Baumer Lecture Series, Faranak Miraftab

In this presentation, recognizing the darkness of this historical moment, I stress the potential for imagining and building the alternative—a new world, a new pedagogy, a new planning. Building on prior research and reflection on my collaborative work, I extend an invitation to dare to imagine beyond the current patriarchal-racial-capitalism and its profit-centered “bully urbanism,” toward humane urbanisms that center on life and life making. For this, an anti-colonial feminist lens helps us register and learn from the “termite work” of women in the oppressed communities around the world, from Palestine to Iran, from Brazil to South Africa and the U.S.

Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with courtesy appointments at the departments of Gender and Women Studies and Geography. She is an urban scholar of globalization whose work bridges sociology, geography, planning, and feminist studies. Using ethnographic methodology, she explores how marginalized groups mobilize for housing, infrastructure, and urban justice across the globe. 

In 2025 she received the ACSP’s Distinguished Educator Award. Her book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking (2015), which carefully reveals transnational ties of care and displacement linking communities from Mexico and Togo to the U.S. Rustbelt, received multiple awards including ACSP’s Davidoff book award and ASA’s Global & Transnational Sociology section book award. Using an anti-colonial feminist lens her work uncovers the everyday practices of resistance by marginalized communities at their center the work of women she calls “termite work” that while often un-noticed, they bring down oppressive structures of patriarchal-racial-capitalism. A native of Iran, she has conducted research in Latin America, Africa, and North America.

This event is approved for AICP CM credit. To claim your CM credits, log in to your My APA account on the APA website and enter the event into your online CM event log.

This event is part of the Autumn 2026 Baumer Lecture Series.

The Baumer Lecture Series invites prominent researchers and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning to present their work and to engage subjects both topical and enduring.