IRS Spring Academy 2026: Urban Scholarship and Activism

The Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) invites doctoral and postdoctoral researchers to its 2026 Spring Academy on "Urban Scholarship and Activism." This interdisciplinary space enables participants to critically examine and discuss their own projects and positionalities in engaged urban research.

About

Urban research today unfolds amid overlapping global crises—ecological breakdown, deepening inequality, the dismantling of democracy, and the reconfiguration of capitalism and governance. In this unsettled terrain, researchers increasingly seek to engage beyond the academy, co-producing knowledge with urban communities, activists, and policy actors.

Activist and transdisciplinary scholarship is no longer peripheral but increasingly central to the international field of urban studies. This reflects a significant institutional shift: an acknowledgement that addressing complex urban challenges requires forms of knowledge that are integrative, plural, and co-produced. However, these developments also introduce new tensions. Calls for "impact" and "societal relevance" can both open and close possibilities for critical and independent research; when engagement becomes an administrative requirement, it risks losing its political and epistemological edge. The turn towards engagement thus raises fundamental questions about the role of scholarship: What does it mean to study the city critically and with others? What are the potentials, contradictions, and limits of urban scholarship that aspires to be both analytical and transformative?

Formats and Venues

Using formats such as keynotes, workshops, and field trips, participants will join lecturers and practitioners to explore the opportunities, challenges, and contradictions of co-producing knowledge across academia, activism, and practice. Together, they will also interrogate how these entanglements reshape both urban politics and the very conditions of academic knowledge production.

The event will take place at the IRS (city of Erkner, near Berlin) and in Berlin.

Target group

Doctoral candidates and early post-doctoral researchers from disciplines such as Sociology, History, Geography, Architecture, Spatial and Environmental Planning, Economics, and others. Participants will be selected according to their academic qualification as well as the suitability of their current project to the topic of the IRS Spring Academy 2026.

Costs

Tuition fees will not be charged, catering is included. Participants are required to organise accommodation and make travel arrangements themselves and to cover these expenses. A limited number of scholarships (up to €500) are available, see Call for Applications.

Speakers and Lecturers

Isabelle Anguelovski, Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability

Derek Hyra, American University Washington D.C.

More to follow.