Alex Rhys-Taylor

The festivities of the ‘Great British Summer’ are steeped in ideas of monarchism, timeless heritage and monoculturalism. What is forgotten are the continually striking encounters of peoples and histories which have made and continue to make the country today.

The Europe that is dying is the one that remains hostage to its past. Another Europe is not only possible but is in fact fast becoming an urgent necessity. This would be a Europe of vitality, open to connections, that has let go of its civilisational conceits

How do embodied memories transmit the effects of movement between places, amongst things, and within people into the contemporary urban environment? In a part literary, part sociological account, a sociologist describes the sensations of Marcia, a Caribbean first generation immigrant to Britain, during a visit to an east London street market. In exploring the conditions that give rise to sensation, the narrative points towards a heterogeneity of movements that comprise sensation in heterological spaces. This underlines the multicultural constitution of seemingly mundane experiences and points towards the dynamism that the activation of this experience imparts to the contemporary city.

In recent years there been a growing recognition and celebration of culturally hybridised dishes as part of a Northern European and American street food revolution. As this paper discusses, this hybrid characteristic is nothing new for a port city such as London, which, for the majority of its history, has cooked up  an assortment of transcultural dishes. Through a consideration of everyday lunches such as the halal chicken katsu wrap, jerk chicken bagels and the mince sandwich pakora, this paper examines the relationship between life in the city’s margins, taste, transculturation, adaptation and entrepreneurship. Attracting some of the longest queues of the inner-city’s urban food courts, the popularity of such dishes will be considered in terms of both economic necessity (offering the most calories for the least money) but also as important cultural meeting points, a role that is derived through histories of global exchange. Taking the increasingly ubiquitous chicken katsu curry wrap as its main focus, the paper reveals the origins of the ‘authentic Japanese’ dish amongst early twentieth century dialouge with European and Amwerican tatses. The more recent proliferation of the dish through the lunchtimes of working Londoners is related to the affordances delivered by this early moment of intercultural exchange. The paper also considers the importance of this earlier moment of cultural exchange in the light of the recent rise of Asian economic and cultural influence in the city. Through tracing the evolution of this dish and a taste for it the paper demonstrates the transformations local and global culinary cultures undergo as entrepreneurs strive to accommodate the super-diversity of globally embedded cities. Alongside the jerk bagel and deep fried mince sandwich, the importance of chicken katsu curry wraps will be emphasized for what they lend to an understanding of the complex genealogies of contemporary urban culture.

Part of a panel on superdiversity and urban multiculture: practices and spaces of social mixing and polarisation.

This paper draws on extensive ethnography of street markets in East London to reveal the role of under theorised aspects of urban space (in particular its smell) in the production of new urban ethnicities and the sustenance of everyday multi culture. Drawing on the methods developed as part of a recent sensory turn in the social sciences, along side an array of insights derived from anthropologies of the Caribbean, this paper aims to move beyond simplistic discussions of assimilation, acculturation and integration, and intends to reveal the role of the sensoria and sensibilities that suffuse urban space in the transcultural production of everyday multiculture.

This panel is composed of five urban researchers and invites all 
participants to question the hegemonic visual insight into the world 
both from an epistemological and ontological perspective.
It will present a different mode of attending to the urban areas, 
exploring the changes in our perception and understanding of the area  that occur when we close our eyes. From smell, to sound, to written
text, to looking through photographic lenses with a different insight, 
this panel will present a series of short papers by five researchers’ 
themed on their attention to the urban through the sensorium and the 
changes this can contribute to in Sociological method.

This month's edition of The Wire Salon takes a look at this emerging art-science via a panel of contemporary film makers, sound makers and theorists. Participants include the writer and theorist Alex Rhys-Taylor, and Nina Wakeford, an artist, film maker and course leader of the Visual Sociology MA at London's Goldsmiths College. The event will also include a specially recorded audio-visual introduction to sonic ethnography by the sound recordist and manager of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Ernst Karel.

This talk explores the sensory life worlds of various part s of the city to explore the interaciton between the senses and the spatilisation of ethnic difference in the city. Taking studies of the CBD and an abutting neighbourhood of impoverished migratns,the paper will argue that applying. sensory methods to the sociologicvals tudy of cities results in a deeper understanding of how centres and peripheries are both constituted but also complicated.

Cities are inherently sonorous, aromatic, delectable and textured places, littered with an astonishing array of sensoria. Yet urban sociology has tended to overlook many of the cities sensuous components, relegating them to the background against which ‘real life’ takes place. ‘The Sense of Making Sense’ workshops intend to help bring the nuances ascribed to experience by the ‘other senses,’ out from the ambient background of sociological accounts, and into the foreground.

The multi-sensory sociology that will be developed through these workshops draws on a combination of ethnographic and photographic practice, augmenting them to ‘making sense’ through the nose, ear and taste-buds.

This workshop will comprise of a a session at the start of the day discussing some of the difficulties posed when trying to research the social roles of the 'other senses' including limitaitons imposed by a lack of technologies for their representation and translation. It will also, however, focus on why the 'other' senses might be particularly useful for understanding.  Participants will be invited to explore their own orientation in the city using olfactory, gustatory, sonic, written and
visual methods.

These workshops are intended to be of interest to, and open, to all, However, they will draw on prior knowledge and practices of ethnographers and photographers, and thus, may be of the greatest interest to them.