Navigating Gendered Landscapes through Sensorial Methods: Gendered Monuments in Ankara and Abu Dhabi

This paper explores the intersection of critical geography, sensorial, and auto-ethnographic methods, focusing on gendered monuments in public spaces in Ankara and Abu Dhabi. Recognizing that methods actively shape and participate in the construction of realities, as articulated by Law (2004), this paper critically examines my role as a researcher engaging with the researched, blurring the traditional boundaries between researcher and researched, ontology and epistemology.

Through ethnographic exercises around the public monuments in Güven Park (Ankara) and Mamsha Al Khair (Abu Dhabi), I use mapping and soundscapes as narrative tools to delve into the experiences of women—through my own embodied experience of these spaces—and to understand the role of gendered monuments within capital cities. Central to this inquiry is an examination of how gendered symbols and iconographies of power influence women’s perceptions of their place in urban environments and their use of the public spaces the monuments are part of.

Furthermore, this presentation reimagines mapping and soundscapes not merely as tools for spatial representation but as transformative spaces that modulate the spatio-temporal continuum of urban landscapes. I employ these alternative methods to redefine “the field,” using visual and auditory components to reflect on the construction of urban experience. This relational approach moves ethnographic methods beyond data gathering, aligning them with onto-epistemological frameworks that render the familiar strange (drawing on Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti, 2013, p. 895). Here, the researcher and researched are situated in a state of becoming through encounters with difference (Behar, 1996; Borer, 2010).

References:

• Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge.
• Behar, R. (1996). The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Beacon Press.
• Borer, M.I. (2010). ‘From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: Time, Place, and Urban Redevelopment’, Symbolic Interaction, 33(1), pp. 96-114.