Month: February 2026

Categories
Environment power Research methods sensory Uncategorized

The City That Won’t Let You Sit: Sensory Criminology and Urban Pain

Luisa T. Schneider

What does a city demand of a body when it refuses to let that body stop moving?

Exclusion, displacement, and hostile urban governance come together to regulate and criminalize through law, policy, and space. The effects of this governance on those targeted are lived sensorially. They accumulate in bodies over time and are enacted not only symbolically, administratively, or practically, but also through pain.

Learning from houseless people’s sensory navigation, and from sensory criminology’s attention to how punishment and control operate through the senses (see Herrity et al. 2021 [sensory penalities]), reveals that Western cities govern houselessness through what I conceptualize as deliberate nociception. There is a pervasive, intentional production of sensory pain that functions as a mechanism of regulation. This governance is not primarily enacted at the level of spectacular punishment, but through mundane, everyday encounters that keep people on their feet, in their shoes, and on the move.

From hostile architecture to deliberate nociception

Urban design disciplines and excludes through hostile and defensive architecture. Work on The London spikes controversy by James Petty (2016) or by Roland Rosenberger on Callous Objects (2017), among others, shows how benches, spikes, dividers, and sound deterrents communicate who belongs in the city and who does not. These analyses tend to frame hostility as deterrence, moral signalling, or behavioural modification.

If we follow where those who are so “deterred” go, however, we realize that hostile architectures and associated regulations are not simply about discouraging presence. They are about hurting. Pain is not a side effect of urban governance; it is the technique.

How does this work? In Leipzig, where my research took place, people experiencing houselessness are systematically prevented from sitting, lying down, or remaining still for extended periods of time. Public order regulations criminalize “lingering,” “camping,” or Lagern which includes sitting on a jacket, rearranging space for comfort, or resting in place. Benches are segmented, surfaces slanted, sprinklers installed, and classical music is blasted for hours near transport hubs. Together, these practices form an urban environment that produces pain through enforced standing, walking, and sensory overload. Because there are no alternative places available, houseless people are forced either to keep moving or to endure these architectures despite the pain they cause. This is governance through nociception: regulation enacted by targeting the body’s capacity to rest, recover, and withdraw from stimuli.

Limbs as sites of governance

Theoretically, I move away from the abstract notion of “the homeless body” toward limbs as the primary site of governance. Feet, legs, backs, arms, and hands are not metaphorical here; they are infrastructural. They are the means through which people move, carry belongings, access resources, and maintain a fragile sense of home wherever they are (forced to) go. For people experiencing houselessness, home is embodied, mobile, and continually under threat. Home exists in backpacks, shopping bags, and on the body itself. As a result, limbs become overburdened, injured, swollen, infected, and exhausted. The city’s regulatory apparatus targets these very capacities. By prohibiting sitting, discouraging stillness, and enforcing constant movement, urban governance undermines the bodily conditions that make survival possible. This produces a particular form of spatial violence that goes beyond exclusion from space or participation but encapsulates structural violence and denial of bodily possibility. The right to rest, to take off one’s shoes, to withdraw from sensory assault, is effectively reserved for those with access to private housing.

Sensory citizenship and the criminalization of rest

Implicit in these practices is the deeply entrenched assumption that sensory regulation belongs in the private sphere. Housing is imagined as the space where bodies recover from exposure, where shoes come off, where pain can be managed, and where sensory input can be controlled. Public space, by contrast, is designed for movement, productivity, and consumption.

Thinking with Arendt (1958), we can see how deeply entrenched this private–public divide is, how long its durée, and ethnography shows us how it continues to structure contemporary law and urban governance. What is at play here is a violence of non-acknowledgement. Sensory needs need not be actively denied to people experiencing houselessness; rather, those needs are rendered unintelligible once housing is absent. The city refuses to acknowledge and to compensate for what housing would ordinarily provide. The result is a form of sensory citizenship in which some bodies are entitled to stillness, comfort, and recovery, while others are governed through exposure, noise, cold, hardness, and pain. Rest itself becomes suspect, and stillness becomes criminalized.

