Ian M. Cook

Photo essay: The layers of overlapping,
crumbling, moss-ridden tiles speak to the overlapping, crumbling
and nature-reclaiming temporal and spatial frameworks
of coloniality, post-coloniality and indigeneity. It is possible to
see the straight lines of a ‘civilizing’ empire; neoliberalism’s desire
to produce global representations of sameness; land’s material,
economic and poetic instability; ghostly hauntings from the
past and future; insecure masculine militaristic language; and
the scattered remains left by the transmogrifications of empires.

From the chapter: Neoliberalism and right-wing Hindu nationalism complement one another as they both see divisions within society as unnecessary, if not pathological, and create bounded internal and external realms (e.g. the Muslim other, or the welfare agency) in their rhetoric of ongoing revolutionary transformation. However, and here we turn towards the source of trouble on Mangaluru's streets, whereas the individualism celebrated by economic liberalism offers 'freedom' (whilst holding the market supreme and punishing those who disrupt it), the individual within a majoritarian vision is always subordinated to the good of the Hindu community. This entwines with a perceived loss of national sovereignty with the deepening penetration of global capital, leading to attempts at controlling 'national culture', more often than not in ways that uphold rigid conceptions of gender and sexual identities. As such, and as I will detail below, there is an ethical tension at the heart of this Hindu majoritarian and market-led development project: the continuing ‘opening-up’ of the Indian economy has also opened-up ethical questions. The same groups who celebrate ‘India’s moment’ after centuries of national impediment due to Muslim, colonial and then ‘socialist’ rule are also often those who are deeply troubled by the effects of these changes in terms of cultural purity, gender norms, and youthful experimentation. Moral policing, I argue, is one of the ways in which this ethical tension reveals itself. I will make this argument based on material gathered during 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2011-2016.

We need to retheorise urbanism from the perspective of smaller, post-colonial cities in the global South to account for both relational size on a global scale and localised city-specific contexts. Cities like Mangaluru, in south India, cannot be solely understood as mere variations within universal processes, especially when these processes are theorised through big cities in the global North. They must also be explored through detailed analyses that, whilst attuned to global processes, recognise historical and contextual particularities as key for understanding city-specific urbanisms. However, because inhabitants and state officials often frame smaller cities as mere variations—and often as inferior variations—of large ‘Western’ cities, we must interrogate how such universal, global North centred thinking informs the urbanism of such places. Taking a relational and relative understanding of smallness, the article conceptualises Mangaluru as a ‘smaller’ as opposed to just a ‘small’ city. Building on this, it is argued that smaller post-colonial cities in the global South are characterised by 1) niche positioning; 2) a feeling of relative lack; and 3) the dense intimacy of relationships. Furthermore, through an analysis of Mangaluru’s most common framings—as a port, as an education hub, and as a city of vigilante attacks—it shows how these dominant characterisations are exceeded and reworked amidst the unpredictability and flux of urban change.

In Mangaluru, a smaller rapidly urbanizing coastal city in southwest India, there is a broker on every street. They are skilled, reputation conscious figures, who interpret class, jati, age and gender characteristics into housing and land markets through their mediations. Their work is above all ‘link work’: the forming, maintaining and breaking of links between parties. I argue that links are a form of property. With the city’s changes over the last decades—including partially redistributive land reforms, industrialization, the opening of an all-weather port, a squeeze on land, a real estate ‘boom’ and the arrival of large numbers of out of town college students—the number of potential links has increased and
diversified. The links’ sizeable and growing monetary value, the large numbers of brokers or potential brokers, and the temporal incongruities between buyers/tenants and sellers/landlords push brokers to continually search out new links and to move quickly in closing or dropping deals, thus driving the commodification of land and housing in the city.

Mangalore, a smaller city on the south-west coast of India, is awash with high-rise buildings in various states of construction. I spent eighteen months in the city researching the ways in which urbanisation temporally and spatially re-structures and de-structures everyday life, working with auto drivers, moving vendors and housing brokers.
The city lies in coastal Karnataka, on a narrow stretch of land hemmed in by the Arabian Sea on one side and the Western Ghats on the other. Its expansion northwards – spurred on by the creation of an all-weather port and related industrial activity, and southwards – driven by a slew of new higher
education institutes, has given the metropolitan region a population of 619,664, making it the 83rd largest urban area in India.
Property relations in the city are changing: people are now investing in housing, rather than building a home; the local politicians are growing ever more indistinguishable from the local real estate developers; and land-owners are cashing in on the opportunity for joint-builds with these same developers. Mangalore is on the property map.

