Plenary Speakers

Spaces and Flows: An International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversation Sessions

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Jerry Herron

Jerry Herron is Professor of English and American Studies and Founding Dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University. His publications include two books, Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline, and AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History, as well as a co-edited collection, The Ends of Theory. His essays and critical articles have appeared in Raritan, Social Text, Representations, Georgia Review, SAQ, Harper’s, and Playboy. He has also written for the Detroit News, Hour Detroit, and the MetroTimes. He is currently finishing a book about Americans’ sense of the past: “Living with Detroit: An All Purpose History of American Forgetting.”

Since 1982 he has been a resident of downtown Detroit, a city which has provided him with a great subject to write about and an exceptional place to live.

Roger Keil

Roger Keil is the Director of the City Institute and a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. He researches global suburbanism, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. Among his recent publications are The Global Cities Reader (ed. with Neil Brenner; Routledge, 2006); Networked Disease: Emerging Infections and the Global City (ed. with S.Harris Ali; Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism (with Julie-Anne Boudreau and Douglas Young; UTP 2009); Leviathan Undone? Toward a Political Economy of Scale (ed. with Rianne Mahon, UBC Press 2009) and In-between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in an Age of Vulnerability (edited with Douglas Young and Patricia Burke Wood, Praxis(e) Press).