Methodological intervention: attuning to hostility on the margins

My argument draws on a five-year sensory ethnography with people experiencing houselessness in Leipzig. Crucially, in interviews, collaborators rarely spoke about feet, legs, or standing. Pain was normalized, unremarkable, often unnamed. What made these dynamics visible was sensorial co-presence: walking long distances together, standing for hours, carrying bags, waiting, navigating surveillance, and being repeatedly moved on. Having learned from sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) and work in sensory criminology on thick sensory environments most notably from Jason Warr’s writing on being trapped during a prison fire (2010), I remained with people attending to their sensory worlds, until pain emerged as an unexpected analytic focus.  I describe this methodological stance as attuning to hostility on the margins. It involves tuning into absence as much as presence: the absence of places to sit, to lie down, to recover; the repetition of movement; the accumulation of minor sensations that become debilitating over time. This form of attunement requires staying with the ordinary, the mundane, and the taken-for-granted, where violence often hides most effectively.

It also highlights how risk logics translate care into threat. For example, nail clippers which are essential for preventing infections are routinely confiscated as potential weapons, illustrating how individual bodily care is reframed as a security risk, echoing broader transformations of risk and responsibility in penality (Hannah‑Moffat 2005).

What this data does for sensory criminology

What do the experiences of houseless people’s urban navigation give sensory criminology?

First, they shift attention from spectacular or acute pain to slow, attritional harm. The pain documented here is chronic, cumulative, and often invisible, resonating with work on chronic pain as something that resists recognition and legitimacy (Johnson 2019). Second, they expand sensory criminology spatially. Rather than focusing primarily on enclosed spaces of punishment such as prisons, cells, or detention centres, they show how open city streets function as punitive environments, governing through exposure rather than confinement. Third, they redirect analytic attention from sensing places to sensing conditions of possibility: who is allowed to rest, to recover, to withdraw, and whose bodies are instead governed through pain. This invites sensory criminology to engage more fully with questions of urban governance, citizenship, and inequality. Attuning to hostility on the margins reveals that, through these forms of governance, houselessness becomes a condition of being kept in pain, on the move, and in one’s shoes. Sensory criminology allows us to see how cities govern through sensation and how suffering is not only produced but carefully designed and hidden in plain sight.

Luisa’s chapter on this subject can be found here: Schneider, Luisa. (2026) ‘Dispossessed realities Houselessness and spatial violence’, in the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. Herrity, K., Sharma, K., Warr, J. & Umamaheswar, J. (eds.)  Vol1, Section 6, chapter 19.

References:

Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The human condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Herrity, K., et al. (2021). Sensory penalities : exploring the senses in spaces of punishment and social control. United Kingdom, Emerald Publishing.

Hannah‑Moffat, K. (2005). “Criminogenic needs and the transformative risk subject: Hybridizations of risk/need in penality.” Punishment & Society, 7(1): 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474505048132 

Johnson, Mark. (2019). “The landscape of chronic pain: Broader perspectives.” Medicina, 55(182):1–19.

Petty, J. (2016). The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture’. DOAJ, 5(1):  67 – 81

Rosenberger, R. (2017). Callous Objects. Designs against the Homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. London, Sage Publications.

Warr, Jason. (2021). Fire! Fire! – The prison cell and the thick sensuality of trappedness. In Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control, edited by Kate Herrity, Bethany E. Schmidt and Jason Warr, 19–34. Emerald Studies in Culture, Criminal Justice and the Arts. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Other published works:

Schneider, L. T., et al. (2026). Agency Beyond Confinement: Rethinking the Relationship Between Agency and Structure in the Contemporary World, Routledge. Taylor & Francis.

Schneider, Luisa. (2026) ‘Dispossessed realities Houselessness and spatial violence’, in the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. Herrity, K., Sharma, K., Warr, J. & Umamaheswar, J. (eds.)  Vol1, Section 6, chapter 19.