Whilst most developers are local (although some firms with a national presence are now entering the local market), the labourers who build the buildings come from the northern part of the state, northern states of the country or even (it is whispered) Bangladesh. Living and working on the sites, the
construction work involves men and women, and is for the most part unmechanised.

In this set of photos, however, I am interested in a different type of labour – the production of the imagined futures of the city. Billboards have a unique place in this process. These seemingly static representations of the future come alive when placed in relation to the urban presence that envelopes
them. They are imaginations of a certain future in which Mangalore’s present smallness is revealed through building developers’ dreams of bigness. They are visions of castles in the air.

Budapest’s VIII district is undergoing widespread and divergent forms of purification and gentrification. This article is a ‘rhythmanalysis’ of one of the district’s most well known streets which, through analysing a typical day in the life of its public places, uncovers the temporal and spatial aspects of these processes as well as the everyday acts of resilience that halt or slow them.

This paper analyses three different types of
displacement – social, cultural and economic – in the
lives of three women and their families which have
been affected by the creation of the Mangalore special
economic zone. Conceptualising the displacements in
rhythmic terms, it first details the subversion of
progressive land reforms and the reassertion of
caste-based oppression, followed by the clash between
the dharma of the spirits of the land and the neo-liberal
dharma of capitalistic development. Finally, it looks at
life in a resettlement colony where families that have
been uprooted from the agricultural production
cycle are closed off from the urban life they are
expected to adopt.

Weathered hands move scrap metal from the homes of those who live in and around Zugdidi to the Black Sea port of Poti, and Georgian society moves too, moulding itself around one of the country’s leading exports. From bathtubs, bedsprings and boilers to pots & pans, tin cans and coat stands... in Harvest Georgia the process of scrap metal collecting, weighing and exporting is told through the interaction of these re-valued objects, with those who handle them as part of their everyday lives.

CfP: Cities of the forking paths: intercommunal (dis)harmony and the rhythms of everyday life

We're looking for papers for a panel at SIEF2015, Zagreb, 21-25 June 2015

Global cities are variously represented as utopian multiethnic, interreligious celebrations of cosmopolitan difference, or conversely as dark hives of ethnic and class conflict. Against this split narrative, smaller cities that exhibit ethnic or religious tensions are often portrayed as lacking, provincial or backwards. In light of recent developments -- including the supposed demise of multiculturalism in Europe's cities, the rise of urban Hindu nationalism in India and a surge of violence in towns across the Middle East -- we seek to complicate narratives of communal disharmony with a specific focus on those semi-peripheral smaller cities that are often overlooked by urban scholars. Thinking through these ideas rhythmically (temporally and spatially) allows ethnographers and historians to explore the everyday realities of how community is performed and circulated in smaller cities. It is our contention that inhabitants of plural cities exhibit creative marginality in the face of contrived coexistence, that the heteronomous spaces and times of cities produce contradictory logics that undermine ethnonationalist state goals, and that the mundane cycles of everyday life can destabilise seemingly hegemonic projects. We welcome contributions from a range of geographic settings, historical periods and methodological approaches that address the problem of alterity and its discontents in unsettled urban times and spaces.

Conveners: Ian M. Cook (Central European University) & Daniel Monterescu (Central European University)

Discussant: Eviatar Zerubavel (Rutgers University)

Deadline January 14th 2015

Propose a paper here:
http://nomadit.co.uk/sief/sief2015/panels.php5?PanelID=3507

Course Description:

Sound studies describes the various ways in we can know the world through sound, understand sonic phenomena or practices, and explore how sound extends the contours of academic knowledge production.

Highly interdisciplinary and often undertaken in cooperation with those outside academia, from musicians to professionals, the field of sound studies is increasingly diverse, daring and exciting.

