Dear Colleagues,
Please find below a CFP for the forthcoming EURA conference
'City lights. Cities and citizens within/beyond/notwithstanding the
crisis', Turin (Italy), 16-18 June 2016
(http://www.eura2016.org/).
500-word
abstracts should include title, keywords, name of the
author(s), affiliation and full contact details, and should be sent
to both Michele Lancione ([log in to unmask]) and Elisabetta Rosa
([log in to unmask]) no later than Thursday, 26
November.
A PDF of this CfP can be downloaded at the following link:
http://www.michelelancione.eu/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2015/11/EURA-2016_Committed-Positioning.pdf
All best,
Michele and Elisabetta
Committed Positioning. Politics, activism and ethnographic
encounters in the contemporary city.
Michele Lancione, University of Cambridge ([log in to unmask])
Elisabetta Rosa, Aix-Marseille University
([log in to unmask])
We enter the field and have not a clue about the people standing in
front of us. We have read about them – the people and spaces we have
decided to ‘study’ –, and perhaps we have met them previously, but
now things have changed. Set down in the mists of the field, we are
now faced with the possibility of encounter: things can go wrong;
people may not understand us and we may not understand them, and
ethnography may suddenly cease to be an exciting exploration and
turn into a painful and stressful endeavour. In its most basic form,
positioning might be understood as the negotiation of this
encounter: a fragile process characterised by unbalanced power,
criss-crossed by all sorts of ethical implications. But at another,
deeper level, positioning is first and foremost about questioning
the meaning and relevance of that encounter. Namely: why have we
decided to enter the field in the first place? Why have we done it
here, with these people and spaces? Why, in other worlds, do we do
ethnography and what do we aim to achieve with it?
These questions are anything but a novelty. In geography, they have
been discussed for decades by scholars interested in bringing to
light the responsibilities, meaning and potential associated with
the ethnographic encounter (Caldeira 2009; Cloke et al. 2000;
Herbert 2000). Positioning has thus been understood as matter of
announcing oneself in the field (McDowell 1992); as a form of
reflexivity (Cloke et al. 2000); as a matter of objectivity about
the scope and limit of knowledge (Haraway 1988); as aiming to
establish ‘constitutive negotiations’ (Rose 1997), and as a way to
fictive distinction between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ (Butz and
Besio 2009). Expanding these lines of thinking, scholars have
advocated in favour of an action-oriented form of ethnography (Katz
1994), where the boundaries between activism and academia blur
(Routledge 1996), and in favour of a research approach oriented
towards the production of radical actions and outputs, through the
use of creative methodologies as well (Eshun and Madge, 2012). Our
Call for Papers sets out to explore the role of positioning in
making ethnography more relevant to the people and spaces it
studies. We argue that radical, engaged, meaningful ethnography does
not come naturally, but arises out of what we might call a
‘committed’ form of positioning: a relational oeuvre that requires
time, involvement and adaptation; that involves stress, joy and a
psycho-emotional burden, but that most of all calls for a strong
political ethos to fuel the action/research process (Lancione,
forthcoming).
We are interested in exploring the link between positionality and
urban ethnographic research/activism. We are looking for papers that
freely and openly discuss the limits on and opportunities for
pursuing political agendas through ethnographic work, questioning
the role of positioning in doing so, and recounting (on the basis of
first-hand experience as well) the personal difficulties encountered
in making urban ethnography matter. We welcome in particular
interdisciplinary, creative and non-academic contributions, as well
as contributions from under-represented groups. Abstracts should
cover one or more of the following points:
- The intersection between positioning and urban politics
- The intersection between positioning and activism/research
- Theory of positionality in – and from – the urban South
- Theory of positionality in – and from – gender studies
- Radical urban ethnography – and radical urban ethnographers –
today
- What kind of methodology for what kind of positioning?
- The physical, emotional and psychological burden of committed
positioning
- Case studies showing details (limits and achievements) of
committed positioning
500-word abstracts should include title, keywords, name of the
author(s), affiliation and full contact details, and should be sent
to both Michele ([log in to unmask]) and Elisabetta
([log in to unmask]) no later than Thursday, 26
November.
--
Michele Lancione
Urban Studies PostDoctoral Fellow
Department of Geography
University of Cambridge
Downing Place
Cambridge
CB2 3EN, UK
Books Review Editor
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action
Honorary Associate, UTS, Sydney (Australia)
www.michelelancione.eu