Radio Mapping DTLA: Urban Humanities X MLA Experiential Session

​Calling urban humanists to RAMBLE!

​Listen, and map, DTLA in this 2.5 hour special experiential session co-hosted by the 2027 MLA Annual Convention and Global Urban Humanities Network (UHN), as co-producers of pilot “season” of a new radio show, The Ramble. In guided teams, participants explore DTLA in dialogue with selected texts (poetry, fiction, on-fiction), collecting recordings that emplace the text onto the city, and vice versa. Foregrounding the urban humanities method of sound scavenging, that is, sensing, interpreting and speculating urban space through creative reuse of field recordings and other forms of found sound, the session introduces MLA attendees to  the interdisciplinary toolkit of the urban humanities, an approach to spatial study fusing architecture, planning and the humanities, through a field-based application of one its  “fused practices” (for example, thick mapping, filmic sensing, emplaced reading, to name a few).