Activism
Geuder’s work, presented in conversation with researcher Lerchs, traces how video activism functions as a claim to the right to the city. For Geuder, activists are not just those who film or upload footage: they include witnesses of urban violence, editors who shape the material, platform infrastructures, and the audiences who respond. His book reconstructs these processes, insisting that video activism is not a single moment of capture but a long-term engagement.
Lerchs, whose own research focuses on ecological reserves and marginalized communities fighting for urban rights, found strong methodological affinities with Geuder’s methods, which he described as “transparent and self-reflective.” He noted how positionality, being present, engaged, and accountable, shapes the knowledge that activism-oriented research can produce. Reading Geuder, Lerchs recognised elements of his own practice: what Geuder calls an “engaged documentary,” grounded in everyday actions and structural, often hidden, forms of violence.
While Geuder’s study shows how social media algorithms promote spectacles of violence, Lerchs works in context is quieter yet no less pervasive.
The theoretical bridge between their work is the “right to the city,” understood through a Lefebvrian lens not merely as a right to access space, but a right to difference, to participation, and to shaping urban futures. For Geuder, video activism becomes a means of linking the street and the screen, making visible the struggles otherwise ignored in mainstream media. Yet he also reflected on how rapidly this landscape is shifting. The authenticity once associated with video evidence is increasingly destabilized by AI-generated images and information warfare – turning his research into a kind of time capsule of the early 2010s smartphone era.
Worlding Home: Camps, Cosmopolitanisms, and Borderworlds
The second half of the evening turned to Maren Larsen’s Worlding Home, with commentary by Jasnea Sarma. At first glance, Sarma noted, her own research on militarised borderlands seemed worlds apart from UN peacekeeping missions in the DRC. Yet what emerged were unexpectedly rich points of connection, especially around the question of how people build forms of home in sites structured by conflict, extraction, and global power inequalities.
Larsen examines the peacekeeping camp in Goma, situated at the edge of North Kivu and historically shaped by layers of displacement, from Belgian colonial violence to Rwandan refugee flows after 1994. The camp is not military nor humanitarian; it is part of a broader urban fabric where boundaries blur between the city and the non-city. Drawing on Jennifer Robinson’s call to theorise from “ordinary” places or the ‘elsewhere’, Larsen shows how camps can reveal alternative ways of living, dwelling, and relating.
Sarma highlighted how Larsen’s work illuminates a striking form of Global South–to–Global South cosmopolitanism. Peacekeepers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere navigate unfamiliar spaces that nonetheless echo aspects of their home contexts. Yet this sense of familiarity often comes at someone else’s expense: when some actors “feel at home,” others – for example, women – are pushed into more precarious spaces. Larsen resists romanticising the notion of home, instead foregrounding its frictions, violences, and unevenness.
Ethnographically, Sarma praised Larsen’s writing for its fluidity and honesty, particularly her reflections on how to build camaraderie with people trained to give scripted answers, and how to study an institution as powerful and contradictory as the UN, which for many peacekeepers is simultaneously an employer, an abstraction, and an “other.”
A Shared Commitment to Engagement
Across both book launches, Ola Söderström noted how a shared set of questions came to the surface: How do researchers balance activism and scholarship? How does long-term engagement shape what becomes visible? Who gets to claim space – whether on a city street or in a peacekeeping camp – and at whose expense? He also posed questions to the authors about where they might go in their future work, and whether they had reached the limits of where their particular theoretical engagements might take them.
The evening demonstrated how different fields, methods, and geographies can come together to illuminate the intertwined politics of violence, visibility, and home. Both books offer deeply grounded insights into how people inhabit worlds marked by conflict and constraint, and how they carve out possibilities for collective futures despite it all. As Söderström noted during his wrap up, there’s much to be learnt from these books and thinking through cities from elsewhere – not just in terms of raw comparison, but in exploring more complicated interrelationships.
We hope you enjoyed this CC double book launch, and we’re happy to see you at the next event. Stay tuned!
