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- Convenors:
-
Florian Grundmüller
(University of Göttingen)
Noa Miro (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Leipzig university)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Stream:
- Urban studies
- Location:
- G25
- Sessions:
- Saturday 10 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
In this workshop, we will go on an hour-long unguided city tour in Brno in small groups. Using postcards as triggers for exploring the cityscape without our smartphones to guide us. We will collect souvenirs from our journey and share them at a joint meeting, reflecting on our experiences.
Long Abstract:
On the unguided city tour (Sontag 1979) of Brno, groups of 2-3 people will find their way to a designated spot depicted and\or described on postcards without digital aids. During the tour, we gather impressions, sensations, and ephemera as souvenirs and mementos of our journey (for example soundscapes, photos, notes, sketches, found objects, etc.) (Lindner 1990).
In the second part, we'll meet at the selected spot and share our impressions and souvenirs (on souvenirs: see Steward 2007). We will reflect on our experience of moving around the city without relying on our smartphones. How did moments of getting lost engender uncertainties? What kind of uncertainties did we experience? How did they e\affect us? What insights can we take away from "getting lost"?
Nowadays, experiencing space is rather limited since our trips are mostly mediated by technology that guides us through cityscapes. Thus, our workshop aims at re-enacting moments of uncertainty by getting lost on the way (Solnit 2005).
Maximum participants: 12
Participants need notepads, recording devices, and/or a camera.
NO PAPER PROPOSALS: In your contribution, please write 3-10 sentences describing your research interests and motivation to participate in the workshop. Please do not send an abstract for a paper, as this is NOT a panel!
Participants number is limited. We will secure spots based on "first come, first served"
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Saturday 10 June, 2023, -Contribution short abstract:
Looking forward to unexpected experiences and new insights
Contribution long abstract:
I've started to become interested in affect and sensory approaches to material environment, how people experience their lived environment (urban, rural, in contact with nature), and, more broadly, how this relates to issues of well-being, awareness, and care as well as identity, social cohesion, and social justice. I think your workshop and approach offers an interesting experience and new insights - but, to be entirely honest, it also sounds like a fun-thing to do. And I'm both curious to know how it works out and looking forward to unexpected experiences and insights.
Contribution short abstract:
This is not my contribution abstract, as the organizers have not required it.
Contribution long abstract:
I have already had some experience of walking thorugh the cityscape in my research (researching the tourist guiding pracitices in Warsaw), and have been using a walking-through-space format on several occasions in my teaching practices, both with ethnology and design students (I teach at a design school of my univeristy). Getting lost in your research is part and parcel of design process and if you missed it, it would be harder to find an innovative solution to the design problem you are supposed to face. Getting lost is about unlearning in order to find new ways to operate in circumstances that have become unkown in time of uncertainties.
Contribution long abstract:
I am a PhD student in Ethnology and my project is about the relationship between tourism and cultural heritage. I´m going to see how two cultural heritage sites have become and are continuing to be done as visitable sites. I´m going to do field studies at Åland Islands in Finland and at the island of Gotland in Sweden. At these sites I want to study how the cultural heritage is presented in relation to a hegemonic cultural heritage discourse and how the visitors are encouraged to understand and move around on the sites. The material I´m going to look at is signs, information boards, maps, and different kinds of brochures.
I want to participate in the workshop because I´m interested in how people move around and understand a site depending on how the moved around and experienced it. I think the theme for the workshop is very interesting in relation to my PhD project.
Contribution short abstract:
Can we get to ideas on productive activities within today academy life without a smartphone?
Contribution long abstract:
Being without a smartphone becomes a synonym of a rare leisure time. Smartphones guide us and blind us for everything between two destination points. Looking for a place without an exact address and traced route discovers many wonderful places and faces on the way. I just realised that I never thought about being at a conference without all my helpful digital gadgets. Can we get to ideas on productive activities within today academy life without a smartphone?
Contribution short abstract:
not applicable
Contribution long abstract:
One of my research interest is sound. I develop the concept of Steven Feld’s acoustemology in urban/highly industrialized settings. Also I deal with field recording as socio-cultural practice (myself I am feld recordist and sound artist), I explore phenomenon of soundmapping, new listening, podcasting, locative media, underwater soundscapes, bioacoustemology and sounds of protests. I conduct soundwalks/audio-drifts, deep listening and field recording workshopsExamples of my projects: https://szarareneta.bandcamp.com/album/3-square-meters, http://miastodzwiekow.blogspot.com/, https://transportodrone.tumblr.com/, https://3squaremeters.weebly.com/.
Contribution long abstract:
My research within urban ethnology has focused on people’s experiences about their surrounding neighbourhoods. I have worked with both written ethnological questionnaires (oral history) and ethnographic methods. Lately my interest has been in the affective practices of placemaking and in the multi-sensorial ways of experiencing urban environment. I have also been keen to develop more applied methods of urban ethnology to bring ethnological knowledge into urban planning. I would like to join your workshop to learn a new way of experiencing and documenting urban experiences, and to take the role of an urbanite trying to express their emotions and sensory experiences of a city.
