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- Convenors:
-
Carolina Maurity Frossard
(University of Amsterdam)
Alana Osbourne (Radboud University)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
How can ethnographies that foreground the affective and sensorial dimensions of urban space contribute to understandings of violence and (in)security in the city? This panel welcomes papers dedicated to the theoretical, methodological and political aspects of researching urban affects and sensoria.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, the social sciences and humanities have paid increased attention to the sensorial and affective dimensions of their research fields and field sites, engendering what has been phrased an 'affective turn'. For urban anthropologists and geographers, affect, emotions and the senses have served as lenses through which to investigate city dwellers' embodied experiences of urban environs and politics. This panel explores the potentialities of the affective realm, broadly understood, as an entry point into urban violence and the reactions it engenders. How can we attune our ethnographic encounters to the affective and sensorial manifestations of violence and (in)security in the city? And how can this affective attunement add to how we understand and analyse the spatial thresholds and material signifiers of urban violence? This panel is in conversation with recent literature that has explored affects and emotions in order to connect (in)security and (urban) space. Fear, for example, has long been evoked as a key element in the emergence of defensive architecture and urban design aimed at excluding dangerous 'Others'. Similarly, the notion of 'security atmosphere' (as proposed by geographer Peter Adey) has been mobilized to capture how bodies are attuned to safety as affect through the material and sensorial properties of the spaces they inhabit and move through. This panel welcomes contributions that focus on sharpening existing theoretical approaches to the questions posed above, as well as those interested in reflecting on the methodological and political implications of researching the urban through its affective and sensorial atmospheres.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will address some questions concerning the possibility of grasping structural violence through our senses, by comparing two cities - Guatemala City and Milan - connected by a personal experience and the exploration of a peculiar research interest, i.e. violence and urban space.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will address the possibility of grasping structural violence through our senses. It will do so by comparing two cities - Guatemala City and Milan - connected by a personal experience and the exploration of a peculiar research interest. The personal experience is related to my last two fieldworks, the research interest is about violence and urban space. While moving around some marginalized areas of Guatemala City meant to deal with a sense of insecurity directly connected to high levels of "social violence", in the neighbourhood of social housing of Milan where I have been carrying out my research since 2017, I have always felt "safe". However, both cities showed specific forms of structural violence that influence the organization of their urban fabric. Many questions arise from this consideration: along the continuum of violence, does everyday experience of social violence prevent ethnographers from understanding other violent dynamics essential to interpret contemporary cities? Is structural violence interpretable through the ethnographic practice, or do ethnographers always need to refer to non-ethnographic dimensions in order to understand any violent manifestation? My hypothesis concerns the opportunity of a multi-scalar approach that considers ethnography and its affective realm as an essential tool to investigate dwellers' experiences of violence and insecurity within urban spaces.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about fear of terrorism in the urban space. Focusing on the sensorial and affective aspects of urban space and life, the paper explores the connection between fear of terrorism and material and social settings as well as memories of previous terrorist attacks in the urban environment.
Paper long abstract:
"I was standing at Nørreport station and the train was delayed, which meant that more and more people came to the platform. The station is below ground and it was rush hour, so we stood there like sardines in a tin. In the end I decided to take the car, because I didn't want to risk standing there any longer." In this way, a Danish woman describes how she in certain situations becomes afraid that a terrorist attack will happen in Copenhagen. Similarly, citizens in Oslo and Paris describe how they from time to time get scared of terrorism as part of their daily lives in the European capitals. Often just for a few seconds, before they think of something else and life goes on.
This paper is about fear of terrorism in the urban space. The paper argues that urban dwellers in Copenhagen, Oslo, and Paris sense situations of potential danger as part of their everyday movement through the urban landscape, which evoke flashes of fear. Fear of terrorism is therefore not constant but momentarily sparked off by specific situations. Focusing on sensorial and affective aspects of urban space and life, this paper explores the connection between fear of terrorism and material and social settings as well as memories of previous terrorist attacks in the urban environment. The paper is based on a year of fieldwork in Copenhagen, Oslo, and Paris, including street level observations and informal conversation as well as interviews in the homes of local citizens.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the intersection of bodies and dangerous cityscapes by taking a more-than-human perspective to the sensing of urban danger. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I focus on the role of Kingston's many security dogs in mediating between humans and the urban environment.
