Convenors
Andrea Mubi Brighenti, University of Trento
andrea.brighenti@unitn.it
Andrea Pavoni, DINAMIA’CET, Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies, University Institute of Lisbon
andrea.pavoni@iscte-iul.pt
Urban ethnography, grounded in the observation and participation in the everyday lives of city dwellers, offers a unique set of challenges and opportunities for writing. Urban spaces are alive with movement, interactions, and contradictions, requiring ethnographers to capture this fluidity in their written accounts. Yet, writing is not merely a vehicle for reporting findings but is integral to how ethnographic insights are crafted and communicated. All too often, writing is considered the end point of an ethnographic effort: the last phase, what happens after the fact, as a «writing up». Instead, as Tim Cresswell notes, «the act of writing is part of the process of relating to place – not just a record of it» (2019, p. 3). Its form, pace, rhythm – its style – is therefore a crucial element of ethnographic practice.
First, this means exploring the way urban environments, with their complex social, spatial, and cultural dynamics, shape not only what we study but how we write about it: How do ideas emerge from the relation between place, body and observation? And, What is the style through which they are captured and made sense of? Second, then, this prompts a question of translation: How is the fieldwork transformed into an ethnographic account by writing? And, at the same time, How does writing transform the place into a specific kind of fieldwork? How does the experience of the city — its noise, pace, and rhythms — shape narrative structure, style, and voice? What are the tensions between representing lived urban realities and the constraints of academic writing? How do we write about the fragmentation and diversity of urban life without losing sight of the people who animate these spaces?
This panel invites contribution to explore theoretically and performatively the relationship between the practice of ethnography in urban settings and the act of writing. In particular, we are interested in contributions that critically engage with questions of style, form, and rhythm in writing urban ethnography. We invite panel proposals that bring together ethnographers, writers, and scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss these and related issues. Contributions from all areas of urban studies and ethnography are welcome, particularly those that engage with innovative or experimental approaches to writing.
Open questions
- What narrative strategies and literary techniques can best evoke the complexity and vibrancy of urban settings?
- How do ethnographers balance personal experience with analytical rigor in their writing?
- And how do questions of accessibility, audience, and the politics of representation influence the way we write about the urban?
Keywords
urban life; social environments; practices of documentation; politics of representation; writing.
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
urban studies; interaction studies; human geography; environmental psychology; humanities; media studies.
References
Cresswell, T.
2019 Maxwell Street: Writing and thinking place, University of Chicago Press.
Convenors’ bios
Andrea Mubi Brighenti is Professor of Social Theory and Space & Culture at the Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. Research covers broadly space-power-and-society issues. His latest monograph is The Bond of Creation. Elias Canetti and Social Theory (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Andrea Pavoni is assistant research professor at DINAMIA’CET, ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon, Portugal). His research explores the relation between materiality, normativity, and aesthetics in the urban context. He is a fellow at the Westminster Law and Theory Lab, co-editor of the Law and the Senses Series (University of Westminster Press), and associate editor at the journal Lo Squaderno, Explorations in Space and Society. He is the author of Controlling Urban Events. Law, Ethics and the Material (Routledge, 2018) and, with Simone Tulumello, of Urban Violence. Imaginary, Security, Atmosphere (Lexington, 2023).