MA Global Urban Sociology

Cities are sites of complex and vibrant forms of social, cultural and political life. Anthropology’s traditional focus on the rural and the small-scale has begun to be supplemented and extended through a focus on urban life as a context in which to understand social processes and relationships under conditions of extraordinary transformations, including localised adaptions to the forces of globalisation. This module focuses on ethnographic approaches to urban life. With an emphasis grounded in everyday life practices, it explores how urban residents and other inhabitants make sense of their daily social worlds, navigate surrounding communities, and manage the broader forces that structure their urban experiences. Drawing upon urban ethnographies, the module explores economic, cultural and political change in global cities since the late twentieth century and examines the relationship between urban life and different forms of sociality, aspirations and conflicts.

Humanitarianisms, a term associated with organized, formal, response to various human crises, long or short term, is a well-established discourse and a distinct area of study. In either humanitarianisms research or urban research, the city as an arena for humane action or what may be termed social responsiveness, is emerging as a distinct realm. For example, cities struck by crises - ‘natural’ or man-made disasters, or episodes of violence and war, or medical emergencies like pandemics or local epidemics become intense theatres of humanitarian activity. Governmental and non-governmental agents, individual citizens or concerned collectives are the many actors through which a range of practices that attempt to sustain beleaguered lives - from bureaucratically managed aid and relief measures to everyday acts of neighborly kindness - become evident. Faith-based organizations, civil society groups, and even individuals are a significant part of urban spaces where they routinely and regularly provide for the poor, sick, destitute and hungry. Churches, shrines, temples, mosques locate this work as much as other agencies do for the homeless, orphans or street children, destitute women, the elderly and the sick. Cities are often the crucibles in which political activism, social movements and even nascent ‘revolutions’, however ephemeral, find their most visible, dramatic and powerful manifestations. Public squares, city halls, parks and streets stage some of the most impactful events that claim recognition of human suffering and deprivation, human rights and justice, in recent as well as in historical time. Underlining the plural version of this range, in terms of both discourse and practice, this course attends to the internationalized vector of contemporary humanitarian interventions. Exploring the encapsulation of response and responsibility in international humanitarian law, understanding specific projects and delving into the concepts that drive humanitarian activity, this course will enable a view of an emerging area that is urgent, dynamic and timely

The urban landscape in its diverse manifestations is the most familiar environment to the majority of human populations and will be for generations to come. The term ‘urban ecology’ has been used variously to describe the study of humans in cities, of nature in cities, and of the coupled relationships between humans and nature. This has led to scholarly investigations of cities as individual units, some cross city examinations and with the conceptualization of the planetary climate, there has been a re-interpretation of meanings of urban ecologies. Contemporary scholarship problematizes what forms of ecologies compose urban spaces and how they relate to other human and non-human elements.

To bring this out the course will engage with how urban ecologies can be understood through themes that address how urban nature is understood and governed, climate change infrastructures emerge, interspecies formations take place, effects of urban water worlds and how waste comes to matter. Ethnographies will explore these themes in cities such as Manchester, Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Lahore, Lagos, Nairobi and Stuttgart.

This module will tackle the question of how the global and the urban as twin concepts align themselves to address the moment of the contemporary. This course will not have sections outlined separately as theory and method but will demonstrate empirically, through ethnographies and other sources, how conceptual frames have been approached methodologically and how particular concepts, drawn from these ethnographies or otherwise, can help us critique and challenge certain universal frames which have often tended to be hegemonic in working with the distinctions between the global north and the south. 

This module combines theory and anthropological case studies to help students develop a critical knowledge of approaches to address contemporary global challenges in sustainability. It seeks to deepen students' awareness and understanding of how people around the world apprehend and deal with the pressing social and environmental challenges they face, and the range of concepts and practices enacted to deliver sustainable futures. The module invites students to grapple with the contested and culturally-situated nature of these paradigms, and how they are underpinned by forms of economic and political power.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This course will explore these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times. Different theories, approaches, and disciplinary angles will be introduced and discussed. We will also consider what de-colonising approaches to migration and diaspora might look like. By drawing on established and less charted bodies of work on migration studies, diaspora and identity, transnationalism, postcolonial and de-colonial studies the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the emergence of diasporas, the reformulation of 'home' and the simultaneous instability and reinforcement of nation-states.

In this module we explore the complex and often paradoxical relationship between place, mobilities and food. We critically interrogate claims made about food system 'delocalisation', 'deskilling' and 'gastro-anomie'. We examine food markets, street foods and restaurants as sites of both cultural production and labour exploitation, of social interaction, cosmopolitanism and open debate, and of social control, surveillance and spatial cleansing. We explore contemporary forms of ethical food activism, including in the digital realm, and consider the complex role of food in migration.

The Commons have been understood either as common pool resources, in how communities collectively manage resources outside the market and state frameworks, or through a radical political inclination of finding alternatives out of capitalism, state and their ensuing effects altogether. The commons, both as a resource and practice, a place and process, are theorised through a focus on how we basically manage resources, institutions and peoples. The ‘urban’ as a site of continuous flux and connectivity, diversity and accumulation will be examined through the generative process of claims-making institutions, movements and ideas that negotiate with states, boundaries, enclosures, communities and solidarities through ideas of consumption and value, proximity and density, in the face of, and in spite of, seamless capitalist accumulation and consolidation. Urban commons as a moorage for humans and non-humans alike will take up constructs that concern the world at large, such as the cyber-commons, reclaiming movements, ecological commons, a discourse of rights to clean air, water and shelter with a focus on practices and processes that endeavour to common regulated space and place. The written and visual course material will equip students to reimagine the city and urban spheres into futurity in ways their formalist state-centric planners seldom intended.

Steven Connor’s essay “The Modern Auditory I” provides the basic premise of this course. Drawing upon his ideas we can say that the consideration of the modern subject as the subject of production and reception of sound not only counters the proverbial ‘tyranny of the eye’ prevalent in western philosophy, but by following Connor, we can focus on the sonic experience in early modernity through one of modernity’s defining features, the technological innovations. The latter, especially allow for exploring the enhancement of the senses, in this case the auditory, through the power of technology and the dissemination of the object of listening through the technologies of reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin indicates. This basic premise guides this course outline in many ways. Firstly, the technological innovations related to sound (sound recording machine, telephone, stethoscope) collapse the space-time boundaries, on the one hand, in the inter-subjective realm and on the other, across geo-political spaces by virtue of the fact that soon after their innovation in Europe, they were deployed in far distant spaces of the colonial world for commercial, academic and political purposes thus creating the ‘colonial-imperial-global’ sphere. This historical trajectory is important for building genealogies of the contemporary sonic production and experience. In the contemporary world, the sonic experience is thus necessarily international and/or digital-virtual. We can find it in the way people talk to power and assume sonic agency against the bombardment of authoritative diktats (Labelle 2019) or in the song in the Marathi film Sairat, where a live symphony orchestra recorded in L. A. intensifies a ‘semi-urban’ romantic moment. If urban spaces/cities come into view, first through the structures that house sound technologies (telephone wires/poles, radio wave towers, satellite towers) that surround them, scholars of sound studies describe the urban/city as formed of physical and social acoustics. The openness of the ear and the ensuing multi-directional inputs of sound provides them grounds for building different arguments vis a vis the visual and the visible urban/city. The proposed course can explore these and more directions to understand the connections and disjunctions in a global world