This article explores people's narratives about changing shipyard work in East Germany since 1989. The shipyard serves as a central place where loss, emotions and memory condense. Using oral history interviews with former workers, it delves into their experiences and emotions about (the fear of) losing their jobs. This sheds light on how transformations affect people emotionally, highlighting oral history's role in capturing personal experiences in geographic research.

Critical geographers in recent years became interested incidents of failure, disruption and glitches in digital technologies. While we sympathize with the basic assumptions of this discussion this paper proposes an opposing perspective. Using the example of Internet infrastructures, we focus on the work of preventing glitches and maintanance. We are particularly interested in the production of resilience the rationalities of redundancy and addressing latency.

This paper argues that varied perspectives on the multiple crises from the Global South and Global East are underrepresented in international urban studies publishing. In these regions, the crisis is exacerbated by the relative lack of data addressing urban issues. This absence underlines the importance of the international publishing system but justifies urgency to engage with a wider range of perspectives while also pointing towards a need to support local publishing structures.

In this forum contribution, I seek to reflect on conceptions of our current times of crises, engaging with reparatory-justice perspectives. These perspectives can add a strong sense of historical depth and a sense of entanglement between the global and the local. In alignment with Gurminder Bhambra's (2022) call for reparatory social science, I advocate for reparatory approaches in urban geography. 

In this intervention we ask, “what counts as crisis?” We query the adeptness of Eurocentric epistemologies that conceptualize crises through rupture. We turn to a framing of crisis that builds on continuity, honing in on the everyday violence that women experience. Our research in Cochabamba, Delhi, Georgetown, Ibadan, Ramallah, and Shanghai shows that one in every two women participants had experienced intimate partner violence. We also ask what crises mean for the methodologies we employ.

What could urban geographers continue to learn and unlearn from critical utopianism and emancipatory futurities? This contribution seeks to recover transformative academic practices and work towards didactics of speculative estrangement. Specifically, I propose to draw on science and speculative fiction literature to support the revision of established geographical imaginations and epistemologies in a higher-education context.