The motivations at the heart of all of my work might be explained like this: Understood collectively and aggregated together, the everyday actions of ordinary people help to produce and reproduce enduring patterns that are much larger than individuals—things like norms, values, ways of being together and inhabiting space, and ways of organizing and directing labor and value; many of the seemingly massive and indelible “structures” that define the contemporary world. Regardless of whether people recognize this or think about it in these terms, their lives and actions play a role in making and remaking such patterns. This happens under conditions inherited from the past and often not of people’s choosing, but also in ways that are often up for grabs and improvised in the present. Therein lie possibilities for better and for worse patterns to emerge. Indeed, in these terms it’s possible to understand how ordinary people and everyday actions can and often do—knowingly or unwittingly—play a part in (re)producing structural inequity, harmful forms of dominance, and crisis. But in these same terms, the generative power of ordinary life and common action might also be recognized, questioned, reorganized, and redirected in critical and (potentially!) radically transformative ways. Outcomes one way or another are never total, and can never be taken for granted—they are only ever tenuously achieved, and must be constantly labored for and reproduced.

So how might people cultivate forms of thinking, knowing, relating, inhabiting, and acting that work against forms of socially produced harm, precarity, and inequity while moving towards different horizons of liberatory transformation? I approach this in terms of a need to cultivate critical social or practical ‘infrastructures’—contentious ways of feeling, making sense, thinking, relating, practicing, and acting that can world different futures in place. And for me, experimentation with different ways of being and thinking in-common—especially in and through space and place—seem like exciting opportunities to learn and buoy movement toward such transformations and futures. These are central themes within all of my work (scattershot as it may seem!). They recur in my research on urban space and contemporary city life—in contexts of urban development and urban political economy, civic activism, gentrification, and spatialized inequality, for example—and also infuse my sensibilities around collaboration and collective experimentation, teaching, and institutional work.