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FEELING PUBLIC (2020 - )

The question of what it means to feel public lies at the centre of twenty-first-century life. Such a question demands interdisciplinary research spanning the publicness of space and cities (architecture, urban planning, design, policy), the publicness of digital acceleration (tech ethics, digital publics, platforms and broadcasting), and the publicness of belonging, difference and inequality (sociology, cultural infrastructure, humanities).

This project looks to develop an understanding of the changing ways publicness comes to be felt by interrogating the geographies of affect and emotion, the histories and colonialities of the understanding and performances of publicness, and reconsiders these through grounded theoretical approach in four geographically, cultural distinct cities. Building off of decolonial, queer and feminist scholarship, the project aims to operationalise the call to retheorise central tenets of the ‘urban’ from new sites, spaces and times, and in relation with new critical lenses. A critical examination of the concept of public, publicness, and public space within urban discourse, practice and experience is, then, a central research objective. The method will be to apply the lens of cultural infrastructure, inequalities and emotional geography to that question.


From ‘Frames of Love, or Love’s Perspective’ (2018)

‘Love’s perspective might be a window into someone’s life. Or perhaps it is more like a signal that one sees and likes and recognizes what another or other put/s forward as a framed structure of their feeling of life.’
- Adam Kaasa
From ‘Feeling Bodies of Architecture: Towards an Incommensurable Pedagogy’ (2023)

‘Space, time, energy must be made for the bodies of architecture to be present in this new pedagogic performance, for feeling in both senses of the word to happen, for bodies that have moved to be moved again, by and through each other.’
- Adam Kaasa