Place Exploration: some challenges of investigating city ‘site effects’ through urban ethnography

• In Event: 4162 - Redefining Place

Abstract

As a method in sociology, urban ethnography is rather straightforward: it conducts participant observation in cities. In essence, urban ethnographers study place, and yet how place is portrayed, as it pulls together community and city life, is too often absent from ethnographic descriptions. Indeed, place serves as a powerful actor in the lives of everyday people, but it becomes difficult to understand how place works in an ethnographic context. To reflect upon this puzzle, the following offers a language for how we may make better sense of place as urban ethnographers. Focusing here on the central ideas of Wirth (1938) and how it relates to place as an actor in ethnographic research, highlights the more hidden tenets of this methodological approach, underscoring the boundary maintenance of what is in and out of what it means to do urban ethnography. By revisiting classic urban ethnographies we consider how place is constructed as an object of analysis, reflective of social phenomenon occurring within a city ecology. And, in identifying six tensions (in/out, order/disorder, public/private, past/present, gemeinschaft/gesellschaft, and discrete/diffuse) we demonstrate how descriptions of place are either present or absent in these ethnographies. To understand these tensions as they depict place, we maintain, is to better understand how place is represented within ethnographies claiming to be urban. In conclusion, we present future directions for urban place-based ethnography that may offer more robust interpretations of place and the people who inhabit it.

Authors

• Thomas Corcoran, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Jennifer Abrams, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Jonathan R. Wynn, University of Massachusetts, Amherst