High Stakes, High Hopes

Decolonizing urban studies demands radically different methods and modes of theory building. Oldfield and her interlocutors have gifted us a brilliant guide that shows this practice, forged through patience, reflexivity, partnership, care, and evocative writing. High Stakes High Hopes is vital reading and a generative pedagogic tool for those passionate about the just city under construction.

-- Edgar Pieterse, founding director of the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town

High Stakes, High Hopes is a powerful praxis, a painstaking archive, a profound pedagogy, and a committed celebration. Sophie Oldfield takes us on a journey with her urban co-theorists to offer a new aesthetic of creation, reflection, and narration in partnership. With Gertie, Mina, Dan, Zaida, Koekie, Suki, Rosemary, Naomi, and many more comrades, she not only shows us an alternative way of doing urban theory but she also inspires us to reimagine the possibilities of humanistic social sciences .

-- Richa Nagar * author of Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability *

The stakes of this powerfully argued and beautifully written book are indeed high. They are about what I call research justice: the making of deep-rooted partnerships as methodology and epistemology such that we can imagine and create spatial justice in highly unequal cities. Drawing on the long arc of such work, Sophie Oldfield shows us a different embodiment of urban theorizing and archiving, one that shifts the knowledge geographies of our disciplines and makes possible a transformative mode of knowledge relations.

-- Ananya Roy, director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Sophie Oldfield answers the call for more relational and embodied theorizing, including (and especially) from cities in the global South. She contributes to the contemporary impulse to reimagine scholarship as a community-engaged practice and to experiment with narrative form.

-- Geraldine Pratt * coauthor of Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present *

High Stakes, High Hopes is a compelling read. The text is very well crafted, with a lively and personal style. But it does not sacrifice critical or analytical rigour in the process. . . . The book's highly original contribution rests on the proposition that urban knowledge, and urban theory, can arise from a collaborative, community-based methodology, including innovative pedagogical practices developed in the context of a long-term, richly rewarding community partnership.

-- Jennifer Robinson * author of Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studi