Schneider, L. T. (2025). Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy after Conflict. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. OA: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/love-and-violence-in-sierra-leone/4A94801CE53AD8DE995BE149CBE2926B#fndtn-contents

Schneider, L. T. (2024). Imprisonment seeking among rough sleepers in Germany: Rethinking disciplinary and control society through a temporal lens. Carceral Worlds Legacies, Textures and Futures. H. Stuit, J. Weegels and J. Turner. London, NY, Bloomsbury: 127 – 144.

Schneider, L. T. (2023). Rape, ritual, rupture, and repair: Decentering Euro-American logics of trauma and healing in an analytic autoethnography of the five years after my rape in Sierra Leone. Ethos: https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12392

Schneider, L. T. (2022). “Humanising Through Conjecture: Recognition and Social Critique among Houseless People.” Ethnos: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2093932

Schneider, L. T. (2021). “Let me take a vacation in prison before the streets kill me! Rough sleepers’ longing for prison and the reversal of less eligibility in neoliberal carceral continuums.” Punishment & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211010222

Schneider, L. T. (2020). “Sexual violence during research: How the unpredictability of fieldwork and the right to risk collide with academic bureaucracy and expectations.” Critique of Anthropology: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X2091727

Schneider, L. T. (2020). “‘My home is my people’ homemaking among rough sleepers in Leipzig, Germany.” Housing Studies: 1-18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2020.1844157

Categories
Environment Green Criminology History power sensory Uncategorized

International Handbook of Sensory Criminology Series: 3

Introducing… Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses

This post marks the third in a series dedicated to discussing each of the organising themes of the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology, in preparation for its launch. Each piece will leave comments open as an experiment in discussion. Please feel free to post talking points or ask questions – we particularly welcome students. See earlier posts in the series, or the link above, for contents, contributors, reviews and signposting for the next instalment.

The second section opens with an introduction written up from a conversation between Onwubiko Agozino, Rose Boswell, Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Sharon Gabie, Andrew Kettler, Macpherson Uchenna Nnam, Jessica Leigh Thornton and Jason Warr entitled “Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology”. The discussion reflects on each of the following chapters, foregrounding two interrelated issues: the impact of colonial and imperial legacies on sensory criminological concerns in the present, and the lessons it needs to learn to become part of the broader effort to decolonise criminology as we look toward the future. These themes unfold into a complex consideration of what decolonization looks like: “Within these chapters, we find broader discussions of justice, history, coloniality, criminology, anthropology, ocean cultures, the potential toxicity of legacy, and the lessons that can be drawn from memoir” (p80).

These works disrupt western ways of approaching matters of “justice”. Each of the chapters in this section emphasise the need to consider harm in ways that frequently transcend the visible, the legible. While the focus of these pieces is the abhorrent legacies of colonialism and ways to reconceive justice, there are echoes in these treatments of harm, of the section that precedes it, disrupting how we think about violence and damage beyond immediate materiality and legal classifications. Within Coloniality… “we are invited to…think, rethink, and unthink what justice is, feels like, tastes like, smells like, sounds like, was, and should be in a future free from racism, racialisation, and harms of apartheid” (p81).

The first chapter in the second section – Doing Justice Differently: A Pan‑Africanist Perspective is written by Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo, and Macpherson Uchenna Nnam. In it they explore the rich history of Africanist justice and the sensorial tableaus woven in pre-colonial forms of social control. They detail the rich sensoriousness of some of the traditional justice practices which were later suppressed in favour of patriarchal, gendered, racialised violence as well as those perpetuating the violence of apartheid. In considering this history, the authors encourage us to understand, engage and challenge colonial – and other – injustices of the past as a means of imagining a different future. In his chapter I’ll Make You Shit!: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons, Andrew Kettler explores colonialist discourses of smell and pollution (and logics of supposed inferiority and threats to the colonial status quo) to consider both how colonialism functions through, and weaponises, the panoptical nature of the prison. The material and the symbolic are combined to sate the colonial need to racialise, sequester, control, exploit, and monitor the bodies of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the oppressed. Kettler foregrounds the discursive weaponisation of olfaction, whereby smell is used to ‘other’ the colonial victim, forcing proximity to shit, death and putrification. ‘Olfactory othering’ is divorced from the actual smell reality, though significant stenches formed part of the everyday in penitentiaries designed for both foreign enemies and colonised locals (p97). Placing the racially oppressed into a noisome space, allowed colonial powers to cast them too as being inherently noisome. This justification then becomes cyclical, justifying and legitimating injustice.

