THE SENSORY CITY SIGHTS, SMELLS, SOUNDS AND TOUCH OF ISTANBUL

Course Objectives: The course will focus on relations between the sensory experience and the urban experience, exploring a range of issues such as environmental destruction, consumption, urban governance, identity, temporality, mobility, and human and non-human relations. The course involves readings across genres and disciplines (literary texts, travel writings, texts on visual arts and architecture, and recipe books besides academic texts on senses and cities). Throughout the semester, we will have trips to some neighbourhoods and sites in Istanbul. The students are also expected to design and execute a research project about Istanbul as a laboratory to examine the relationship between the senses and notions of identity, difference, intimacy, and affect.

Course Content: The course focuses on relations between the sensory experience and the urban experience, exploring as it does, a wide range of issues such as environmental destruction, consumption, inequalities and claims on space, cross-class encounters, resistance, memory, belonging/exclusion, and human and non-human relations within Istanbul.