António Ferraz de Oliveira and Mara Duer reflect on the ‘Contested Political Spaces’ postgraduate conference held at Warwick University last week.

Last Thursday and Friday, a few months of learning-as-you-go intensive teamwork coalesced into a successful conference that made all the effort involved seem more than justified. Over two days, over twenty people gathered in Warwick to present an exciting range of papers around a broad common concern – that of understanding how physical and social space is entangled with political contestation of various kinds and contexts. The panels organized were thematically arranged around the issues of borders and mobility, the play between spatial arrangements and certain subjectivities, productions of territory (materially and semantically), contestation in cities and the struggles which attempted, theoretically or in practice, to establish alternative concepts of space and politics, alternatives relations between place and power. The conference had been set up to ask difficult and daring…