FIELD TRAINING SCHOOL AND RESEARCH SEMINAR 2026
URBAN RESEARCH: THEORY AND METHODS
Montecatini Terme, Tuscany, Italy, 26 July – 1 August 2026
Coordinators: Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato, University of Kent, UK
The 2026 IUS School was a successful intensive academic endeavour that brought together 14 highly motivated and fully engaged postgraduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral scholars from Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, the UK and the USA.
The School’s teaching staff included sociocultural anthropologists, qualitative sociologists and architects. They were, in alphabetic order: Gary Armstrong (City St George’s, University London, UK); Hana Cervinkova (University of Maynooth, Ireland); Jerome Krase (Brooklyn College-CUNY, USA); Karolina Moretti (National Technical University of Athens, Greece); Italo Pardo (University of Kent, UK); Giuliana B. Prato (University of Kent, UK); Matthew Rosen (Ohio University, USA); Enkelejda Sula-Raxhimi (Saint Paul University, Canada).
The School’s Programme included fourteen 80-minute teaching seminars led by the teaching staff; two targeted observational field excursions, one in the medieval hamlet of Montecatini Alto and one in the districts of Montecatini Terme; one full-day session dedicated to participants’ reports on their field observations; and a full-day Research Seminar Session during which participants presented their own work.
Teaching Seminars focused on governance, legitimacy and the effect of misgovernance; stereotype and stigma; memory, history and contested urban spaces; disaster and conflict; visual approaches to city change; theory, methodology and methods; rights and wrongs in ethnographic inquiry; informal urbanization and cultural history of modern cities; application and challenges of digital technologies; travel explorations and ethnography.
Work started in the morning of Sunday 26th July and ended in the evening of Saturday 1st August, with a farewell reception and dinner.
Revised essays based on participants’ reports on their field excursions will be published in Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography.
Selected expanded and revised papers presented at the Research Seminar will be consider for publication in platforms associated to the IUS, including the journal Urbanities.
