Urban Sensoria After Socialism

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? This course will investigate these questions using multimodal approaches to ethnographic research, and as part of our exploration of urban sensoria after socialism we will make a multiweek visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina.