Sensing Dirty Matter: Sensory Ethnography as a More-Than-Human Approach to Urban Inequalities

Abstract

How do the sensory and material qualities of place relate to, and become vectors for, the inclusion or exclusion of specific lifeforms in/from the city? Based on the assumption that power materializes in the sensory-spatial textures of place, this chapter foregrounds everyday sensory experiences and their associated affective intensities as powerful means to investigate how the material conditions of urban life intersect with questions of power. Sensory ethnography is deployed here as a methodology capable of capturing the commingling of bodies and spaces and revealing the contribution of material agency in the ontology of the urban social. To illustrate these arguments, this chapter presents a sensory ethnography of urban waste in Tor Pignattara, a gentrifying multicultural suburb in Rome, Italy. Following residents’ sensory revulsion, the analysis sheds light on the active contribution of “dirty” matter in the social production of urban difference and the shifting moral geographies of urban renewal.