Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes is teaching Comparative Urban Policy at Columbia University SIPA. Her research in urban policy develops a paradigm called ruptured urbanisms which analyzes across a range of case studies forms of intervention in the built environment which result in social polarization and group segregation, often exacerbated by exogenous shocks such as climate change or internal sources of social and political conflict.

Filipcevic Cordes holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning, with concentrations in Sociology and Political Science, from Columbia University. She was a Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College and a Research Associate to the late Dr. Benjamin Barber at Urban Consortium, Fordham University, New York. She is the author of New York in Cinematic Imagination: The Agitated City [Routledge: London and New York, July 2020], which was shortlisted during deliberation for the 2021 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award. In May 2022, Filipcevic Cordes received a Faculty Teaching Excellence Award from John Jay College, Sociology Department, where she taught from 2017 to 2021.

Filipcevic Cordes is currently completing a forthcoming participant-observation and theoretical research study on The Politics of Sanctuary. This research argues for a more inclusive political life of expanded urban citizenship for undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees through the active mechanisms of sanctuary practice.

Filipcevic Cordes has published on cosmopolitanism and the politics of recognition in Critical Issues in Justice and Politics, on planning interventions, social reform, and anti-urban bias in Planning Practice and Research, and on the right to the city and right to sanctuary in the Sustainable Development Goals book series entitled "Transitioning to Reduced Inequalities" (eds. Sabin Bieri and Christoph Bader). She has also written on urban inequality and the limits of city sovereignty in Urban Science, on the criminalization of immigrants and sanctuary practices in the Journal of Urban Affairs, and on the politics of sanctuary cities in Critical Planning Journal. Filipcevic Cordes furthermore writes at the intersection of film and urban history and theory: the metropolitan discourses in/of Manhatta (1921) in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, film noir and the city in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, landscapes and representations of warfare in Jean-Luc Godard's films in Jump Cut, New York films of the Great Depression in Culture, Theory and Critique, race and urban space in Helen Levitt's and James Agee's Harlem documentaries in Columbia Journal of American Studies, landscapes and representations of nationalism in Milcho Manchevski's films in Film Criticism, and migration in film in Cineaste.

Before undertaking doctoral research, Filipcevic Cordes worked at the Pratt Center for Community and Environmental Development in Brooklyn, contributing to the "Community Development Corporations: Oral History" project and co-writing with Ron Shiffman the "Greenpoint 197-a Plan," which won the William H. Whyte Award for Creativity in Planning.

Education

• PhD, Columbia University
• M Phil., Columbia University
• MS, Pratt Institute
• MA, McGill University
• BA, Belgrade, Faculty of Dramatic Arts

Honors and Awards

• Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, John Jay College, Sociology, May 2022
• New York in Cinematic Imagination: The Agitated City [Routledge: London and New York, July 2020] was shortlisted during deliberation for the 2021 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award (September 2021)
• Urban Consortium, Fordham University, New York, Research Associate (Dr. Benjamin Barber), Urban Consortium Distinguished Senior Fellow, December 2016 – April 2017
• Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), Columbia University, New York, Visiting Fellow, May - December 2016
• Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, 2010-2011
• Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University, New York, Research Associate (for Prof. Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology), Summer 2009
• Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), Columbia University, New York, Graduate Fellow, Fall 2003 - Summer 2005
• Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, Essex, United Kingdom, Dissertation Research Award, 2003 - 2004
• School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, Teaching Assistant (Prof. David N. Dinkins (former NYC Mayor), January 2003 - May 2004
• Open Society Institute, New York, Global Fellowship, Fall 2001 - Spring 2002 and Supplementary Fellowship Grant, Fall 1994 - Spring 1995
• American Political Science Association, Best Paper in Urban Politics Award, September 2001
• Public Policy Consortium Fellow, Columbia University, New York, Fall 1999 - Spring 2000
• Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA, Dissertation Award, Summer - Fall 1999
• American Planning Association Robert C. Weinberg Award, May 1999
• Co-written with Ron Shiffman, “Greenpoint 197-a Plan,” a comprehensive, participatory community-based plan for Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York  -- Collective Project Award: American Planning Association William H. Whyte Award for Creativity in Planning, Spring 2002
• USCIS Alien of Extraordinary Ability, August 2009