Catherine Dale

My research plans for the rest of 2024 and into 2025 grow from my research into urban public space. I am preparing three academic articles, each of which considers the uses of common and uncommon public places.

The first article develops some of the ideas laid out in the magazine piece “A Place to Sit.” It investigates the surprising placement of household dining chairs at many of Tokyo’s city bus stop. The article focuses on the unusual tacit agreement between the municipal authorities who don’t supply bus stop seating and small-scale local communities who do. I plan to submit it to the journal City.

The second of the three projects continues my work on feminist group walks, following two conference papers I gave in August 2024 on Feminist History of Cities and  Metamorphosis of the City through Feminist Group Walks. The research follows feminist group guided walks in Istanbul, Cork, Glasgow and elsewhere. I argue that these walks transform patriarchal city streets into palpably feminist places through the innovative and collective use of biography, storytelling, archives, performance, and group discussion. This resaerch aso explores the problem of monuments or monumentality, the deisre for statues of women in cities. I argue that the need for these perpetuates the patriarchal cityscape and hierarchical urban planning. I intend to submit a 3000-5000 word article to the academic human geography journal Environment Planning D or the journal Feminist Theory.

The third and final text associated with my present research into urban space is an academic article on 20th - 21st century UK and USA fiction and poetry about walking and the ethics of looking at others. The article weaves together texts on walking by Virginia Woolf, Garnette Cadogan, Frank O’Hara, Mikki Kendell and others, to reflect on problems that emerge when we look and are looked at in public spaces. Using the theory of the gaze in psychoanalysis, I contend that the kinds of looking done while walking in the city often give way to objectification because city architecture and town planning are based on the overdetermined idea that mobility and appearance in public equates to social freedom. 

Finally, I am co-writing a book under contract with Cambridge University Press. Planned for publication in 2025-26, the book Suicide in Public: The History of Emotions in the 21st Century focuses on the manner in which concepts attached to urban public reflect and produce contemporary emotional subjectivities.