Monika Streule

(Zusammenfassung in Englisch)

Taking her recently published book Ethnography of Urban Territories (2018) as a starting point for this Talking Points Seminar, Monika Streule invites exploration and discussion of the experimental, critical and self-reflective use of differing methods in today’s urban studies.

Deriving from an intense empirical and theoretical commitment to the urban question in Mexico City since 2005, the book offers on the one hand a compelling close look at everyday life in this metropolis and literally invites us to roam the streets of Mexico City. On the other hand, it also suggests a novel interpretation of urbanization processes by focusing on inherent but often underrepresented power relations in the production and appropriation of urban territories. One of the main concerns of the book unfolds around the question of how qualitative-empirical methods, such as ethnography or qualitative mapping, can be adapted in order to explore contemporary urban conditions.

Dr Streule seeks to contribute to current debates by proposing a socio-territorial perspective and by introducing specific methodological design of a mobile ethnography that enables qualitative analysis of large and heterogeneous urban territories. By suggesting different representations of the urban, she thus emphasizes how important it is to entangle empirical and theoretical conceptualizations transductively in order to further decentre urban knowledge production.

Respondents: Professor Haim Yacobi (The Bartlett DPU, UCL) and Dr Katherine Saunders-Hastings (Institute of the Americas, UCL)

Invited lecture at the Institute of Advanced Studies Talking Points Seminar, November 13 2018, London

(Zusammenfassung in Englisch)

Ethnography is one of the key methodologies in current urban studies. Researchers from various disciplines are now using and adapting ethnography for an ever-evolving range of purposes and different urban settings. While employed widely as an empirical research tool, the writing part of ethnography often remains methodologically vague and there is little reflection on the implications of ethnographic writing in urban studies. How do we put something into words which did not exist as text before? How does this abstraction shape the way we think the urban? And, what could this mean for building theory from the empirical? Recent post- and decolonial thoughts on deeply inscribed power relations in knowledge production now create a useful moment to critically revisit this textual rendering of urban worlds, closely scrutinized in anthropology since the 1980s.

In this contribution I reflect on ethnography in urban studies by bringing in reflections from anthropology, focussing on ethnographic writing, using my experience of research. Taking the call to always locate our projects and ourselves precisely and consistently as a starting point has led me to engage carefully with the practices of representing the city I work with. In my extended study of urbanization in Mexico City, a main concern has been to call into question conventional representations of the urban. Together with a historical analysis and experimental mapping, I drew upon ethnography for knowledge production through writing.

Doing research in Spanish, writing in German, presenting in English, I am constantly confronted with the power of language and its effects on my objectifying of Mexico City. Dealing with the complexities of writing about urban territories unknown by many readers holds particular challenges for a monolingual textual representation. The situatedness of researching, writing, and speaking finally brings me back to the politics of translation in knowledge production – and to the question of how to translate positionality and to make it work for creating spaces for a more transversal understanding between and within urban worlds.

Invited paper at the Workshop Writing the city [into the urban], organized by Pushpa Arabindoo, Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Paris, May 3–4, 2018, Paris