MA Global Urban Sociology

Theory and Method in Global Urban Sociology I, to be taught at SNIoE, 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. The course is envisaged along three broad sections. Please note that each section carries a combination of theory and method.

Tracing Genealogies 

The first section intends to work with the question of what it means to frame “global” as a concept in the contemporary and how the vector of the urban extends, destabilises, and realigns the concept of the global today. The imagination of a “global south” has been a given, but this course would like to do away with such hegemonic universalism and ask how we can conceptually pitch the argument of a Global Urban instead of the global north or global south to think about modern-day space/place configurations or understand the traction these have and question what is their validity and how to rethink them? This section would then like to trace the genealogy of three key concepts—post-colonial, Decolonial, and Global- from the vantage point of the Sociology and Social Anthropology discipline(s). 

The Comparative Urban 

The second section builds on the first to help students understand how the modern-day configuration of the city or the global is not necessarily about comparison or drawing a homology between different empirical sites or locations. Instead, contemporary notions of what constitutes urbanisms, and the current geo-political city could be seen through other dimensions which are alike yet distinct. The intent here is to destabilise the notion of the universal and understand what motivates the relationship between the universals and particulars. We don’t take the current stand of offering vernacular alternates as an alternative to the category of the universals or think about the south or any other location as a radical alterity to any hegemonic universal. This section would like to bring forth for discussion conceptual frames beyond the classical ones tackled in the first section and work with questions of social Infrastructures, atmospheres, and Informalities. 

City in Data 

While the first two sections squarely address the conceptual frames for the global-urban in its concrete empiricisms, the third section would work with macro-scales through which the modern-day city is administered, governed, and lived as a functional and affective space. Drawing from a variety of empirical locations, this section will highlight how the contours of mapping, demarcating, and categorising the city yield conceptual frames that mark their potential in understanding the urban. This section will engage with methods of understanding the city through scalar techniques of GPS, GIS, information, and communication and ask how these methods construct newer senses of the urban.

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, to name a few. These ethnographies will bring out how prior understandings of the complexity, resilience and innovation in urban ecosystems have fundamentally changed through unpredictable dynamics between cities and their larger environments. By focusing on questions of social experience, the course will ask how ecological issues are shaped by legacies of inequality and injustice; shifting dynamics of power and governance; and culturally specific ideas about nature, culture, and the human.

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” (Roy Porter, ed. 1997) provides the basic premise of this proposed 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.

Anthropologists have been strong contributors to understandings of conditions and states of being labelled, historically as “madness”, and as “mental disorders” in contemporary parlance. In conversation with other disciplines - especially the “psy” disciplines of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis - the discipline of anthropology has pointed to the many ways in which people, lay and professionals, experience, categorise, treat, represent and live with mental health issues, in different parts of the world and at different times in history. In doing so, mental illnesses necessarily emerge as not only biological or psychological but as also social. This course situates itself within such longstanding and ongoing debates and discussions. in recent times, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) has called for a united front to address purported issues of mental disorders across the globe. Taking the MGMH discourse as an important “movement” with ramifications for current and future theories of and practices around mental health, the course aims to understand, interrogate, and recalibrate the “global” and “mental health” and their conjunctions. How can “the global” be attentive to the specificities of different “locals”, without resorting to the “indigenous”, in understanding what constitutes “mental disorders” in particular contexts and for specific peoples? Extending this, the space of the urban too is not seen to be a given but a site in making along with and as part of “the local” and the “(mental) disorderly”. Attending to the instability of these categories, it is hoped, will lead to complex questions about a “global” paradigm to mental health, and ask what kinds of questions are made possible by attending to the constant making and remaking of these categories.

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. 

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.

This course offers an exploration of the formation of diasporas and their cultural politics. It looks at how diasporic subjectivities are formed through gendered aesthetic practices and performances, which can take on and signify religious, cultural, political meanings, which are in turn constantly negotiated, hybridised and re-fashioned across bodies, times and spaces.

Students will engage with the central theoretical and ethical debates relating to anthropologies of climate change, and consider how these have developed in relation to key social movements and moments from the 1960s onwards. Questions of temporality, political economy, development, justice, the concept of harm, emotion, activism and feminist ecologies of care are explored in the context of the anthropocene, with students encouraged to consider how they might approach crafting their own anthropologies of climate change. Whilst attention is given to historical antecedents and the development of climate as an object of concern, both within and outside the academy, the course looks at contemporary developments and encourages students to think about how they might engage with and shape emergent anthropologies of the anthropocene. In this, the intersection between anthropology and activism is explored, as we ask not only how we can write anthropologies of a warming planet, but also how anthropologies of the anthropocene can help us collectively navigate uncertain planetary futures.

Food and eating are fundamental to human life and health and play profound roles in the construction of social bodies, from families and kinship groups to religious groups and states. Further, food mediates our relationships with non-human beings and surroundings. In this module, we emphasise that our reliance on food for nutritional sustenance is inseperable from food's social, cultural and ecological dimensions. As such, the transformation of food habits and food systems are a central part of human experiences and world histories. We explore cultural diversities and historical change in food production and distribution, eating, cooking and sharing, recycling and wasting, and the classifying, celebrating and prohibiting of food and drink.