I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content

I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable, but I think it's unfair to take that article as an example of Sokal-style nonsense. As an exercise, here's my translation of what she's saying [supplied in brackets]: This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies [clear enough] and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture [reference to the economic historian Ernst Labrousse's idea of conjuncture, basically a middle-term historical trend on the order of decades rather than centuries]. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents [this is going to be a paper about urban centers in the developing world which were, until recently, largely rural], the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics [cities are complex and hard to figure out]. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy [the different historical points of origins of cities structure how we should think about them, e.g. urban studies of London might not tell us what we need to know about Manilla] and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization [the author basically says, I'm going to be drawing on the works of various French theorists here and I think it's useful.] Likewise the final paragraph, while overwraught, is actually saying something substantive. Basically, "we need to study cities in terms of what they exclude as while as what they include. Many develping world cities were rural zones within living memory of the present, and that agricultural background continues to persist even as they become more urban." Really nothing very objectionable to me there - and I say that as someone who does think there are major problems with obscurantism in academic writing, especially various branches of philosophy and literary studies.