Rosabelle Boswell, Jessica Leigh Thornton, Sharon Gabie, Zanele Hartmann, and Ismail Lagardien follow with their chapter: The Resonance Factor: Personal Experience and the Role of Sensory Ethnography in Countering Violent, Abhorrent Heritage. Both this contribution and the final one of the section again look at the horrors of the colonial past and persistence of neo-colonialism as lenses through which to understand and challenge potential futures for criminology. Boswell et al explore how sensory ethnography can help to reveal the enduring and often overlooked impacts of structural and direct violence in what they term ‘abhorrent heritage’. Focusing on South Africa’s coastal communities, they show how violence is not only historical but deeply embodied. They explore how sensory foci, allow us to access the dimensions of violence that are not always visible or legible, can unsettle dominant heritage discourses as well as expand on criminological theory to include the affective, spatial, and spiritual dimensions of harm, resistance, and social suffering. Onwunbiko Agozino concludes this section with his chapter Decolonizing Sensory Rhetorics and Activism in Africana Prison Memoirs. He considers the important lessons that can, and need to be, learned by sensory criminologists if we are to avoid the essentialist empiricism of criminology’s positivist paradigms and be part of the ongoing work to decolonise our discipline’s future. He makes the point that taking on a sensory ‘lens’ can allow us to explore that which has hitherto been overlooked, or more specifically, in the contexts of the Global South, obfuscated and silenced. He cautions that, given the materiality of sensory methods, we run the risk of once more falling into disciplinary traditions that trap us in conservative and punitive logics that preclude the type of revolutionary, liberatory, and critical criminology that we need to make progress.

These contributions urge the reader to conceive of a broader conception of justice, one which also accounts for our relationship with, and reliance on the land. Agozino urges a greater awareness that “Indigenous ways of knowing and practicing ecological sustainability include embodied and spiritual supra sensory evidence that could be missed if following only Western empiricism” (p120). Failure to acknowledge these bodies and systems of knowing replicate harms and injustice both to one another and to the world we inhabit, alienating us further from the earth that sustains us. As Dastile et al assert, dominant political systems at once diminish the toll of capitalist enterprise on the soil and sea others rely on, resulting in sensorially potent effects of exploitation in the form of, for example pollution, noise, toxic waste. In Boswell et al’s chapter this results in diminished opportunities for keeping livelihoods alive, threatened by the imposition of prohibitive regulatory frameworks. These structures do not recognise the knowledge and experience of those whose forbears have inhabited the land for centuries. Simultaneously, these systems rely on sensorial cues to reinforce cultural, racial and class biases – as Kettler elaborates in his consideration of olfactory othering as a key facet of social control in the colonial prison. A broader conception of justice here, allows us to conceive of the ways in which its practices are interwoven with our connections to both the earth and to one another. Subjects which are revisited later in the book, in section five, albeit in very different ways and places.

Andrew Kettler examines the ways in which the repertoire of olfactory imposition was woven into atmospheres of necropolitical violence; the putridity of colonial regulation (p97). The manufacture of these sensory worlds served both to demarcate space and justify its occupation. The colonial project was bolstered by racist estimations of indigenous sensory difference both as sensory and sensing bodies. The colonial creation of the savage as subordinate was reinforced “due to their supposedly inferior mental functions and perceptual apparatuses, which were believed to be always and falsely attuned to the mystical totems and taboo” (p98). Kettler refers to the sensory studies term for ethical and empathetic numbing, “self-blinding” to the humanity of those subject to violence and torture, percepticide (p100). There is a common strand between percepticide and Agonizo’s caution on the perils of too narrow a conception of the sensory. There is a danger of reiterating what he identifies as the Western tendency to shy away from bigger questions and alternative systems of knowledge.