This co-taught course will explore the cultural, social, philosophical, political and material dimensions of sound and listening. We will explore questions such as: how do race and ethnicity intersect with listening? is our pristine natural sonic environment increasingly ruined by industrialisation and urbanisation? how do states seek to regulate sound and noise? how does podcasting change academic knowledge production? how can we know the world through sound? what's the importance of sound design in documentary film? what does the advancement of literacy do to cultures of orality? how does technology mediate sonic knowledge and musical production?
Taking sonic mediums seriously, the course also includes practical sessions in which students will learn how to create audio materials relating to the topics and theories explored in class.

Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world. (Sterne, 2012 p.2)
Sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality. Metaphors for sound construct perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life. Sound resides in this feedback loop of materiality and metaphor, infusing words with a diverse spectrum of meanings and interpretations. (Novak and Sakakeeny, 2015 p. 1)

In recent years there has been an explosion of work on, with or through sound by researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Highly interdisciplinary and often undertaken in cooperation with those outside academia, from musicians to professionals, the field of sound studies is increasingly diverse, daring and exciting.
Using sonic frames to think through how technology mediates relations, how cultures of perception are learnt and changed, and how the growth and diversity of mass media informs communication can help us develop fresh approaches to longstanding questions, whatever our disciplinary home.
This interdisciplinary and experimental course into the cultural, social, political and material dimensions of sound and listening will challenge students to both rethink their existing ideas and develop new interests.

We will explore questions such as: What is ‘noise’ and why do states seek to regulate it? How does culture shape sound? How does architectural practice change as cities become nosier? What role does sound play in film? What is the relationship between music and social structure? How does technology mediate listening? What can listening more and reading less do to academic practice? How do people listen to religion? How can sound be seen? What else do we listen with apart from our ears?
Taking sonic mediums seriously, the course includes practical sessions in which students will learn how to create audio materials relating to the topics and theories explored in class.

Structure & Aim
The aim of this course is two-fold: firstly to interrogate some of the key debates in sound studies, secondly to acquaint students with some of the different skills needed to undertake research through a sonic lens. Touching on some of the most important moments in the development of the field, as well as contemporary debates, 9 of the 12 sessions will be used to help students situate their thinking within a body of scholarship that is seemingly in a constant state of emergence. The remaining 3 sessions (taking place once every 4 weeks) will involve practical learning and hands on engagement within and outside the university. It will push students to experiment with different ways of listening and researching – from soundwalks to podcasting to transduction. Students will develop public facing materials in these sessions, which may be published if of sufficient quality.
Learning Goals
Students will:
• have an understanding of the possibilities sound studies offers for research within and across disciplines
• become acquainted with some of the key debates in the field
• learn how to do field recordings
• learn how to make a podcast
• learn how to transduce images into sounds
• experiment with applying theoretical and analytical insights in work across different sonic mediums


Instructors

Internal

• Ian M. Cook  (CookI@spp.ceu.edu)
Research Fellow at the Centre for Media Data and Society
Lead for 6 sessions along with course design & management
Please contact Ian for all questions or concerns regarding the course and the other instructors for questions regarding their sessions.

• Cameran Ashraf (ashrafc@spp.ceu.edu)
Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy
Teaching Class 10 ‘Orality, Literacy and Technology’

• Jeremy Braverman (bravermanj@ceu.edu)
Media and Visual Education Specialist & Visiting Professor Department of History
Teaching Class 6 ‘Sound Design for Film’ and co-teaching Class 1 ‘Introductions’

• Dumitrita Holdis (HoldisD@spp.ceu.edu)
Centre for Media, Data and Society
Co-teaching Class 8 ‘Podcasting for Academics’

• Sara Svensson (svenssons@ceu.edu)
Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies & Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy
Teaching Class 3 ‘The Policies of Regulating Sound’

External

• Judit Emese Konopás (juditemesekonopas@gmail.com)
Independent Sound Researcher
Co-teaching Class 5 ‘Soundwalks / Phenomenological Music Listening’

• Zoltán Kovács (zoltandotkovacs@gmail.com)
Interaction Designer, musician – Budapest Metropolitan University & Elefant
Teaching Class 12 ‘Transduction and Sonification’

• Lucia Udvardyová (ludvardyova@gmail.com)
Journalist, Musician, Organizer/curator, DJ – Easterndaze/Baba Vanga/SHAPE
Co-teaching Class 5 ‘Soundwalks / Phenomenological Music Listening’