Visually Attending to black Senses of Place Through “Everyday Things” in White City, West London

Abstract

AbstractThis paper shares a practice‐related rendering of Katherine McKittrick's conceptional notion “a black sense of place” by reflecting on visual practices adopted in my research project, “Everyday Things: Visualising Young Black Adults’ Experiences in White City”. In this article, I advance a black sense of place to be a conceptual lens that is capable of zooming in and out of the embodied perceptions and practices of resistance routinely created by Black people. I link black senses of place with the audio‐visual motif of “the rose that grew from concrete”. This motif acts as a metaphor, for the ways of being that Black people practice in overcoming the struggles of anti‐blackness. Providing snapshots of audio‐visual practices advanced in White City, West London with a kinship collective of young Black adults, I explore how black senses of place may be visually attended to through a combined methodological adoption of visual ethnography and photography.