“Doing Urban Ethnography: New interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to comparative urban research” (P3)
The Panel is part of the RC21 Conference @ Delhi, September 18th–21st, 2019: In and Beyond the City: Emerging Ontologies, Persistent Challenges and Hopeful Futures.
(Panel Abstract (P3)
Academic, as well as non-academic disciplines with a research interest in urban transformation processes, face methodological challenges when searching for new ways to visualize and analyze the urban every day, its social and spatial practices, connections, interactions, infrastructures and rising complexities.
The panel will focus on new interdisciplinary and creative methodological approaches in the intersection of sociology and ethnography to capture the inner logic of the social and constructed environment of cities. Urban ethnographic methods (e.g. participant observations, fieldnote writings, mappings or go-alongs) help to gain access to the social and spatial practices of the urban every day. Furthermore, urban ethnography facilitates the analysis of data sets regarding embodied socio-spatial practices. Therefore, the panel invites scholars with interdisciplinary approaches who bridge theoretical concepts with new ethnographic research methods to address more comprehensively the complexity of urban research issues today. The panel invites presenters who contribute to theoretical concepts on pressing issues of global urbanism and comparative theorizations, e.g. urban social inequality/injustice, gender or migration.
Works should provide a theoretical grounding to methodological challenges, and make a case as to the relevance of the panel topics.
- What methodological concepts help us to think beyond our very own disciplinary boundaries?
- Ideas, which are not only connected to “terms” but focus on comparative theorizations or didactic mediation, e.g. how methodological tools can be developed to capture the notions of time, embedded imaginations or the invisible or unspeakable dimensions of everyday urban practices?
- How do urban imaginaries change the way people produce and form new urban spaces?
- How to enhance new (digital, visual, creative) methods in the intersection of sociology and ethnography to capture growing complexities of embodied knowledge and urban practices that shape, produce and challenge the urban today?
Panel Structure
The well‐known session of a maximum of 4 papers in a 90 session, in which presentations by authors last for 10‐15 minutes, followed by discussion, and papers are posted online and distributed by the panel conveners directly.
Submissions
For those submitting abstracts to the panel convenor, each abstract submission must be accompanied by Panel Number (“P3”); Panel Name (“Doing Urban Ethnography”); Author last name in the Subject Line. The abstract must not exceed 300 words and should clearly indicate the title of the paper, research questions, theoretical contribution and connection to the panel theme. Author details about institutional affiliation must also be included.
Please send your abstracts for panel submission up to 300 words max. as one PDF at the latest by 31st January 2019 to both the panel convenor carolin.genz@hu-berlin.de and cc your submission to rc21delhi@gmail.com.
Selected papers will be notified by 20th February 2019.
For more information on the RC21 Conference “In and Beyond the City: Emerging Ontologies, Persistent Challenges and Hopeful Futures ” please visit: https://rc21delhi2019.com/.
Picture: Photo by Karthikeyan K on Unsplash
Urban Ethnography Lab 