Cultural Topologies of Experience

Everyday interweavings of different temporalities and spatialities challenge our modes of recollection, representation, and complicate practice. This has implications for our understanding of bodies, causality, agency and power, and engagements with the wider environment. This discussion will explore the continuities and disruptions in the sense of social totality as a global condition of contemporary urban life.

It seeks the sites and moments where aesthetic experience and ethical situations collide with with political and moral institutions and norms as a way of linking the ethical with the political.

Dr. Shields is the Henry Marshall Tory Chair, Professor in Sociology and in Art and Design at the University of Alberta and Director of the City-Regions Studies Centre. He is an award-winning author and co-editor of numerous books including: Spatial Questions, The Virtual, Lifestyle Shopping, Cultures of Internet, Lefebvre Love and Struggle, & Places on the Margin.

Dr. Shields was past Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. A Commonwealth Scholar at University of Sussex, he founded Space and Culture, an international peer-refereed journal, and Curb Canadian planning magazine. He was 2014 City of Vienna Visiting Professor in Architecture and Planning at TUWien and is currently completing research on nanotechnology as a space of concern.

Dr. Shields will also give a graduate seminar on October 31 at 1:00 pm in EV 11.655.

All are welcome.