Pop-Up Ethnography: Methods for Studying Social Relations at the Register of Urban Public Space

ABSTRACT

As tensions around the politics of race, ethnicity, and culture move back toward the centre stage of politics in the global north, it becomes ever more important to investigate how social relations between diverse groups play out in everyday urban life. Many studies of urban diversity rely on in-depth interviews or focus groups reflecting on the topic as their main method, while the growing number that include observation in public often say little about what these methods contribute specifically. I argue that to describe and understand social relations in multiethnic cities, we need to use methods that are appropriate to the register of urban public space — methods that match and capture the kinds of interactions and expressions of views that occur in public. I discuss the strengths and limitations of methods that help achieve this objective. I call them ‘pop-up ethnography’, a term that reflects both their serendipitous development and their contrast at social and spatial levels with traditional immersive ethnography. Place still matters as we try to understand everyday cohabitation in diverse cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• methods
• public space
• urban space
• everyday cohabitation
• conviviality

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the guest editors of this special issue, Bob White and Annick Germain, for hosting the workshop on Everyday Cohabitation where I presented the first version of this paper, and to the other participants for their inspiring contributions. My thanks go also to Bob, Annick, Nathalie Boucher, the JIS editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Approved by the Comité d’Éthique de la Recherche, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, CÉR-06-102. Written information was provided to all interview participants. Consent to participate was recorded verbally for short interviews and either verbally or in writing for in-depth interviews.

2 Approved by Dalhousie University’s Research Ethics Board, 2012-2681. Consent to participate in interviews was recorded verbally.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Martha Radice

Martha Radice is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the social, spatial, and cultural dynamics of cities. She has conducted research on space and place, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, neighbourhood change and community, and public art and public culture in Canadian cities, and is currently working on an ethnography of new-wave carnival culture in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dr Radice is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a past president of the Canadian Anthropology Society.