Focusing on cities, this project seeks to elucidate the interrelatedness of space, place-making, emotional experiences and emotion-articulations in interactions of different types of âbodiesâ. To narrow this broad scope, particular attention will be paid to emotional aspects of public interventions at night-time. I am interested to see how people navigate the city and to what extent their movement-patterns are reflected in or influenced by their emotional attitudes attached to certain locales. Self-perceptions, how people are externally framed, and collective as well as individual memories presumably affect how one uses cityscapes, which necessitates ethnographic methods to unearth narratives of emotional landscapes and meanings attached to a cityâs âplacesâ. In the context of interventions, the questions of emotionality of experience and self-expression will have to be asked for those intervening, those âreceivingâ interventions at night and those who may have opinions about night-time interventions that based on non-experientially obtained âknowledgeâ. When booming digital and social media enable self-representation, opinion and information-distribution at a near-omniscient scale, it becomes easier to develop emotional atmospheres or form a picture of âplacesâ that rests on other peopleâs experiences. Also, the virtual realm may offer a different kind of platform to express emotional attitudes that remain obscure in real-life face-to-face interventions â for all involved. It will be interesting to follow digital footprints of nightly city-dwellers to investigate their (emotional) understandings of cityscapes. Hopefully, knowledge about mobility-patterns and emplaced sentiments, related to self-identification, stereotypes etc., helps improve communication between groups involved in interventions and establish a more positive emotional cityscape.
Förster, Claire
Start date:
October 2016Research Topic:
Emotional Experiences of Nighttime InterventionsResearch pathway:
Human GeographyResearch Supervisor:
Dr Sergei Shubin and Dr Matt Roach and Dr Andrew WilliamsSupervising school:
Department of Geography, Swansea UniversityPrimary funding source:
ESRC StudentshipExternal Sponsor:
Blurrt and Ordnance SurveyEmail:
918547@swansea.ac.uk