Gathering Cities, Speculating Wind: Listening in Dry Season Gulu

ABSTRACT What is the place of the wind in analyses of the city? In late 2016, and into 2017, forceful dry season winds in Gulu, Uganda, provoked frequent commentary. This short ethnographic essay endeavors to think with these winds (of weather and breath) and to speculate their implications for “the city” vis‐à‐vis its lived, sensory geographies. Using listening methodologies drawn from ethnography, sonic praxis, and Black studies, I consider windy encounters as gatherings of the city in audible movements of air. From these windy attunements emerges a city unsettled by changing seasonal winds, a city that endures, and a city living with wind as relational presence. For each, performed displacements of air enact wind as a situating force amidst unsteady linkages of geography, climate, and urban development. Can winds attune us to ways of unsettling human geographies of enclosure?