Urban encounters: Performance and making urban worlds

AbstractThis article develops how urban encounters have been theorized and mobilized across the social sciences to emphasize the ordinary and unspectacular ways in which people live together in cities in response to widespread talk of a crisis of multiculturalism. Situated in the contact zone between social science disciplines and arts practice, the article argues for performative and more political theorizations of spaces of encounter. Focusing on photographer Mahtab Hussain’s project You Get Me? (2017), the article examines how photographic portraits offer one example of a performative encounter that takes up as a position in the politics of lived experience by carving out spaces where difference might be encountered in new ways, and by challenging viewers to imagine and enact new ways of being-in-common.