AN138a-URBAN WORLDS: LESSONS IN SENSING, PERFORMING, AND NARRATIN PLACE
SPRING 2023 - BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY . DESIGNED AND TAUGHT
What do we make urban worlds we inhabit? How do we render our environments meaningful and endow them with social and cultural significance? How do we put these meanings to work towards revising our attachments to both our material worlds and one another? In this course, we will address these questions through a deep exploration of sensing (and making sense of) urban places from diverse perspectives across the world. Drawing inspiration from Keith Basso and Steven Feld who define sensing place as “the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested and struggled over […],” we will delve into this multi-faceted activity that my friends in Ghana call “drinking the world” (sha duniya). To do so, we will move through four interrelated modes of knowing place: embodying, ordering, narrating, and re-imagining place. Organizing our learning in this way helps us move away from more static modes of analysis focused on people or place towards a relational approach that forges meaning between the two.
Taking seriously calls for scholars to pay more attention to the practices of meaning-making in contemporary urban contexts, the first module course opens with broad questions from classical and contemporary theory about how we grapple with the universal and diverse ways we understand the spaces and places of cities. Starting at a small scale, the second module explores how urban communities in various parts of the world have made sense of place through cultural conceptions of the body, spatial orientation, and sensing. Next, we turn to the ways individuals and groups order, hierarchize, and control spaces by various means and with different end goals in mind. In the fourth unit, we look at what narrative can tell us about how spaces become animated with meaning and significance. Lastly, we turn our attention to how we are constantly adapting to and re-imagining our urban worlds in an increasingly globally interconnected world.
Despite long-term commitments to sense of place in disciplines such as philosophy, architecture, urban studies, geography, history, and anthropology, when it comes to those cities that are not located in Europe or United States, they are often left off the map. By focusing on how people sense place in and from diverse locations around the world, it brings these accounts of lived urban experience elsewhere into conversation with Euro-American phenomenological approaches with the aim of developing as Comaroff and Comaroff put it, “theories from the south.” Ultimately, we probe a fundamental question about the role of place-making as a universal aspect of the human condition textured by local materialities, understandings, values, and power dynamics.