![](https://moodle.hu-berlin.de/pluginfile.php/5764334/course/overviewfiles/352028215_c045fcfffa_b-1006080693.jpg)
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.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Dr. Andrew Gilbert (he/him)