Monika Streule

Ethnography of Urban Territories literally invites us to roam the streets of Mexico City. Based on the experience of 12 years intense empirical and theoretical commitment with the urban question in Mexico City, the book offers not only a compelling close look to everyday life in this metropolis, but also a novel interpretation of urbanization processes by focusing on inherent but often underrepresented power relations in the production and appropriation of urban territories.

In this book launch, the author Monika Streule explores and discusses the experimental, critical, and self-reflective use of differing methods in urban studies. One of the main concerns of the book unfolds around the question of how can qualitative-empirical methods, like ethnography or qualitative mapping, be adapted to explore contemporary urban conditions? The book seeks to contribute to current debates by suggesting a socio-territorial perspective and by introducing specific methodological design of a mobile ethnography that enables an analysis of large and heterogeneous urban territories. By suggesting different representations of the urban, the book thus emphasizes how important it is to transductively entangle empirical and theoretical conceptualizations to further decenter urban knowledge production.

Invited lecture at Think & Drink Colloquium, HU-Berlin Department of Urban and Regional Sociology and the Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies, December 17, 2018, Berlin

The Urban Salon is a London-wide network exploring international and comparative urban issues. In this panel, Pushpa Arabindoo, Catalina Ortiz, Monika Streule and Lisa Tilley will bring together insights from scholarship and urban experiences from different contexts (India, Columbia, Mexico and Indonesia) to explore the challenges and openings for decolonising urban studies. (How) can the terms of knowledge production in urban studies be transformed, to support the possibility of a decolonised and global urban studies?

• Pushpa Arabindoo: Decolonising as an ‘ontological turn’: An ethnographic theorisation from Chennai
• Monika Streule: Decolonialism is a practice
• Catalina Ortiz: Mestizo Urbanism: decolonial insights for urban studies
• Lisa Tilley: Speculative Wastelands and the Contradictions of ‘Use’ in Jakarta
• Chair: Jennifer Robinson

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Invited lecture at the Urban Salon at UCL Urban Lab, December 6 2018, London

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