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Urban Sensescapes: Sensory Excursions in the City
Language: English
Cities are sites of social structure, diversity, transgression, inequalities and violence. These sites are at the same time settings for diverse and complex social relationships and practices negotiated on an everyday basis. Within these spatial, temporal and socio-economic processes, the senses are central in mediating these relations and organising urban life.
How does the human sensorium influence people’s experience of cities and towns in various temporal milieu and locales such as streets and neighbourhoods? How do the senses delineate the boundaries of selfhood and “others” in the context of cities? How do smell, sound, touch and other sensory modalities produce a moral order which govern access to spaces in the city? How are urban spaces built and designed through the senses? How can we use the lens of sensory politics to talk about cities as sites of deep structural inequalities and asymmetries? How do food, rituals, performance, religion, tradition, consumption, aesthetics, popular culture, and other aspects of the everyday intersect with the senses and urbanity?
We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical deliberations on broad themes critically mapping out the primacy of the senses in cities and urban life which include (but are not limited to) sensory ethnographies in and of the city; the regulation and organisation of everyday life and the senses in different urban settings; sensory order and disorder in cities; cities as sensorial spaces of power, belonging and exclusion; cities, memories and the senses; and urban change and social transformation through the senses.