scholarly journals Being-in-the-City: A Phenomenological Approach to Technological Experience 

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Wasiak

This paper examines dynamics surrounding the negotiation and articulation of the body-technology relationship necessarily characterizing the experience of being-in-the-city. Nowhere is everyday experience more mediated by technology than in the city. Being-in-the-city involves being embodied by technology at levels ranging from micro to macro. Despite the fact that technologies are constantly evolving in city space, relations with technology tend to become quickly normalized — mundane — transparent. Given this normalization as well as the sheer pervasiveness of technology in constituting city space it is important to examine the ways in which technology comes to shape the experiential contexts of everyday life. In urban space, technologies result is new sights to be seen, sounds to be heard, smells to be smelt, textures to be felt, as well as altogether new modes of experiencing the everyday. In exploring the dynamics surrounding the ongoing, multi-layered negotiation and articulation of the body-technology relationship necessarily characterizing the experience of being-in-the-city a phenomenological perspective is adopted. Heidegger’s writing on technology, Merleau-Ponty’s writing on embodiment and perception, and Don Ihde’s writing on the body and technology contribute to a theoretical framework for a phenomenological examination of the experiential implications of being-in-the-city, a technological ecology.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 11-41
Author(s):  
Daniela López ◽  
Valeria Laborda ◽  

The paper aims to analyse the potentiality of Schutzian phenomenological approach on institutions. We will maintain that this point of view has to take into account at least three aspects of institutions. Firstly, institutions should be considered as objective and sedimented configurations of meaning. Secondly, the historicity and the genesis of the institutional objectified meaning should be explored. Thirdly, life in modern societies shows how reference to the generating activities has been lost in our institutions and how that process has led to the disaffection of the citizens towards them. Motivated by understanding the process through which certain actors question their relative-natural concept of economic life and institute alternative types of economic actions, the article explores a case study of an economic institution in the City of Buenos Aires belonging to the so-called “Other” economy. Following the model of the well-informed citizen, the manuscript describes a type of “economic citizen” who transforms the imposed economic relevances experienced in everyday life into the centre of interest. The emergence of that interest is analysed by tracing back this particular economic institution to the process of sedimentation and of genesis of meaning. It is demonstrated that the process of institutionalization is shaped in contrast to dominant anonymous economic institutions.


Author(s):  
Dolly Kikon ◽  
Duncan McDuie-Ra

For a city in India’s northeast that has been embroiled in the everyday militarization and violence of Asia’s longest-running armed conflict, Dimapur remains ‘off the map’. With no ‘glorious’ past or arenas where events of consequence to mainstream India have taken place, Dimapur’s essence is experienced in oral histories of events, visual archives of everyday life, lived realities of military occupation, and anxieties produced in making urban space out of tribal space. Ceasefire City captures the dynamics of Dimapur. It brings together the fragmented sensibilities granted and contested in particular spaces and illustrates the embodied experiences of the city. The first part explores military presence, capitalist growth, and urban expansion in Dimapur. The second part presents an ethnographic account of lived realities and the meanings that are forged in a frontier city.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
McKenzie Wark

It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Ana Rusta

AbstractIn this essay will be given a great importance to the traditional and contemporary conception and perception of urban space as elements referred to the city. Throughout the analysis, in the level of the contemporary perception of the city, will be presented the theory that insists on the conception and construction of urban space by the practices of everyday life and the so-called strategy of resistance. This refers not only to a new frame of sociology but also to a new methodological approach for the construction of the urban space. Regarding the latter, will be elaborated the thought of Henri Lefebvre and Michael De Certeau as a vector for the explanation of some problems observed in the methodological conception of urban space such as the city of Tirana. Through this approach, we will specifically disclose some problems observed about the use of certain urban spaces. Traditionally, the theory of representation emphasizes a conception of abstract and rational presentation of urban space analyzed from above, giving us an incredibly simplified bureaucratic view of the city. This theory does not analyze specifically micro-urban space and social problems facing the people in this space. Therefore, a new contemporary theory appears as a critique which aims to use a new anti-bureaucratic method that starts from the study of practices of everyday life, using instrumental analysis of the body and micro-social practices to present urban space in the most comprehensive frame.


