The City and the Senses Conference
The City and the Senses: Exposure, Health and the Urban Environment
June 6th, 2012
The Great Works Symposium
Pennoni Honors College
Drexel University
The city, perhaps more than any other widely shared experience, awakens our recognition of the sensuality of collective life. Indeed, the city concentrates and releases multiple sensations ranging from its cacophony of universal and particular sounds to the crush of bodies and car-congested streets that every rush hour and weekend brings. In these ways, the city can prove to be simultaneously invigorating and overwhelming, and perhaps even threatening. That tension in the sensory life of the city has elicited a variety of initiatives and concerns directed at mitigating what are seen as unpleasant and insalubrious aspects of the urban sensory environment. These have sometimes taken the form of public policies such as noise bylaws and the regulation of street foods, or policies aimed at the elimination of billboards and graffiti, or the removal of the homeless from city streets, and so on. The interest here, it has been argued, is the “production of moderated soundscapes, tactilities, smellscapes and scenes” (Edensor, 2007) directed at making for healthier cities and their populations.
At the same time, those who live and/or work in cities, through their everyday social conduct, simultaneously contribute to, and betray an implicit relationship with, the sensations of the city. Such actions—whether walking in the city (with or without an ‘ipod’), eating on restaurant patios or snacking on street food, clubbing, driving in(to) the city, visiting the museum, shopping at on outdoor market, or bicycling, and more—are also expressive of the ambiguity of the urban sensory experience, in that there are those that one might wish to seize and assimilate (say the coffee shop) and yet others that one might wish to avoid (say the crush of public transit) . Similarly, the arts (in its various forms) have also been figurative of that ambiguity in relation to urban sensations.
Program Itinerary
10:00 am 10:10 am Welcome and Opening Remarks
Scott Knowles, Associate Professor (Department of History and Politics), Associate Dean (Pennoni Honors College, and Director (Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry), Drexel University
Stephen Gambescia, Associate Professor (CHNP), Assistant Dean (Academic and Student Affairs), Drexel University
10:10 am 11:00 am Keynote Address: Sensuality and the City - Rethinking the Commonest Sense
Professor Alan Blum, Project Director, Culture of Cities Centre
University of Waterloo
11:00 am 12:15 pm Panel 1 The City and Its Images
Chair: Saeed Hydaralli, Drexel University
Steve Bailey, York University: Second-Order Senses in the City: The Hermeneutic and the Phenomenological Urban
Prakash Kona, The English and Foreign Languages University: Imagining the Community of Beggars and Homeless: Constructing the Paradigmatic Third World City
Emily Hoffman, Arkansas Tech University: Permanence, Paralysis, and Perfection: The Perils of J.C. Nicholss Utopian Urban Vision
12:15 pm 1:00 pm LUNCH
1:00 pm 2:15 pm Panel 2 The City as the site of Over-stimulation, Anxiety and Danger
Chair: David Flood, Drexel University
Scott Knowles, Drexel University: Supertall: Vertigo in the Postmodern Metropolis
Kevin Dowler, York University: The Nervous (Dis)Order of the City
Kevin Egan, Drexel University: See Something, Say Something: The Biopolitics of Security in the City
2:30 pm 3:45 pm Panel 3 Conflict and Rivalry in the City
Chair: Rickie Sanders, Temple University
Lindsay Campbell, USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station and Carrie Grassi, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation: Smelling, seeing, and remembering the Dump: Perceptions, memories, and reputation of FreshKills landfill and park
Christopher Ramsey, Loyola University: Marquette Park and the Problem of Image in a Post-Civil Rights World, 1966-1983
Allison Carter, Rowan University: -The Sixth Sense: Sports Fanhood and Civic Sense of Well-Being
4:00 pm 5:15 pm Panel 4 Sensations and Sensory Experiences in the City
Chair: Stephen Gambescia, Drexel University
Elke Grenzer, Culture of Cities Centre: Kairos and the Urban Happening: Birth as Performance Art.
Anthony Dotterman, Adelphi University: Spectacles of Neuro-Diversity in the New York City Novel: Autistic Individuals and their Environment in Motherless Brooklyn and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Thelma Lazo-Flores, Ball State University: Social Subtexts and Sensational Tapestries of City Streets
5:15 pm 5:30 pm Closing Remarks
Saeed Hydaralli
Information for Participants/Attendees
Discounted Hotels - http://www.drexel.edu/procurement/travel/hotels/
Campus Maps & Directions - http://www.drexel.edu/admissions/visit/directions/
Conference Organizer:
Dr. Saeed Hydaralli, Visiting Fellow
Great Works Symposium
Pennoni Honors College
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA