N°42. (March 2025-August 2025). Urban sensibilities and experiences: Social production of senses and emotions in contemporary cities.

Thematic Coordinators

Ph.D. Ana Lucía Cervio, University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina.
Ph.D. Carolina Peláez González, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico.

Urban centers today are undergoing transformation processes in response to environmental, energy, technological, political, economic, labor, and migratory changes, to name just a few, which are occurring in both the Global North and the Global South. These transformations entail the deepening of processes of inequality and socio-spatial and racial segregation, embodied in bodies intersected by gender, race/ethnicity, class, generation, and geocultural context, which impose particular ways of living, feeling, and inhabiting cities that must be critically explored by the Social Sciences.

As privileged sites for the production of bodies, interactions, and commodities within the framework of capitalism, cities are also strategic centers for the reproduction and circulation of sensory and affective experiences. Practices of smelling, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, along with other forms of sensory perception, are related to the everyday environments in which individuals live and coexist. Thus, analyzing the urban from the perspective of sensibilities involves addressing both emotional and sensory experiences as well as the everyday practices and social regulations that compose them at the individual and collective levels, in connection with processes of social structuring and change. Moreover, studying inhabitation in contemporary cities requires observing the configuration of spaces and the emotional and sensory communities that constitute them, in terms of their conflicts, practices, demands, pleasures, and interactions.

This thematic dossier invites academic exchange through the submission of proposals presenting empirical research results, as well as theoretical-methodological reflections that converge in the study of urban senses, experiences, and sensibilities. The objective is to establish dialogues between different theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches that enable a critical examination of the aforementioned social transformations, while also providing a space for reflection and knowledge construction on the challenges that cities impose today.

All proposals should focus on the analytical study of the senses, experiences, and sensibilities produced and reproduced in contemporary cities. Suggested thematic lines include:

• Collective action, urban conflicts, and emotional communities
• Urban space, sensibilities, and inhabitation
• Sensibilities and policies of the body
• Inequalities, sociabilities, and dynamics of social structuring in the city
• Migration, poverty, and processes of socio-spatial and racial segregation in 21st-century cities
• City, emotions, and space
• Digital spaces and urban experiences

Keywords: sensibilities; city; politics of the senses; emotions; space; social structuring.