The Digital Salon is a curation of listening experiences brought to you by alumni of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, a collective of interdisciplinary scholars, activists, and artists seeking to blur the boundaries of our respective disciplinary and epistemological habits.


As urban humanists attuned to the ways urban space reinvents the enclosure, we bring you Season 2, THE COLLECTIVE. If our first season investigated the ways the pandemic is a portal, our second season elevates sonic projects that explore how the urban environment can be used to organize and arrange an array of polyvocal collectives. We ask urban humanists, what is a collective and what are the ways to transmit knowledge through collectivity? What lessons can we learn from alternative forms of knowledge production and practices of organizing and social change-making?


Selected contributors were asked to create 20-30 minute episodes that narrativize collectivity at various scales within an urban humanist framework: the intimate, the familial, the communal, the urban, the global, the metaphysical. Contributors came together in a series of three one-hour workshops to build distinct types of sonic content—observations, interviews, summaries, syntheses, reflections—that comprise the archives for their final episodes.