Paper long abstract:
In urban contexts with high levels of violent crime, fear plays a large role in residents' experience of the city. This fear of urban violence is mediated through discourse, for instance through regular news reports of homicides and through the everyday talk of crime. However, fear is also an embodied experience that is connected to sensory perception and atmospheric attunement, including the ability to recognize sights and sounds that mark a place as dangerous. This paper explores the intersection of bodies and dangerous cityscapes by taking a more-than-human perspective to this sensing of urban danger. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I focus on the role of Kingston's many security dogs in mediating between humans and the urban environment. How do those who live and work in the city construct and experience its threats through interspecies sociality with security dogs? What different embodied relations to the city do dogs enable for security professionals such as private security guards, and for residents positioned differently in the urban hierarchy? Can we understand dogs as not just a companion species, but a prosthetic species, whose olfactory and auditory acuity extends humans' capacity to sense the city and its dangers? I suggest that attending to the entanglement of both human and non-human animal bodies with the urban environment can provide new insights into everyday perception, construction and negotiation of fearful cityscapes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper listens into the sonopolitics that evolve around funk proibidão, a popular music genre in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Sounds are heard differently depending on context and power structures. I argue that tuning into sound is central to understand the experience of violence.
Paper long abstract:
When scrutinizing violence in terms of the senses, sounds are omnipresent and often more pervasive than the visual. Sounds perpetrate the walls of houses and enter the body through the ears. Furthermore, the sound waves have an almost tactile impact on the body itself. Visually, violent acts are seen by direct victims, perpetrators and passers-by, but aurally gunshots and screams are heard by the whole neighborhood, and often by people beyond that neighborhood through the reproduction of sound through WhatsApp, Facebook or in music. Also, the profound impact sound has on how we experience a space shows us that zooming into (or rather tuning into) aural understandings of violence is needed to understand the daily life realities of urban centers in Latin America.
In the case of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, inhabitants experience sounds of violence almost daily. What influence do these sounds have on their experience of their neighborhoods? Moreover, the ideas about violent sounds, for example gunshots coming from the police or drug traffickers, tell us about the legitimacy and authority of these different actors. As an example in this paper I will draw on funk proibidão, a music type that incorporates the soundscape of the favela into its sounds. From this case study, we can understand that sounds gain their meaning in context. Furthermore it advocates for the inclusion of sensorial research by ethnographers of violence.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the commodification of diversity in two multicultural neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and Rome, and how it was used by both institutional and white, civil-society actors as a tool to develop a local tourism industry and further neoliberal urban reforms leading to gentrification.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the commodification of diversity in two so-called multicultural neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and Rome, and how it was used by both institutional and white, civil-society actors as a tool to develop a local tourism industry and thus further neoliberal urban reforms leading to rampant gentrification. These neighbourhoods have historically been home to sizeable Muslim immigrant minorities, a thing which won them the reputation of "failed" and criminalised urban spaces in need of physical, commercial, and demographic restructuration. Recent efforts to regenerate these areas have explicitly targeted local manifestations of cultural difference - "ethnic" shops in Amsterdam, and Bangladeshi basement mosques in Rome - with the explicit goal of commodifying them as heritage to be sold to white, middle-class visitors during guided urban tours. While allegedly fostering intercultural dialogue and celebrating multicultural diversity, these tours operate a spectacle of cultural difference and provide visitors with curated 'multicultural atmospheres' (Ricatti&Bartoloni 2015) that reduce racialised others to sensuous objects for white consumption. Such commodification of diversity, I argue, has been functional for the affective resignification of the two neighbourhoods as sites of pleasure and consumption for white visitors and consumers. I conclude that these tours can be viewed as violent tools of control of non-white bodies and spaces that (re)confirm the white subject as the prime occupier of space and aesthetic organising principle of the neighbourhoods' landscape, and raise questions about the role of urban sensory politics in the revaluation of multicultural neighbourhoods like the Indische Buurt and Tor Pignattara.