Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

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City Scents: Food, Sensory Knowledge and Transnationalism in the Urban Everyday. Part I

TG07 Senses and Society (host committee)

Language: English

This session draws on sociological analyses and social theory, together with insights from cultural geography, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, to analyse the significance of food and the senses for re-shaping social imaginaries in 21st century global cities. Through the microcosm of food production, consumption and food sharing, papers will reflect on the power of the senses for mapping meanings of the everyday in urban contexts. 
Framing this analysis is the haunting image of the postmodern/postcolonial city – Sandercock’s “mongrel” city – reflecting complex patterns of migration and displacement; circuits of people and commodities within and beyond its boundaries; negotiations with difference, alienation and inclusivity. 
Our focus is particularly on the movement of people, and their food to, from and within these cities, and on the ways food’s sensory capital allows transnational spaces of identity-formation. At the same time, this acquired transnational sensory knowledge is deeply rooted in the specifics of the everyday – food’s familiar tastes, scents, colours, textures, as well as its challenging unfamiliar ones. 
Questions might include: How do people carry food memories with them – in the nose, on the lips and tongue? Does “dislocation of self from place […] actually heighten one’s [sensory] self-awareness”, as Low and Kalekin-Fishman suggest? How can food’s sensory landscapes facilitate cultural exchange, for example across borders of nation and ethnicity? Above all, what are the practical and analytical implications of sensory transnationalism (along with Nava’s “visceral cosmopolitanism”), for social transformation in global cities – for living, as Ang says, “together-in-difference”? Posters: