DAY II | Workshop “Ethnography in Urban Settings”
The speakers for the second day of the workshop brought together three major themes around urban ethnography: digitizing, collaborating, and conjuring.
In a nutshell, digitizing ethnography highlights how researchers need to take seriously and know how to handle digital data while doing research in urban settings. Digital data looks much different from a qualitative, in-depth analytical perspective in contrast with ‘big data’ or quantitative approach. That the two approaches can complement each other, and that there remains a pressing need for in-depth, fine grained life perspectives – best done through ethnographic approaches – is becoming increasingly evident.
Collaborations in urban ethnographic research can provide an important mechanism through which researchers can, not merely increase research capacity, but also come to understand our own subjectivities and positionalities visa-vis our research topics/research subjects in the urban field. By contrast to the “lone wolf” researcher style that pervades sociocultural anthropology and other disciplines that use ethnographic methods, collaboration is a useful approach to check and channel our own limitations and open up new possibilities for critically viewing our urban research data.
Finally, it is important to recognize that the urban environment is a complex and dynamic space of semiotic density, where multiple actors engaging in forms of ‘conjuring’, bringing out into the open (visually,) and call into being vforms of knowledge about urban history, social life or activism.
Urban Ethnography Lab 