Skip to main content Skip to local navigation
The City Institute at York University (CITY)
Home » CITY Institute Graduate Student Symposium

CITY Institute Graduate Student Symposium

As part of the effort to facilitate conversation and knowledge exchange and to showcase the range of current urban research undertaken by York students, CITY launched its inaugural graduate student conference in 2024. With 'cities' at the centre, the interdisciplinary conference fosters critical dialogue and analysis around a central theme. Participants will gain communication skills through presentation delivery and answering live questions as well as being able to network with other researchers. The conference will also be an opportunity for researchers to learn from one other and engage in knowledge exchange and dissemination, as well as contribute to the academic community at York and beyond. 

We are pleased to invite you to the CITY Institute’s upcoming graduate student symposium, "The City in the Age of the Polycrisis," to be held on February 27, 2026, at York University. The general theme of this interdisciplinary event is the “polycrisis”, that is, a crisis predicated on the convergence of social, cultural, environmental, economic and political upheavals.  With the emergence of the polycrisis, cities around the world today, both in the Global South and Global North, are contending with a set of unprecedented and particularly vexing challenges. The nature of these challenges are varied and cut across all sectors in ways that directly and/or indirectly affect many aspects of the contemporary city. 

This graduate student conference will bring into dialogue and discussion the many different dimensions of the polycrisis and the implications these have for cities based on (but not limited to), the following sorts of guiding questions:

  • How can we approach and analyze the polycrisis? 
  • How do we identify and critically analyze the impacts and effects of the polycrisis on different aspects of the urban, including: the political, cultural, social, and environmental? 
  • What are some of the responses, actions and policies that cities can adopt to address different aspects of the polycrisis? 
  • What does the polycrisis mean for the future of the city – politically, socially, economically, culturally?
  • How does the polycrisis impact every day urban life and lived experiences in the city?

View the symposium page here.

This conference will foster dialogue on how cities and people resist, adapt, and repair in response to these challenges. The theme, "Crises, Control, and Repair," encourages critical reflections on the root causes of urban breakdowns and the mechanisms of control that arise in times of instability. It also invites inquiry into the collective and creative processes of repair, care, and rebuilding that emerge in the wake of crises. We welcome submissions from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to sociology, geography, political science, public policy, health, cultural studies, anthropology, urban planning, and environmental studies.

Key Themes and Topics of 2024:

  1. Urban Infrastructure and Systemic Failure: How do physical infrastructures—such as housing, transportation, water, energy, and telecommunications—break down materially and figuratively? What are the political, social, and economic implications of such failures? How are these breakdowns managed and repaired? How do people interact with these failures in their every day?
  2. Social and Political Crises in Cities: How do urban populations experience and respond to social unrest, public health crises, or governance failures? What role do state and non-state actors play in controlling or exacerbating urban crises?
  3. Governance and the Politics of Control: How do mechanisms of control emerge in response to urban breakdowns? How are crises used to justify increased surveillance, militarization, or authoritarian measures in urban spaces?
  4. Care, Repair and Rebuilding: How do cities and communities rebuild during and after periods of crisis? What are the forms of resistance, care and resilience that emerge in post-crisis scenarios, and how do they reshape urban environments?
  5. Global Perspectives on Urban Breakdowns: How do urban crises manifest differently across global contexts? What can we learn from comparative studies or research across cities in the Global North, South and East?

View the 2024 conference page here.