Fear Objects in Public Place: Everyday Encounters at an Urban Coast

Communities of Fear, Amsterdam, Hollanda, 29 Eylül - 02 Ekim 2023, (Yayınlanmadı)

Fear Objects in Public Place:

Everyday Encounters at an Urban Coast

Fear is an emotion functioning through anticipation and imagination. By this, it

becomes a key emotion toning our presence in public places where co-presence with

strangers or half-knowns is the code. Brian Massumi points out how fear triggers people,

even if there is not a perceptible object, in his article “Political Ontologies of Threat”.

“Sticking” to certain bodies and objects or circulating in the atmosphere, fear navigates our

modes of presence in public places. Based on my study everyday life of an urban coast in

Turkey, this paper will discuss how fear circulates with or without a perceptible object in a

public place.

Focusing on spatial, temporal and affective dynamics of social encounters, I’ve

conducted ethnography on everyday life on an urban coast in Samsun, Turkey. This coast

was known as countryside for summerhouses until around early 2000s, and then it turned into

a brand-new neighborhood for upper-middle class city dwellers after gentrification policies,

but also remained open to all as a public place. By this, the coastline became a place for

encounters of city dwellers from different backgrounds and it is mostly appointed as a site of

comfort, fun and security and dissociated from other parts of the city through abjection of

other parts’ residents in daily discourses.

Throughout the study, I explored three dominant modes of people’s existence on this

coastline: loneliness, proximity and friendship. These different modes are made possible

through several spatial and temporal settings that serve to safety, security and trust in public

places. Fear, on the other hand, creates moments of rupture within these modes and feelings.

From the fear of coronavirus to fear of people from different neighborhoods, I’ve

encountered different objects of fear navigating people’s trajectory in this place. In this paper,

I will reflect on discourses of fear at this public place, which is actually mostly associated

with fun, freedom, and contend.