International Urban Symposium & Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
SUMMER SCHOOL AND RESEARCH SEMINAR
Cities in Flux: Ethnographic and Theoretical Challenges
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, 23-29 July 2018
Convenors: Italo Pardo, Giuliana B. Prato, James Rosbrook-Thompson
With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, and this proportion set to increase to two-thirds by 2050, the ethnographic study of life in urban settings has never been so urgent and important. Urbanisation proceeding at such a pace has meant increases in the number and size of cities but also continues to alter the social fabric of urban centres, sometimes in profound ways. This five-day Summer School and two-day Seminar – organised and hosted by Anglia Ruskin University under the auspices of the International Urban Symposium (IUS) – brought together social anthropologists, sociologists, urban planners, architects, and human geographers committed to empirically-grounded analysis of cities in order to examine a number of pressing methodological and theoretical questions relating to urban change.
The Summer School encompassed lectures, seminars, field trips and social events across a range of topics including migration, identity and belonging, the impact of stereotype, gentrification, public space, and historical and global links. The primary aim of the School was to train students in the ‘art’ of conducting ethnographic fieldwork and developing analysis based on said ethnography. The School also instructed students on how to debate issues while seeking to understand and develop the link between ethnographically-based analysis and social theory. Teaching took place in three-hour blocks – one each morning and one each afternoon – with in-class work being supplemented by events such as structured city walks and field trips. The School was open to postgraduate and doctoral students, final-year undergraduate students as well as professionals and practitioners.
The Summer School culminated in a two-day Research Seminar that brought together colleagues who taught in the School and other interested scholars. As well as papers delivered by academics and practitioners on a range of issues relating to the theme of Cities in Flux, the Seminar gave students of the School the opportunity to deliver poster presentations that drew on their own work and on the work they conducted over the previous five days.
Two School’s attendees, Michael Maltzer and Debapriya Chakrabarti, revised the respective paper presented at the Research Seminar, which were published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography (see “Publications”, below). Will Brown was later invited to serve as book review Editor for the Journal Urbanities.
THE SEMINAR – SPEAKERS AND TITLES
Saturday 28th July
PANEL ONE: Migration, Belonging and the Urban Visual Imaginary
Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato (University of Kent), Knowing the Urban Field: A Comparative Study of Movements of People in Europe
Jerome Krase (Brooklyn College, City University of New York), Seeing the Image of the City Change, Again
Hana Cervinkova (University of Lower Silesia, Wrocław, Poland) and Juliet D. Golden (University of Lower Silesia, Wrocław, Poland), Contested Urban Heritage: The Politics of Remembering and Belonging in Poland’s Haunted Lands
PANEL TWO: Space, Gender and (In)formality
Karolina Moretti (National Technical University of Athens), The Formal, the Semi-Formal and the Informal: The Case of Dortmund
Mirna Guha (Anglia Ruskin University). “If we don’t wear sarees, the para boys will kill us”: Space, gender norms, and ‘respectability’ politics in the lives of female sex workers in a red-light area in Eastern India.
PANEL THREE: Policing, Crime and Racialization
David Skinner (Anglia Ruskin University), The Wrong Faces in the Wrong Places: The Reinvention of Race in New Policing Technologies
Gary Armstrong (City, University of London) and James Rosbrook-Thompson (Anglia Ruskin University), On Road Trips: Combatting ‘County Lines’ in Essex
Sunday 29th July
SESSION ONE: Student presentations
SESSION TWO: Roundtable discussion and publication plans
Publications:
A peer-reviewed edited collection of selected revised and expanded papers has been published in Ethnographies of Urbanity in Flux: Theoretical Reflections (Eds I. Pardo, G.B. Prato & J. Rosbrook-Thompson), special issue of Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography, Vol. 10 (Suppl. 3), 2020.