While Agozino cautions on the perils of too narrow a conception of the sensory, and the danger of reiterating Western tendencies to obfuscate, to shy away from bigger questions and other ways of knowing, Dastile et al and Boswell et al identify mechanisms to move us closer to reconciliation. Their work identifies remedies beyond the imposition of bureaucratic, criminal justice frameworks. Community-led fora for embodied truth-telling and co-created knowledge that more closely honour lived experience, and which can better facilitate healing. Sensory criminology offers the capacity to think, feel, listen, see differently, and in so doing reimagine future conceptions of justice in ways that offer the possibility of mitigating rather than engendering harm, and of fostering inclusivity rather than facilitating social exclusion and marginalisation. Dastile et al argue for a reconfiguring of systems of justice which privilege Africanist human security and communitarianism (p92). Their chapter demonstrates how the sensorial aspects of reintegrative justice allow for a greater distinction between the affective response to the act, and the corporeal dignity of the actor – dividing feeling from feelings. Boswell et al urge us to adopt a sensorially-astute sensitivity both to embodied remembrances of violence, and those which intrude upon the interior into the dream world of spiritual life. The sensory constitutes a potential mechanism for disrupting Western percepticide.

It is important, too, to note that a significant number of scholars reject the conceptual framing of decolonising criminology all together. Juan Tauri takes issue with what he identifies as a frequently tokenistic, superficial and ultimately harmful effort to assimilate and neutralize indigenous voices. Rather than representing progress, these contributions mimic and reproduce the structural violence of the systems they emerge from. He argues of criminology’s decolonising efforts that “until it confronts its deep entanglement with colonisation, any reconciliation with Indigenous scholars will remain rhetorical rather than real” (2025). These vital criticisms raise the fundamental question of whether the master’s tools can ever dismantle the master’s house (to misquote Audre Lorde 1979). In the field of academic discourse this can arguably become a murkier issue. In this context what and who constitutes the master’s tools is itself an open question – contributors, discourse, theoretical frame, methods, formats of dissemination?

The contributors of this section have emphasised the need for reckoning, a heightened sensitivity to the violence of historical and persistent processes and forged potential pathways for us all to consider possibilities for doing justice differently. Where sound dominated treatments of violence in the last section, in section two smell provides a mechanism for charting the textures of the everyday violence of racism. Our proximity to one another, central to social interaction, is close, personal, as are, frequently, those processes of distancing and othering. As Classen et al emphasise; smell is a social phenomenon (Classen et al 1994). Though this is not to detract from the potency of Boswell et al’s identification of weaponised noise as a form of cultural violence (p114). If, as Boswell et al assert, developing a sensorial attunement to the harms of racist and colonial violence is a necessary step to more constructive iterations of justice, we must endeavour to do justice differently. In our failure to consider colonial legacies, we bequeath a most abhorrent heritage.

Some questions

What possibilities are opened up by considering the sensory in these contexts?

What might it mean to address “abhorrent heritage”?

Is the concept of “percepticide” useful more broadly to account for cultural blindness?

What might a decolonial criminology look/sound/smell like?

References

Classen, C., Howes, D., Synnott, D. (1994) Aroma: the cultural history of smell. London: Routledge https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781134822409_A25032735/preview-9781134822409_A25032735.pdf

Lorde, A. (1979/2018) The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. London: Penguin (in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114) [online] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/audre-lorde-the-master-s-tools-will-never-dismantle-the-master-s-house https://monoskop.org/images/2/2b/Lorde_Audre_1983_The_Masters_Tools_Will_Never_Dismantle_the_Masters_House.pdf

Tauri, J. (2025). Decolonising Criminology? We’re Not Interested: Indigenous Refusal and the Limits of the Discipline. Journal of Global Indigeneity, 9(4). https:/​/​doi.org/​10.54760/​001c.151793 [online] https://www.journalofglobalindigeneity.com/article/151793-decolonising-criminology-we-re-not-interested-indigenous-refusal-and-the-limits-of-the-discipline