2020 ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Marta Zambrzycka ◽  
Paulina Olechowska

The subject of the article is an analysis of the three aspects of depicting urban space of Eastern Ukraine, focusing specifi cally on the Donbass region and the city of Kharkov as depicted in the novels Voroshilovgrad (2010) and Mesopotamia (2014) by Serhiy Zhadan. The urban space of Eastern Ukraine overlaps with the most important values that shape a person’s personality and aff ect her or his self-identifi cation. The city space is also a “place of memory” and experiences of generations that infl uence current events. In addition to the historical and axiological dimension, the imaginative aspect of space is also important. This approach is used by the author to describe the urban space as a functioning imagination or stereotypes associated with it as opposed to its realistic depiction.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110034
Author(s):  
Dang Nguyen

This article explores the temporality of liveness on Facebook Live through the analytical lens of downtime. Downtime is conceptualized here as multiscale: downtime exists in between the micro action and inaction of everyday life, but also in larger episodes of personal and health crises that reorient the body toward technologies for instantaneous replenishment of meaning and activity. Living through downtime with mobile technology enables the experience of oscillation between liveness as simultaneity and liveness as instantaneity. By juxtaposing time-as-algorithmic against time-as-lived through the livestreaming practices of diện chẩn, an emergent unregulated therapeutic method, I show how different enactments of liveness on Facebook Live recalibrate downtime so that the body can reconfigure its being-in-time. The temporal reverberation of downtime and liveness creates an alternative temporal space wherein social practices that are shunned by the temporal structures of institution and society can retune and continue to thrive at the margin of these structures and at the central of the everyday.


2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
AbdouMaliq Simone

Abstract:In contemporary urban Africa, the turbulence of the city requires incessant innovation that is capable of generating new ways of being. Rather than treating popular culture as some distinctive sector, this article attempts to investigate the popular as methods of bringing together activities and actors that on the surface would not seem compatible, and as experimental forms of generating value in the everyday life of urban residents. This investigation, sited largely in Douala, Cameroon, looks at how youth from varying neighborhoods attempt to get by, and at the unexpected forms of contestation that can ensue.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solange Muñoz

This article expands on current conceptualizations and applications of precarity by exploring the everyday socio-spatial complexities of migrant squatters living in informal hotels in the center of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through ethnographic methods, this research investigates squatters’ practices of negotiating access to shared domestic spaces and resources, while experiencing long-term waiting for eviction from their home and potentially from the city center. Employing a cultural geographies approach, this work is concerned with understanding the ways in which precarity is routinely experienced in the micro-spaces of everyday life. Precarity is examined in its temporal and spatial manifestations, with particular emphasis on gendered experiences and home-making practices. Moving through daily spaces and routine situations, I document how precarity is embedded in the mundane tasks of the domestic, and as a result, unevenly impacts women whose traditional roles as mothers and caretakers mean that they are often at the fore of place-making practices and responsibilities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Eka Permanasari ◽  
◽  
Thomas Lientino ◽  

Kalijodo has a long history in terms of gambling, prostitution, human trafficking and other illicit activities. Although it is a green belt area, the location had always being filled with semipermanent buildings. The area was changed its meaning in 2016 when the late Governor of Ahok with the help of the police and army, eradicated these housing and transformed this place as the community center (RPTRA-Ruang Publik Terpadu Ramah Anak). Together with Yori Antar, Basuki changed Kalijodo into a new center for Jakarta with its mural and skatepark. Former illicit users have been pushed out from the site. Some built a temporary shelter under the highway bridge while others went to their villages. After the fall of Basuki due to the blasphemy crime, the image of RPTRA Kalijodo was contested. Within a day, the area was filled with illegal parking and prostitution returned in different forms taking place under the highway bridge. Layers of meaning and use of Kalijodo transforms rapidly and in results changes the image of the city. Through observation, interviews and archival research, this paper analyses the contestation of the city image by investigating the relationship between the top-down approach and the everyday life uses of space.


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