The modern, socialist, citizen-subject was imagined as
urban, and this practically made urbanization a means of emancipation and thus
a moral imperative for state-socialist policy. This made cities a showcase for
socialist values, sites of aspiration and social mobility as well as barometers
for the legitimacy of the life worlds that socialism built. Cities were also
where a socialist “distribution of the sensible” was constituted, a
sociopolitical order that rules by designating who or what could be seen, heard,
felt and otherwise sensed – and who or what could not. This course asks: How we
can understand the transformations after socialism through a focus on the
changing urban sensorium – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings of
privatization, de-industrialization, gentrification, labor migration,
inequality, and so on? What kinds of invisibilities, erasure, and silencing
accompanied the end of state socialism and how might they reveal a struggle for
a new distribution of the sensible? At the same time, how might the
materialities and sensibilities of the socialist city provide resources for
resisting unwanted change?
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Dr. Andrew Gilbert (he/him)