Abstract

This article begins by reviewing the recent literature on place-media entanglements, and proposes a "synthetic" understanding of place as a meaningful configuration of proximities. It then maps out some of the ways that research on mediation and place-making might benefit from engaging with Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, and in particular with the notion of orientation that she brings forward. Supplementing theoretical considerations with fragments from ongoing fieldwork in Abidjan, this exploratory piece suggests that Ahmed's writing offers a fruitful point of departure to link media practices and the habitual spatialities of place, in a thoroughly critical perspective that nonetheless remains committed to embodied, everyday experience, as well as to the open-ended nature of a politics of "shared inhabitance."