Speakers

Will Straw

Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies in McGill University in Montreal.  He has been Visiting Professor at the Open University (Budapest), the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Belgrade.  

Dr. Straw’s research has come to focus on the ways in which the night-time culture of cities is governed, promoted and represented.  On the one hand, this takes the form of an interest in new policy instruments adopted by cities so as to acknowledge the role of night-time culture within them.  On the other hand, this interest takes him into the study of narrative forms (in the cinema, journalism and fiction) that treat the night as a distinct “territory” of human experience.  Straw maintains a website, theurbannight.com, that tracks developments in night-time urban culture.   

• WordPress
• WordPress
• Twitter

Begoña Aramayona

Begoña holds an International PhD in Social Psychology, obtained with maximum grade at Autonomous University of Madrid in 2019. She explores the field of Urban studies through qualitative methodologies, with special interest on urban nightlife, securitisation, informality, displacement and visual-based methodologies.

She coordinated the project “The Displacement of Informality: Geographies in the city of Madrid” (funded by the Urban Economy Area, Madrid’s City Council, 2018-2019) and she currently leads the project “Geographies of the Nocturnal City: A comparative and policy-oriented research on nocturnal leisure practices of young people in Lisbon, Barcelona and Madrid” (funded by Centre of Young Studies Reina Sofía, 2018-2020).

Her research has been awarded with the 1st prize at II Heritales Sustainable Communities in 2017, organized by ‘UNESCO Chair in Intangible Heritage’ and University of Evora, and the I YERUN Research Mobility Award in 2018. Recently awarded with a post-doc visiting fellowship at De Monfort University (Leicester, UK) in 2020. Based on her desire of disseminating academic outcomes to broader audiences, she has also directed some ethnographic documentaries, such as “Next Stop: La Latina” (2017) and “Carmen: Memorias Vivas del Rastro” (2018).