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The Urban Ethnography Reader assembles the very best of American ethnographic writing, from classic works to contemporary research, and aims to present ethnography as social science, social history, and literature, rather than purely as a methodology.
Urban ethnography is the firsthand study of city life by investigators who immerse themselves in the worlds of the people about whom they write. Since its inception in the early twentieth century, this great tradition has helped define how we think about cities and city dwellers. The past few decades have seen an extraordinary revival in the field, as scholars and the public at large grapple with the increasingly complex and pressing issues that affect the ever-changing American city-from poverty to the immigrant experience, the changing nature of social bonds to mass incarceration, hyper-segregation to gentrification. As both a method of research and a form of literature, urban ethnography has seen a notable and important resurgence. This renewed interest demands a clear and comprehensive understanding of the history and development of the field to which this volume contributes by presenting a selection of past and present contributions to American urban ethnographic writing. Beginning with an original introduction highlighting the origins, practices, and significance of the field, editors Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kasinitz, and Alexandra Murphy guide the reader through the major and fascinating topics on which it has focused -- from the community, public spaces, family, education, work, and recreation, to social policy, and the relationship between ethnographers and their subjects. An indispensable guide, The Urban Ethnography Reader provides an overview of how the discipline has grown and developed while offering students and scholars a selection of some of the finest social scientific writing on the life of the modern city.
Showcasing the ideas, analysis, and perspectives of experts in the method conducting research on a wide array of social phenomena in a variety of city contexts, this volume provides a look at the legacies of urban ethnography's methodological traditions and some of the challenges its practitioners face today.
Showcasing the ideas, analysis, and perspectives of experts in the method conducting research on a wide array of social phenomena in a variety of city contexts, this volume provides a look at the legacies of urban ethnography's methodological traditions and some of the challenges its practitioners face today.
This book offers an inside view of Manchester, England demonstrating the complexity of urban dynamics from a range of ethnographic vantage points, including the city’s football clubs, the airport, housing estates, the Gay Village and the city’s annual civic parade. These perspectives help trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, with each turn of the wheel, another aspect of the city is materialised. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as driven by the city administration’s entrepreneurial ethos. By taking up civic space and resources with council-led cultural representations focused largely on generating financial income for the city, three decades of command-and-control politics has inhibited grassroots and spontaneous forms of emergent publics.
The city is more than demography and architecture, it is a state of mind. Various groups, scenes and subcultures, widely known as "man in the street", shape and are shaped by urban space and its history according to imaginations, nightmares and dreams. Urban anthropologists get immersed in this closely knit fabric of urban culture and conduct field research with all their senses. The reader provides a compact introduction into urban anthropology, which has become the key discipline in exploring cities and city live as sites of encounter, conflict and sensation. It introduces the most influential writers in the field as well as young and upcoming field researchers.With essays by PeterJackson, LesBack, RuthBehar, MoritzEge, RolfLindner, Mirko Zardini, Margarethe Kusenbach, Loic Wacquant.
The Anthropology of Los Angeles: Place and Agency in an Urban Setting questions the production and representations of both the real and imagined L.A. by documenting hidden histories that portray a collision of elements, including race, class, gender, identity, food, and space.
The era of digital communication provides endless opportunities for the collection and analysis of social data in novel ways. It also presents new and unanticipated challenges, as researchers are often inventing elements of their methodologies on the fly or studying a phenomenon or media platform for the first time. Research Exposed offers in-depth, behind-the-scenes accounts of doing empirical social science in this new paradigm. Through firsthand descriptions of innovative research projects, it shares lessons learned from over a dozen scholars’ cutting-edge work. These candid accounts describe what can go wrong when pioneering new genres of research and how such difficulties can be overcome, giving both big-picture reflection and actionable advice. The chapters discuss a variety of methods, ranging from the completely novel to the use of more traditional approaches in the digital context, and cover research questions relevant to a range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, communication, information studies, and anthropology. By focusing attention on the concrete details seldom discussed in final project write-ups or traditional research guides, Research Exposed helps equip junior and senior scholars alike with essential information that is all too often left with no outlet for sharing. It offers important insights into how empirical social science research can be both innovative and rigorous when dealing with the opportunities and challenges presented by digital media.
