Cities (re)claimed: dismantling geographies of oppression [Radical Book Fair]

From street layouts to statues, tower blocks to shopping malls, our built environment has a lot to tell us a lot about the political narratives of cities: Who is welcome, who is safe, who is forgotten, who is hidden.

Academics and activists Dan Hicks, Morag Rose and Mason Leaver-Yap discuss the histories and politics of the cities around us, how they shape us and how we shape them.

Diving into built histories of women's rights, art as resistance, legacies of colonialism, class and enslavement, this event will serve as a starting point for us to consider how we want to shape our cities for the future.

-- Our Speakers --

Morag Rose is a walking artist activist and academic. She is founder of the Loiterers Resistance Movement and a senior lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. Her work focuses on public space, regeneration, access, equality, psychogeographies and the power of creative, communal walking.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, cultural memory, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan has authored and edited eight books, and has written for a wide variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph to The Times Literary Supplement, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Architectural Review and The Art Newspaper. Twitter/Instagram: @ProfDanHicks

Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to make publications, events and exhibitions. With Winnie Herbstein, he is the co-editor Slamming Doors: Falling out and fighting back in a housing crisis (Framer Framed / University of Edinburgh, 2025). He is based in Glasgow and currently writing about ruination.

- The Books --

The allure of the city is powerful, but not universally accessible. For many women, it can be exclusionary, exploitative and dangerous. In The Feminist Art of Walking, Morag Rose shows how women can and do claim their place in the public space.

Setting off to explore cities and towns across Britain, she traces local histories and personal stories and attunes herself to the wider resonances of women’s rights amidst alienating capitalist cityscapes. Craving connection and comradeship, she discovers a unique and inclusive approach to walking, celebrating diverse women who transform walking into an art form and act of resistance.

By experiencing the pleasures and pains of pedestrian exploration, she shows us how to reconnect with and become enchanted by our streets.

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Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

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Slamming Doors explores housing struggles, community organising, and reproductive labour in Glasgow, highlighting how we document and share these stories. It reflects ongoing relationships with communities and spaces of solidarity. Writers, academics, and activists were invited to contribute, pairing their texts with archival imagery that has been instrumental in the research of these films.