| Kommentar |
What can urban anthropology tell and do? This course is designed precisely to respond and deal with this question and, on the way, disrupt and undo the project of modern urbanisms, which cover various empirical practices of city-making and everyday city-lives. What is more, it will be an interesting course because: (i) it draws insights from disciplines and schools of thought beyond anthropology (among them: Actor-Network Theory, anthropology of infrastructures, anthropology at home, and multispecies ethnography); (ii) you will learn to interpolate, to try out analytical operations, using what you learn as a springboard; and (iii) you can take away and bring it back home and experiment with matters beyond the city proper.
You will problematize and partake and position yourself playfully and artfully in anthropology of urbanisms, step-by-step. The key debate in urban studies, between critical- and assemblage urbanism in the late 2000s, will set the scene as the first introductory session of this course. After that, this course will proceed in two subsequent parts. In the first part, telling, for six sessions, you will learn about three themes: infrastructure, nature at home, and planning. Once you are more at home with the theoretical foundations and conceptual languages, in the second part, doing, for another six sessions, we will explore three up-to-date cases—platform, Do-It-Yourself, and epidemic urbanism—wherein each second session of each case you will do a group presentation. This group presentation will be handy because you can use the material for writing the essay for the final exam.
Some illustrations of how each session will unfold. Before each session, you will read the two mandatory texts, plus one supplementary text at home. The more you read beforehand, of course, the more you can improvise in the class and recreate a vibrant group discussion. We will begin each session with a reading of each paper's abstract or summary for ten minutes. After that, I will talk about the specific theme for approximately thirty minutes. You will then make a group of two or three afterward and have a group discussion for fifteen minutes in break-out groups either in Zoom or Wonder. In the end, you will reflect upon the break-out group discussion results for the next twenty minutes in which one of you and I will moderate.
Bei Interesse lassen sich die Module 7a/b mit dem Seminar verbinden. Bitte dafür Kontakt mit der Lehrenden aufnehmen. |
| Literatur |
Introduction
Farías, I. (2009). Introduction: decentering the object of urban studies. In I. Farías & T.
Bender (Eds.), Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies
(pp. 1-24). London: Routledge.
Telling
I. Infrastructure
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked
Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London, New York:
Routledge. Chapter 2.
Anand, N. (2011). Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai. Cultural
Anthropology, 26(4), 542-564.
II. Nature-culture
van Dooren, Thom and Rose, Deborah Bird (2012) Storied-places in a multispecies city.
HUMaNIMALIA 3(2): 1-27
Kelly, A and Lezaun, J. (2014) Urban mosquitoes, situational publics, and the pursuit of
interspecies separation in Dar es Salaam, American Ethnologist, 41, 2, pp. 368-383.
III. Planning
Perez Fernández, F. (2016) “Excavating Legal Landscapes: Juridical Archaeology and the
Politics of Bureaucratic Materiality in Bogotá, Colombia.” Cultural Anthropology, 30(2):
215-243.
Gandolfo, D. (2013) “Formless: A Day at Lima’s Office of Formalization.” Cultural
Anthropology 28(2): 278–98
Doing
I. Digital/platform urbanism
Farías, I., & Widmer, S. (2017), Ordinary Smart Cities. How Calculated Users, Proffesional
Citizens, Technology Companies and City Administrations Engage in a More-than-digital
Politics. Technoscienza, 8(2), 43-60.
II. DIY urbanism
Corsín, Alberto (2013). The Right to Infrastructure: A Prototype of Open Source
Urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 342-362.
Caldeira, T., & Holston, J. (2015). Participatory urban planning in Brazil. Urban Studies,
52(11), 2001-2017.
III. Epidemic urbanism
Wolf, M. (2016), Rethinking Urban Epidemiology: Natures, Networks and Materialities. Int
J Urban Regional, 40: 958-982.
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