While it has been fashionable to think that academic research benefits marginalized groups, representational and methodological choices have often served to produce and legitimize marginalizing practices. The contributions to this volume reveal how authors have sought to engage with and transform their scholarly repertoires into tools of analysis useful for political action. We hope to encourage scholars, activists, and activist-scholars to reflect upon the complementarity of their academic and activist praxis, and to remain committed to unsettling both disciplinary norms and institutional boundaries. This is a task of particular urgency given that scholars are experiencing more pressure than ever before to become the organic intellectuals of the status quo. Table of Contents: Acknowledgements/5 1. Lumpen-City: Discourses of Marginality Marginalizing Discourses Alan Bourke, Tia Dafnos, and Markus Kip/9 Part I Contesting Discourses of Marginality 2. Understanding Obama's Discourse on Urban Poverty David Wilson and Matthew Anderson/43 3. Legitimizing Violence and Segregation: Neoliberal Discourses on Crime and the Criminalization of Urban Poor Populations in Turkey Zeynep Gonen and Deniz Yonucu/75 4. Homelessness as Neoliberal Discourse: Reflections on Research and the Narrowing of Poverty Policy Mark Willson/105 5. Samuel Delany's Lumpen Worlds and the Problem of Representing Marginality Lisa Estreich/131 Part II Contested Representations 6. Indigeneity and the City: Representations, Resistance, and the Right to the City Julie Tomiak/163 7. Palestinian Refugees and Citizens: Trajectories of Group Solidarity and Politics Silvia Pasquetti/193 8. Sexual Violence and the Creation of a Postcolonial Ordinary: Engagements Between Street-Based Sex Workers and the Police in Machala, Ecuador Karen O'Connor/227 9. Making Sense of Failure: Why German Trade Unions Did Not Mobilize Against the Hartz-IV Reforms-Partisan Research in Frankfurt, Germany Markus Kip /257 Part III Methodological Reflexivities 10. Participatory Practices: Contesting Accountability in Academic-Community Research Collaborations Alan Bourke/291 11. Lost in Translation: The Social Relations of an Institutional Ethnography of Activism Kate M. Murray/323 12. Shifting the Gaze "Upwards" Researching the Police as an Institution of Power Tia Dafnos/355 13. Our Streets Practice and Theory of the Ottawa Panhandlers' Union Matthew R. McLennan/389 14. Afterword: A Call to Activist Scholarship/409 (End)Notes/417 Contributors/442

Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human cooperation and negotiation and its product. Understanding urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and capital. This approach challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven, an idea which resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement to the "Right to the City" alliance. However commons exist in a tense relationship with state and market, both of which continually seek to exploit and control them. Initiatives to create "commons" are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the impacts of economic restructuring, while, at the same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is undermined by continuing attempts to commodify them. This volume examines these topics theoretically and empirically through a wide spectrum of international case studies providing perspectives from a variety of cities as diverse as Berlin, Hyderabad and Seoul. A wider discussion of commons in current scientific and activist literature from housing, public space, to urban infrastructure, is explored through the lens of the urban condition.