#ash amin

[redazionecultura]

Le conseguenze del futuro - Sei dialoghi per ritrovare la fiducia nel domani

Le conseguenze del futuro – Sei dialoghi per ritrovare la fiducia nel domani

Ascoltare il presente, per comprendere, curare e ricostruire il futuro. Un ciclo di sei percorsi di indagine dedicati ad altrettante tematiche fondamentali per lo sviluppo della società: Le conseguenze del futuro. Un ciclo di appuntamenti in cui da dicembre a maggio si parlerà di conoscenza, formazione, comunità, salute, cibo e spazio, riflettendo sul senso di questi termini e sul valore che…

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[anniekoh]

Yet to stand in a busy city anywhere in the world is to be surrounded by so much that might turn out to be formative: the private mingling with the public and the commercial with the noncommercial; the rub of humans, technologies, buildings, infrastructures, animals, and nature; the many human acts of preying, praying, lingering, passing through, watching, and listening; the amplifications of intersecting bodies, objects, matter, symbols, smells, and sounds; the rhythms set by callers, clocks, codes, timetables, technologies, and official and unofficial guardians of a public space; and the asynchrony of repetition, emergence, and novelty following from the latter impulses and combinations. The busy street or mall presents as a space of multiple happenings, influences from near and afar, continuous ebb and flow, more than human resonances

Ash Amin, "Animated space." Public Culture 27.2 76 (2015): 239-258.

[anniekoh]

Ash Amin, "Lively Infrastructures" (published as an article in Theory, Culture and Society, 2014.

I had posted the talk description a while back, but finally got a chance to listen to the lecture this week. One of the signs of a good talk is when I’m frantically scribbling down the scholars referenced, 

Amin talks about infrastructure (very broadly defined to include most of the built environment, esp. housing, and not only sewers, electricity, roads) via three analytical lens:

1. infrastructure as provisioning

2. infrastructure as symbolic/political, in which infrastructure functions as both material/symbolic constructions of modernity, regardless of the efficacy of the goods delivered AND sites of governmentality, social selection and discrimination. 

Amin admiringly quotes Brian Larkin’s phrase "pipes turn out to be documents" from Larkin's paper "The politics and poetics of infrastructure" in Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343. 

3. infrastructure as sensorium, immersive landscapes that shape sentiments and ethical dispositions. Here is where I got super excited and started scribbling down names -  but it turns out Amin has posted the pre-publication version of the article (linked here as pdf).

Kenny, Nicolas. "From body and home to nation and world: the varying scales of transnational urbanism in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the twentieth century." Urban History 36.02 (2009): 223-242.

Hirschkind, Charles. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. Columbia University Press, 2006.

The case studies include the Vila Viva program (in Brazil) which replaces favelas with modern housing complexes in the name of progress. Amin talks here about the violence of the new development’s aesthetic, buildings that offer no recognition of the long tradition of self-build, and deny residents the opportunity to alter the outside or inside of their dwellings (even washing lines are inpermissible).

[doe-ve]

There is no archetypal public space, only variegated space-times of aggregation. 

- Ash Amin, 2006