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This course offers conceptual and methodological training for students to become multisensory-aware urban anthropologists. Through reading and hands-on workshops–combining anthropological debates on the senses, sensoriality, and sensing with a series of experiential walks and other types of engagements–, we will search to understand how a city feels. The course, then, wishes to immerse students in an exploration of what role our embodied senses play in order to be able to live in and thrive on its streets, squares, and parks. For this, students will become sensitized to the understanding that a sensible approach for any urban anthropologist needs to start from expanding the reach of what the sensory means, in order to capture the complex environments that our cities constitute. Hence learning to recognize the variegated human and more-than-human inhabitants that make of our cities much more complex sentient ecologies: not only providing interesting interfaces to feel ‘differently’ – if only we paid close attention! –, but also transforming and re-mediating how we feel, interfering with the conventional understandings of our everyday worlds. In changing our approach for a multisensory one, then, we get a different feel of the cities we inhabit, realizing that they are far less common urban worlds than we might have originally thought. Thus, our training and explorations will not only search to foreground our own experiential engagement as ethnographers of the urban, but will search to unfold methods to approach the not-so-easy to describe, and sometimes unfathomable sentient worlds of a wide variety of human and animal bodies we live with, as well as to understand our relations with not-so-inert urban materials (the city’s material components, as well as gases or pollution, or responsive digital sensors). Learning to understand, in a nutshell, how city’s also feel in a wide variety of ways. Drawing inspiration from a series of artistic and activist explorations into the sensory awareness of cities, the main outcome of the course would be to collaboratively produce a toolkit for the urban appreciation of the sentient city in all its vastness, helping to equip others to venture into the many complexities of urban sensing practices. |
