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The SARS-CoV2 virus or, more colloquially, ‘Corona’ is way more than just a pandemic or a public health issue. As we are currently witnessing, it also entails very specific modes of putting at risk, problematizing and re-assembling life and, most particularly, urban life. This does not only involve biopolitical modes of segmenting and governing populations, sealing zones, blocking transit or intervening the proxemics of social distances in shops and parks, or the emergent dynamics of panic and hoarding. The vastly complex infrastructural and multi-species assemblage of urban life that we tend to call ‘the city’ is also at stake. From the urbanization of domestic spaces due to generalized lockdowns over various concerns about digital broadband connectivity, food provision, informal economies, networks of mutual support, etc. to heightened awareness for surfaces, materials and vectors of the disease, especially animals, life in cities seems to be held in suspension. The challenge, it seems, is to explore this ‘Corona’ moment as a ‘cosmopolitical event.’ That is, a moment shaped by situations of shared perplexity with the sudden intrusion of the unknown and leading to open inquiries and radical problematizations of conventional understandings of who we are, what we do, and the entities with whom we share the urban worlds we inhabit. How could an anthropology interested in the more-than-human nuances of contemporary urbanism be up for this task? This reading-based course seeks to explore, tentatively and with the care and precaution that the situation requires how to engage conceptually and ethnographically with Corona urbanism. Indeed, the current cosmopolitical event entails a deep challenge for our all-too-human ethnographic methods: How can a microscopic phenomenon with huge effects, causing speedy reactions leading to urban paralysis be apprehended? Corona urbanism, hence, invites us to readdress our ethnographic methods so as to become multi-sensory-aware explorers and documenters of these complex multi-species engagements, be it in the newly crowded interior spaces of our homes, or in the cautious social contacts in the outer world. And we plan to do so with an online teaching methodology appropriate for these times: mixing synchronous debates with asynchronous exercises using our digital infrastructures. More specifically, the course will have two main types of sessions: a) those focusing on readings from relevant social/urban theory and current investigative journalism; and b) those used to prepare, execute and discuss two experimental auto-ethnographic exercises. |
