Critical Urban Ethnography: Place, people and transformation (fully booked)

Description:

This course focuses on the role of place as a conduit and marker of societal change. In particular, we focus on ethnographic approaches to capturing the spatial and symbolic dimensions of urban change. We refer to our own ethnographies, including work carried out in Peckham, an inner city neighbourhood in south London undergoing significant transformation, and engage with both planned regeneration and ongoing societal diversification.

We will explore how migration and class is situated, experienced and explained, in a milieu of pronounced change, encouraging in-depth engagement with how different groups—from residents, to workers to planners—perceive and enact urban transformation.

Furthermore, through the course we develop knowledge and understanding of, alongside confidence in, the conduct of critical urban ethnography. In this way, the course aims to inspire experiences that focus both on ethnography as a way of finding out and a process of critical reflection, connecting the particularities of people and places to wider processes of urbanisation and change.

The course covers:

• The methodological and critical aspects of urban ethnography;
• The role of space in the representation and experience of urban change;
• Aspects of migration and class that are ‘of’ the urban: that emerge through and shape the reconfiguration of the city;
• A mixture of critical discussion and on-the-ground fieldwork exercises, spanning how aspects of observation, interview and visualisation contribute to a process of theorisation.

By the end of the course participants will:

• Have exposure to incorporating space into the research design of urban ethnography;
• Engage with different scales of space in urban ethnography, reflecting on the different range of data revealed at different scales of analysis;
• Engage with the relationship between methodology and critical reflection;
• Explore and theorise aspects of class and migration through the analysis of place.

Cost:

The fee per day is:
1. £30 - For UK registered postgraduate students
2. £60 – For staff at UK academic institutions, ESRC funded researchers and registered charity organisations
3. £220 - For all other participants

All fees include event materials, lunch, morning and afternoon tea. They do not include travel and accommodation costs

Region:

Greater London

Keywords:

Ethnographic Research, Mixed Methods, Qualitative Interviewing, Visual Methods, Grounded Theory, Visual Data Analysis

Related publications and presentations:

Ethnographic Research
Mixed Methods
Qualitative Interviewing
Visual Methods
Grounded Theory
Visual Data Analysis

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