Monika Streule

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

This paper explores ways towards decolonizing methods, and thinks about how decentring and pluralizing knowledge production in the empirical field is intrinsically linked to the theorizations of the urban. In the wake of frequent calls to investigate urban processes in a planetary and comparative perspective, the empirical grounding of research is among the particularly complex challenges urban scholars are confronted with today. What are the practical consequences for comparative research after the post- and decolonial critique? How to put a decolonized urban geography into practice? Without pretending to answer these encompassing questions fully, this contribution discusses an experimental, critical and self-reflexive use of methods in a decolonial perspective.

If urban theory is to be both provisional and revisable, it is key to foreground the role of the corresponding methodological strategies. Thus, integrating theory, method, synthesis and reflection, the paper demonstrates how methodological innovations are both influenced by and formative of a decentered urban theory. Taking the original method Mobile Ethnography as an example, the paper engages with an inventive and transdisciplinary qualitative approach apt to engender an on-going transductive dialog between theoretical and empirical reflections in the field of urban studies. The main concern of this approach is to address inherent but often underrepresented power relations in the production of metropolitan territories, and in the scientific research itself.

(Spatial) knowledge, it is argued, is produced on behalf of the Mobile Ethnography and is reflected in the dialectical production of space by the researcher and the researched. In this view, the ethnographic field-site transforms into a research object of its own. Emphasizing thus the agency of multiple subjects in the social production of metropolitan territories, Mobile Ethnography understands everyday urban experiences as an integral part of knowledge production across the urban world.

Paper presented at the Session Decolonizing Urban Geography: Where have we got to; what next? RGS-IBG 2017 »Decolonizing Geographical Knowledges: opening geography out to the world«, 29.8.–1.9.2017, London