• About
  • Publication
  • Events
  • Urban Poetry Society

Read Cities

~ rethinking the urban world

Read Cities

Monthly Archives: September 2017

Space as method

22 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by Yimin in Academic, Publication

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ethnography, Geography, Greenbelt, method, space

My first “academic” article, one that reflects upon my own field experience in Beijing’s green belts, has recently been published in the City journal.

This paper has plenty of meanings for me. It is the very first chapter that was finished all through my thesis. I can still remember the readings I did for this paper, and the drafts I wrote and then scratched – all happened at the moment when the deadline of my thesis was approaching yet I was still in the middle of nowhere. It was also a revised version of the paper that won the third place in the student paper competition of China Geography Specialty Group at this year’s (2017) AAG Annual Meeting.

But most importantly, it shows the reflections I had after doing two spells of fieldwork by myself. Its starting point is a puzzle I had when in the field and its concluding remarks are at best an invitation for further discussions and debates on how to do fieldwork on the urban frontier with our bodily space-time. These works should be further developed, and I hope this paper could contribute some empirical observations that have not been registered in the literature before.

Below is the abstract of this paper, and the full access can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2017.1353342. Please feel free to contact me at y.zhao25#lse.ac.uk (replace # by @); all comments and suggestions are warmly welcome.

 

Abstract

Great urban transformations are diffusing across the global South, removing the original landscape of urban margins to make of them a new urban frontier. These processes raise questions of both validity and legitimacy for ethnographic practice, requiring critical reflection on both spatiality and method in fieldwork at the urban margins. This paper draws on fieldwork experience in Beijing’s green belts, which could also be labelled the city’s urban margin or frontier, to reflect on the space-time of encounter in the field. I aim to demonstrate how space foregrounds not only our bodily experiences but also ethnographic investigations of the daily life, and hence becomes a method. Beijing’s green belts symbolise a historical–geographical conjuncture (a moment) emerging in its urban metamorphosis. Traditional endeavours (immanent in various spatial metaphors) to identify field sites as reified entities are invalidated over the course of the space-time encounter, requiring a relational spatial ontology to register such dynamics. The use in fieldwork of DiDi Hitch, a mobile app for taxi-hailing and hitchhiking, reveals the spatiotemporal construction of self–other relations needing recognition via the dialectics of the encounter. In this relational framework, an encounter is never a priori but a negotiation of a here and now between different trajectories and stories as individuals are thrown together in socially constructed space and time.

 

Keywords

urban ethnography, spatial ontology, spatial metaphors, the dialectics of the encounter, DiDi Hitch, Beijing

 

Advertisement

Time

September 2017
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  
« Apr   Dec »

Space

  • July 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • December 2021 (1)
  • February 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (1)
  • May 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (1)
  • March 2020 (2)
  • December 2019 (1)
  • April 2019 (1)
  • December 2018 (1)
  • March 2018 (1)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • September 2017 (1)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • July 2015 (1)
  • May 2015 (1)
  • April 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (2)
  • March 2014 (1)
  • October 2013 (3)

Spacetime

  • Academic (24)
  • Beijing (1)
  • Events (15)
  • Field (7)
  • London (4)
  • Publication (2)
  • Reading (12)
  • Teaching (3)
  • Travel (1)

Moments

  • About
  • Events
  • Publication
  • Urban Poetry Society

Articulation

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

The right to the city

  • 23,005 rights

Keywords

Beijing central-park conference critical displacement encounter ethnography event Geography Greenbelt identity infrastructure jiehebu land lecture Lefebvre London LSE materiality method metropolitan migration modernism modernity neoliberalism notes nyc PKU political economy politics property Quito-papers research rights Sociology space state summer syllabus Teaching theory urban urbanisation waste

Seminars

Professor Hyun Bang… on About
Enid on 大卫·哈维的黄金时代
Yimin on Urban Poetry Society
Follow Read Cities on WordPress.com

Join!

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

Encounters

No upcoming events

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Read Cities
    • Join 27 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Read Cities
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar