About the Course
In the Fall semester of 2022, Master’s students in the courses Critical Cartography, taught by Dr. Shourideh Molavi, and The City as Archive, taught by Prof. Dr. Kenny Cupers, worked in groups to imagine what it would look like to research the planetary footprint of a company like Nestlé. Their work was supported by assistant F. Baranyk, whose background research on Nestlé was foundational for the development of the research themes.
In the Fall semester of 2023, a new group of students continued the research in “The City as Archive” course. This course explores methods of urban and environmental research through the lens of the archive. As a site of selective public and/or private memory, a physical collection of records, and a metaphor for holding knowledge, the archive is key to the production of knowledge. Whereas governmental and institutional archives gather much of the material for the narration of history, social movements and civil society organizations have created a range of alternative collections, including oral history and sound records. Historians tend to approach these existing archives as repositories of potential evidence, yet built landscapes and ecologies can themselves be understood as historically layered deposits, constituting archives in their own right. At the same time, the rise of the internet has exploded the notion of what constitutes an archive. Students in the course are introduced to archival methods for urban research, with a critical reflection on its political, ethical, and epistemological implications.
The projects, listed below, reckon with the archive and the map as knowledge-making techniques, entrypoints for urban and environmental research on Swiss corporations. Students visited the Nestlé headquarters in Vevey, combed through archives, and examined corporate documentation as well as activist and NGO reports. Their classroom projects, as presented below, aim only to provide starting points for potential site-based research.