Workshop

The City through a Social Sciences Lens

This module examines how space actively structures human experience and asks what the built environment can teach us about how people organize social worlds, construct political projects, and plan for the future. Using theoretical orientations from cultural anthropology, geography, sociology, political science, and history, this module will investigate how social structures shape and are shaped by contemporary urban spaces.

  • Understand the different ways in which social and cultural practices are embedded in a variety of built environments.

  • Analyze the relationship between specific built environments, their users and the activities that such environments facilitate and/or hinder.

  • identify how the built environment can contribute to various forms of inequality (including race, class, and gender), as well as how it has been critically repurposed in the interest of resistance and revolution.

  • Research a topic by combining and critically reviewing information from a variety of sources, and carry out primary research using a selection of social science methods (surveys, mapping, participant observation, interviews, oral histories, focus groups, etc.) with supervision.

Instructor

Lamia Bulbul

Dr. Lamia is a social development and gender specialist with over 20 years of academic and professional experience in the area of gender and development in Egypt and the Middle East. Her professional experience has been versatile and prolific in terms of positions held, projects conducted, and countries involved. In addition, she has a strong academic foundation in Sociology and social development. She has a long academic experience as an assistant professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo. During her eight years of teaching, she taught several sociology courses, community development, and development studies courses both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Lamia is a co-founder and partner in Bureau Glayds for urban and architectural studies in Cairo.
Lamia obtained her PhD in Development Studies and planning from University College London (UCL) in 1999, MA in Sociology from the American University in Cairo in 1993.