One can observe academics as well as non-academic disciplines with a research interest in urban settings facing methodological challenges when searching for ways to visualize and analyze the urban every day, its social and spatial connections, interactions, infrastructures and complexities. As ethnographers, geographers, artists and urban planners, our research methods must navigate multiple scales of analysis of everyday life experiences of urban practices and transformations, which reflect the larger scale processes of urban change.
What methodological concepts help us thinking beyond our very own disciplinary boundaries – which is not only connected to “terms” but focuses on the didactic mediation, e.g. how ethnographic, interdisciplinary or creative tools can be used to capture the invisible or unspeakable dimensions of urban everyday practices?
With a critical approach, we elaborated a narrative of rethinking “urban ethnographic research” to overcome the current boundaries of perception of e.g. mapping and writing in urban anthropology, architecture, geography and design. Therefore, we provided during the workshop a collaborative and interdisciplinary didactic concept, which reflects our very own positions as scholars in the filed and decodes the seen and unseen of our research, questions, expectiations and presumptions.
Urban Ethnography Lab 