Over-Complexifying Social Reality: A Critical Exploration of Systematicity and Rigidification in Ethnographic Practice and Writing

Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative methodology. I conduct an urban ethnography and autoethnography of the metropolitan blasé as a public attitude of indifference to articulate an alternative, quotidian approach to ethnography that better captures social embeddedness, meaning-creation, and how contexts should drive data collection, analysis, and method-selection.

Urban Ethnography

If ethnography is the study of people as they negotiate their everyday lives, then urban ethnography is the study of how urban residents and other inhabitants make sense of their daily social worlds, navigate surrounding communities, and manage the broader forces that structure the urban experience. Methodologically, it privileges deep, immersive fieldwork alongside research participants. Substantively, it focuses on interactions and institutions that define urban space, whether those are public streets, neighborhood organizations, or community events. Urban ethnographies have traditionally thought of “communities” geographically, examining how the central topics of poverty, crime, culture, and peer group formation play out in delimited spaces such as neighborhoods, wards, and districts. Theoretically, it has historically tended to draw on social-constructionist and interactionist orientations, conceiving of the urban life as something “built up,” so to speak, from repeated and ritualized encounters. As one of the longest-standing and iconic subfields of sociology, anthropology, and other humanistic social sciences, urban ethnography remains one of the most influential modes of understanding social life in cities. True to form as one of the most conflictual and controversial subfields, an increasing number of scholars are pushing back on convention, insisting on the need to embrace theoretical orientations that are more critical and structurally focused, and to more adequately consider the global forces and relational dynamics that exist beyond, but fatefully impinge upon, bounded field sites. As urban ethnography’s readership has grown, so too have methodological critiques regarding replicability, as well as concerns about potential exploitation and voyeurism among its practitioners and readership.

Green Infrastructure in the Time of Social Distancing: Urban Policy and the Tactical Pandemic Urbanism

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a number of changes in the functioning of urban areas all over the world and had a visible impact on the use of green infrastructure, including city parks. The study discusses and compares operation and use of two such parks located in Wellington, New Zealand and Warsaw, Poland by adopting “pandemic urban ethnography”, an approach that includes autoethnography, interviews with users, non-participant observation, and analysis of social media content. As indicated by the findings of the study, the importance of less rigidly designed, multifunctional spaces that give their users freedom of “tactical” adjustments, significantly grows during times of lockdown and “social distancing”. During such a crisis, the management and everyday use of urban parks are highly related to urban policies. The article provides insight into how those policies impact the functional values of green infrastructure confronting it with user-generated adaptations and the landscape design itself. The global health emergency showed how access to green areas becomes a crucial determinant on environmental justice while proving the significance of “tactical pandemic urbanism” as both a design and management method.

Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect

In this article, we connect with recent attempts to rethink management learning as an embodied and affective process and we propose walking as a significant learning practice of a pedagogy of affect. Walking enables a postdualist view on learning and education. Based on course work focused on urban ethnography, we discuss walking as affect-pedagogical practice through the intertwined activities of straying, drifting and witnessing, and we reflect upon the implications for a pedagogy of affect. In conclusion, we speculate about the potential of a pedagogy of affect for future understandings and practices of management learning.