Cultivating connections and exploring intellectually stimulating career options outside the university is not always easy. Yet, listening and talking to people who have pursued a career away from research and education is a crucial catalyst for figuring out where your career path might take you next. The Urban Work webinar series will give the floor to urban experts and workers from across the world and from different fields in order to identify, appreciate and support access to meaningful urban work opportunities beyond academia for urban studies graduates. Each webinar will revolve around the careers of one or more speakers, allowing for an informal discussion on their own career choices and paths taken as well as a critical but concrete reflection on urban work opportunities and labour markets in different cities.
For our third webinar in the Urban Work series, we have invited the following two speakers:
Nazima Kadir is an anthropologist with a PhD from Yale with over 20 years of experience conducting and applying anthropological research. Her book The Autonomous Life, published by Manchester University Press, was based on 3.5 years of living and working in a squatters community in Amsterdam and shortlisted for the BBC Ethnography award. It was featured on Radio 4 and Wired magazine.
Early in her career, Nazima worked as an investigator of police misconduct in New York City. She then earned a Fulbright scholarship, interviewing Asian domestic workers in Cyprus. After teaching English language in Uruguay, she went to graduate school. In academia, her fieldwork and writing were funded by grants and fellowships, including the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. In the private sector, Nazima has been leading insights and exploratory research capabilities within innovation and design. Projects range from brand strategy, service design, healthcare innovation, and new product development. Sectors include Hotels/Hospitality, Online Retail, Consumer Electronics, Medical Devices, Health/ Wellness, FMCG, Home Entertainment/Gaming, Automotive, Telecommunications, Employee Services, and Financial Services. She's worked with clients such as Marriott, Amazon, Pepsi, LG, P&G, Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi, Hewlett Packard, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Sodexo, and Ford.
Ralf Brand is a Geographer with a PhD in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked as consultant for the Sustainable Performance Group and advised a number of municipalities on their Local Agenda 21 processes. As lecturer at Queen's University Belfast and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester he conducted research and taught about the “co-evolution” between technical and social change towards more cohesive, more just and more sustainable cities. Since 2013 he deploys this approach at Rupprecht Consult in Cologne, Germany, where he leads the “People-Focused Mobility Solutions” team. Ralf developed and /or coordinated various projects, mostly EU-funded applied research projects (e.g. SUMI, SUNRISE, ReVeAL, INCLUSION) on various aspects of more human- and more environmentally-friendly mobility systems.
Registration
The webinar will take place on Monday 8 March 3-5 pm CET via Zoom. Please register by following this link.
The Urban Work webinar series is jointly organised by the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and the Urban Knowledge Collective.