Paper short abstract:

How does it feel to belong? What can the sensuousness involved in the experience of home and belonging tell us about differentiation mechanisms towards and home-making practices of groups marked by their mobility?

Paper long abstract:

Urban common sensing is constructed and negotiated among different groups. Sensory experience lived as a “background experience” (Ahmed 2007), become disrupted by the arrival and presence of some bodies who are constructed as socially noticeable and subject to scrutiny and discipline. The sensorial stimuli attached to certain corporeal presences come to the front. Particular expressions of it became in dispute, used as input for bordering practices among groups who share a spatial everyday life (Lamont and Molnár 2002). When the presence or activities associated with some migrant groups or ethnic minorities are labelled as “smelly” or “disgusting”, those carrying the labelling are asserting their right to establish what is proper or improper common sensing. This constitutes an attempt to standardize embodied sensing that can lead to exclusionary forms of “sensory citizenship” (Trnka et al. 2013: 1).

Simultaneously, by focusing on those groups whose embodied presence is signalled as “out of place”, a phenomenological approach can also help us to explore the sensuousness involved in the experience of belonging, i.e. becoming part of a place common sensing. To be at home, to belong, is to feel comfortable, to be at ease with one’s surroundings (Ahmed 2007: 158). The sensorial change that migration brings about interrupts bodily inertia by confronting migrants’ bodies with different sensescapes and sensorial regimes. The experience of making oneself at home by migrants and other mobile populations involves the establishment –or conscious maintenance- of a “sensuous habitus” (Wacquant 2005), as a series of ingrained body predispositions and practices.

Paper short abstract:

In my talk I explore how South African activists are demanding fundamental transformations through disrupting normative sensorial realities. By re-arranging common sensory perceptions of particular sociopolitical environments, social inequality and related hegemonic concepts are challenged.

Paper long abstract:

Being conceived of as the „protest capital of the world“ and looking back on a long and rich history of resistance, South Africa is also known to be one of the most unequal countries. Demanding fundamental transformations, some activists are employing strategies of aesthetic activism that disrupt normativity through re-arranging common sensory perceptions of particular sociopolitical environments. These resistances range from smooth and gentle to spectacular and troublesome alterations of sensorial realities. By corporeally engaging their target groups, activists aim to alter hegemonic conceptions and normalised embodiments of common sensations. Their creative interventions and somatic articulations make power configurations tangible and sensorial commons criticisable. Pointing to the fragilities and erosions of unequal lifeworlds, they give way to emergent future visions that are drawn into the present, sentiently palpable in the activist situation. Following Rancière‘s account of perception as being not a passive, but vitally active process of selection, I consider these practices of re-arranging potentialities and patterns of sensation as endued with subversive agency. Drawing on my (yet, due to covid, still digital) ethnographic material, I discuss subtle resistances that fight against discriminating sensory commons.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes relations between the formation of sensory communities and the production of collective identities in far-right milieu, what is possible by the emergence of collective emotions and determine the potential success of the group in the fight for own vision of the future.

Paper long abstract:

Non-political, random signals, such as smells or images, can evoke emotions with political consequences (Isbell, Ottati 2002), influencing the assessment of the situation, behavior, and attitudes. Similarly, sharing certain specific sensory impressions may result in the emergence of emotions that form the framework of a collective identity, including the political one. The display of emotions can be supported by interacting elements of the environment. Sensory stimuli can be used to generate, strengthen certain moods or perpetuate those already existing, which is particularly visible in the case of public demonstrations, but also in communities formed around the so-called musical “identity scene”. New possibilities of expression influences also ways of absorbing specific contents - manipulation of elements affecting the senses can be useful in achieving particular political goals, it is therefore possible to create an emotional resonance in the collective mind by creating an appropriate "scenography". Looking at the areas of creating sensual communities by members of the right-wing movements, with particular emphasis on groups actively operating in Poland, I will try to analyze the relationship of the sensory sphere with the embodiment of emotions and the production of collective identities by enhancing the sense of belonging to a group, and thus contributing to the transformation of this community and in effect –the broader part of society. I will also try to answer the question of how sensory stimuli can contain or provoke references to the basic experiences of the group, thus enhancing the message and overtone of specific contents or symbols.

Paper short abstract:

Cruising spaces are composed of a constellation of embodied sensorial experiences, one that anthropologists and interlocutors share. By accompanying cruising pathways in Basel (CH) the visual sensory apparatus was selected to understand the imagetic construction of race in such liminal places.

Paper long abstract:

The eyes receive the refracted light and the brain process the information transforming electromagnetic waves into images. The light enters the eyes and even in low amounts is perceived by the rods, slowly adapting the "night" vision. A greyscale of some sort, that as a response forges different kinds of spaces. This proposal is based on a work that analyzed the construction of race and racism in space within a Swiss context through electing the visual sensorial apparatus. For such a comparative study three LGBTQIA+ spaces in Basel (CH) were selected, a bar, a park, and a dating mobile app. Here I plan to focus on the park as a place of alternative queer spatialities, one that claims a profuse sensorial understanding. The construction of the park is based on the juxtaposition of shadows and darkness, of what is visible and what is not. Entangling bodies that many times have no clear features, in exploring the visual sense one can hope to comprehend one of the many interlaced sensorial aspects of the spatial constitution. Through space and the different processes of racialization an imperative connection is created, one that responds to a gap in queer migration, and urban studies. What is promoted here - the places or the spaces of interaction, and what they represent, as it relates to blackness and people of color - is in the sense that focusing on visuality allows an understanding of a facet of the racialization process that composes space itself.

Paper short abstract:

Throughout my field research with Candomblé communities, understanding the relationships with non-humans (particularly animals, plants, spirits, forces) meant developing common sensibilities, skills and specific ways of connecting, communicating and feeling with the landscape.

Paper long abstract:

At New Year’s Eve and at the feast of Iemanjá, people follow ritualized ways of entering into the sea, making their offerings to the “Queen of the sea” and determining whether she received the based on the movement of the waves. This is the most common way for Candomblé practitioners to interact with and communicate with the landscape, because divinities, ancestors, spirits, forces and nature manifest themselves and deliver messages through natural phenomena (such as wind, rain, rainbow, clouds and the sun) and animals and plants behaviour. In ritual and daily coexistence, exceptional and common experiences gain meaning and generate emotions and reflections, resulting in a bodily, affective and sensitive experience and mode of existence. An ontological monism establishes a common participation of all beings in the Cosmos to forces, and ritual acts allow them to be directed and accumulated. During my field research with Candomblé practitioners, I learnt that the wind brings intuitions and messages from ancestors and divinities; the appearance of birds signals a message from the Ìyámì, the Ancestral Mothers; plants reveal themselves to the priest in search of them if proper ritual procedure is followed; animals are sacrificed only after they manifest that they accept to offer their life; the presence of butterflies in a burial indicates that the deceased is in his or her way to the spiritual world; the health of plants indicates the balance of energies of the home in which they flourish.