Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the potential of complementary sensory and discursive methods for exploring future-making and imagination in post-socialist urban settings in Bucharest, Romania.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes a set of complementary sensory and discursive methods for a 'thinking aloud with others' experiment.

The methods form the core of a currently developed post-doctoral project proposal to explore what futures are possible and imagined by post-89 generations that live Bucharest, Romania, a city marked by a socialist past. How relevant is that past, how much of it do post-89 generations still sense in the spaces they traverse and live in everyday, and how does that condition how they imagine their futures?

Methods will involve sensory observations of public life, creating sensory maps of the city, sensory elicitation activities (watching tv, listening to the radio, travelling to work, shopping, leisure activities), semi-structured interviews, intergenerational interviews; these methods will be framed by ongoing participant observation with an NGO focused on changing the urban life through raising public awareness and engagement with urban space. I will attend to the sounds, smells, sights, fears, uncertainties, hopes, pleasures, repulsions that make up the urban experience of post-89 generations, to show the tensions and contradictions that arise between how people feel and describe a city with a socialist past and the effects of these tensions on public urban life.

I will discuss the methods in more detail and explore their relationship to the urban settings. I will then invite the audience to take part in short experiments with some of these methods and then reflect, as a group, about their potential for offering new research insights and re-imagining our research practices.