Something which came to our attention via the ever-informative H-Islamart website: "I am looking for a workshop co-director with whom I would like to collaborate and propose a workshop for the 13th Mediterranean Research Meeting to take place in Florence from 21-24 March 2012. My tentative title for the workshop is "Shantytown Chic? Informal Urbanism / Urban Poverty as Cultural Commodity" and I would like to highlight how informal urbanism (as the material urban form urban poverty takes in metropolises of the periphery) is increasingly becoming chic in its popular cultural representations. I would like to focus on Istanbul (on which I work) and one other city from around the Mediterranean. According to the eligibility criteria of the Mediterranean Research Meeting, the workshop co-director should be based in the Middle East, North Africa, or South-Eastern Europe and have a different national background. Mediterranean Research Meeting covers travel and accommodation expenses of workshop directors. The deadline for proposing workshops is 1 March 2011. Please contact me off-list (derya.oezkan@lmu.de) if you work on a similar topic in another Mediterranean city and if you're interested in collaborating. Best, Derya Oezkan"