I am chairing panel Body03: Mediating affect in the world of uncertainties. I hope there will not be an overlap with our session.
Contribution long abstract:
I have used walking ethnography in my dissertation focusing on a neighborhood in Ankara, Turkey. My work is spesifically on urban change and the residents' memory about space.
Contribution short abstract:
Hello! I am an urban researcher at the University of Vienna. Walking in the city, subjective mapping and senor approaches are approaches that are important in my work. I would like to join the group and try the method together in Brno and exchange with other researchers. Many greetings Cornelia
Contribution long abstract:
Hello!
I am an urban researcher at the University of Vienna. Walking in the city, subjective mapping and senor approaches are approaches that are important in my work. I would like to join the group and try the method together in Brno and exchange with other researchers.
Many greetings
Cornelia
Contribution long abstract:
I am interested in performance, heritage, place/placemaking. My research is based in Nepal. This workshop seems an exciting opportunity for experimenting with methodologies in a collective way as well as getting to discover the city. I usually like to get to know places by walking and "getting lost", though I have never theorised it in my research work. What makes this experience interesting is doing this with others and reflecting on it together.
"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours", from Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino.
Contribution short abstract:
I want to explore new ways to study cities and use other senses than visual. When orienteering with the help of a visual guide is not possible, will I use other senses more?
Contribution long abstract:
My research interests concern built environment, especially in urban areas. My dissertation research concentrates on Finnish suburban areas and is based on visual material and photo-elicitation. I want to explore new ways to study cities and use other senses than visual. The idea of getting lost is highly intriquing. When orienteering with the help of a visual guide is not possible, will I use other senses more?
Contribution short abstract:
I´m interested in participatory urban planning processes, heritagisation and sensory ethnography, and I have a background in tourism studies. My latest article with A. Kivilaakso, only summary in English: https://journal.fi/yhdyskuntasuunnittelu/issue/view/8522/1539.
Contribution long abstract:
I just noticed this workshop and would love to participate it! I´m from the University Turku and we have here a new research project about the social and material experiences of welfare in urban environment. In this project we use sensory ethnography, eg. walking interviews and I´m really interested in this idea of getting lost in the city from this perspective. Our research project is starting this year, so timing for this workshop would be perfect. I really hope that it is possibly to join to your workshop, even though I´m quite late with this message.
Contribution short abstract:
I am Junior Professor of European Ethnology at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg. Previously, I was an associate at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich and a research associate in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg.
Contribution long abstract:
I am Junior Professor of European Ethnology at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg. Previously, I was an associate at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich and a research associate in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg. As a scholarship holder of the German Federal Foundation for the Environment, I wrote a dissertation on the problem complex of intensive animal husbandry. My research focuses on agro-food studies, medical anthropolgy with a focus on gender medicine, as well as intangible cultural heritage.
Contribution short abstract:
This is not an abstract
Contribution long abstract:
In my fieldwork I have worked with people who have had an amazing ability to orient themselves in space (urban and periurban) without reading signs, mostly through memory, emotional links or conversations with others. In fact, many of these peripatetic Romani traders are iliterate. I hardly have had such an experience -- in the field I was mostly following my friends and in my daily life I hardly get lost in space. Engaging in 'controlled lostness' by bringing these two modalities together thus promises to bring unique insights. Moreover, as a scholar of Romani communities, I would add to the group a different view of this Czech city.
Contribution short abstract:
Embracing lostness as an anthropologist is a way of wandering through fieldwork spaces, of surrendering to discomfort and unknowns - I have for a long time embraced being lost as a form of discovery, of encounter, of delay and surrender-hence my interest in this novel, exciting workshop !
Contribution long abstract:
‘How to disappear completely’: Embracing lostness
Fiona Murphy, Dublin City University
Themes of loss, ‘lostness,’ distance and recovery have animated my anthropological work with Indigenous Australians forcibly removed from their families (Stolen Generations) and people seeking refuge for as long as I have worked as an anthropologist. In considering lostness through the lens of traumatic experience, I have come to understand its expansiveness as a way of inhabiting lifeworlds anchored in uncertainty. Lostness also echoes through my professional relationship with anthropology and my personal life in multi-layered and often conflicting ways. Embracing lostness as an anthropologist is also a way of wandering through complicated fieldwork spaces, of surrendering to discomfort and unknowns in a way that can be generative and meaningful. In my everyday wanderings, as a person who struggles completely with map reading, I have become reliant on my smart phone (and even then I struggle), so I have for a long time embraced being lost as a form of discovery, of encounter, of delay and surrender-hence my interest in this novel, exciting workshop !