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This paper qualitatively analyses the implication of urban sensorium as a pedagogic mode in the teaching of Urban Studies. Underpinned by the frames of smart learning environments, the paper reiterates experiencing urban ontologies as spatial learning environments. By drawing from a range of transdisciplinary and experiential modes of learning, this paper maps how an undergraduate course on Bangalore city in India served learners to critically engage with and experience spatial urban ontologies both digitally, and in real-world experiences of learning, furthering learner autonomy and reflection. The methodological prisms of this paper are autoethnography and critical reflection. It is organised around enabling learners recognize the experiential, embodied urban spaces through the urban sensorium via real-life engagements with urban spaces, and creation of digital portfolios that map this learning. Findings from the learners' knowledge of sensory learning, the city's intersectional aspects, and the student's embodied and emplaced self in built environments and digital spaces are analysed via cognitive and affective-reflection levels; the course instructor's reflection is analysed via a process-reflection level. These reflections hold implications for the pedagogy of urban studies in undergraduate classrooms by foregrounding spatiality and urban sensorium as significant critical and affective pedagogic tools. The paper has also accommodated critical engagement with an external faculty member as a co-author, in order to manage any bias or researcher subjectivity in the design.

This paper is a critical reading of the mnemic mode of representing, remembering and disseminating a community's history through visual archives and oral performance as represented in Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke (2011). In the novel, Ghosh imaginatively characterizes Deeti, the matriarch of the La Fami Colver community, as creating a visual archive of her community's movement from the inland plains of various parts of Eastern India to the Mauritius. That the visual archive-called Deeti's Memory-temple-is not informed by a lithic logic (which was one of the governing principles of the modern European archival processes of the time), but is, instead, determined by embodied and performative acts of reliving memories is central to this paper. By moving away from a textual archive of memory and instead, paying attention to creative visual narrative forms, Deeti's mode of archiving, it is argued, is an illustration of other non-narrative traditions of archival methods already in place in Indic traditions. The paper highlights the imperial cosmopolitan vision that characterized European modes of assimilation of knowledge being countered by Deeti, enabling a discursive movement from technologies of memorialization to a cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Samanth Subramanian's travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast (2010) for its strength in establishing the significance of the human—non-human connection in the Indian coastline. Although a decade old, the work stands out even today for its strength in framing 'travel' from a non-terracentric point of view, as most travel writings have been often positioned. Subramanian's travel writing is an important departure from territorial historiographies via travel. His work traces the author's movement across India's coastal regions – the frontiers, as it were, of territoriality, literally following fish. Foregrounding a non-human subject as the travel writing's object of investigation, the paper deploys actor-network theory to analyze Subramanian's reconfiguration of the cultural imaginaries of India's coastlines via mobility thus reassembling the social of India's coastlines. His work, therefore, is argued to be an assemblage of the human and non-human actants creating a new water-based examination of socialities. Fish is the central node of his navigation of India's coastline assemblage, where he examines fish as food, as medicine, as commerce and as culture. By positing India's coastal regions as waterscapes to track movement of people, objects, and every day practices vis-à-vis fish, and moving in-land with the fish in some instances, Subramanian's work does not merely function as a commentary on the coastlines, but also emphasizes the need to interrogate mobility and travel across waterscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]