FIELD TRAINING SCHOOL AND RESEARCH SEMINAR 2025
URBAN RESEARCH: THEORY AND METHODS
Montecatini Terme, Tuscany, Italy, 21-27 July 2025
Coordinators: Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato, University of Kent, UK
This annual Training School was organised and hosted by the International Urban Symposium-IUS in collaboration with an international interdisciplinary group of senior scholars from leading universities.
The 2025 IUS School was a successful intensive exercise attended by 17 postgraduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral scholars and academics from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, India, Italy, Taiwan and the USA.
The School’s teaching staff included sociocultural anthropologists, qualitative sociologists, architects and urban planners. They were, in alphabetic order: Gary Armstrong (City St George’s, University London, UK); Nathalie Boucher (Organisme Respire, Canada); Hana Cervinkova (University of Maynooth, Ireland); Jerome Krase (Brooklyn College-CUNY, USA); Karolina Moretti (National Technical University of Athens, Greece); Smoki Musaraj (Ohio University, USA); Italo Pardo (University of Kent, UK); Giuliana B. Prato (University of Kent, UK); James Rosbrook-Thompson (City St George’s, University London, UK); Matthew Rosen (Ohio University, USA).
Teaching Seminars focused on legitimacy and legitimation; public health, governance; stereotype and stigma; sport and health; migration; vernacular landscape; contested urban spaces; adolescents’ life experiences; informal urbanization and cultural history; overtourism; application and challenges of digital technologies .
Work started in the morning of Monday 21st July and ended in the evening of Sunday 27th July, with a farewell reception, which was attended by the Mayor of Montecatini Terme, Mr Claudio Del Rosso, and dinner. Social events included visits and evening concerts at the historical Terme Il Tettuccio, a World Heritage site.
The School’s Programme included thirteen 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 Montecatini Terme; one full-day session dedicated to participants’ reports on their field observations; and a full-day Research Seminar Session during which several participants presented their own work.
We are pleased to announce that Miles B. Jordan will be serving as Film & Video Review Editor of the open access, peer-reviewed journal Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography.
Publications. Two extended and revised reports on the field observations, respectively by Charlotte Gagnon-Lewis and the co-authored piece by Debapriya Ganguly and Aaron Reudenbach, have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography, Vol.15, No.2, November 2025. 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.
This successful international academic endeavour gained local recognition.
