To be held at the International Summer School on Cultural Sociology – Memory, Culture & Identity 2014 – Brno University, June 18-19
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Presentation. What are urban interstices? What does it mean to explore the city through its folds? What sort of skills and sensibilities does the enterprise call for? This workshop is an attempt to tackle conceptually as well as ethnographically these questions. It unfolds in three moves: first, there will be a lecture where a number of urban topics and puzzles will be presented. Hopefully, an epistemic and methodological discussion will follow; second, we will do some fieldwork, albeit a necessarily crushed one. An urban walk or drift will function as invitation to ethnographic observation and data collection. At time 2, our aim is to appreciate the city as a Wunderkammer, a chambre des merveilles, or a Room of Wonders. To do so, we will disperse into the territory equipped with our probes and captors, and see what happens. Third, we will meet for a final round of discussion, collectively reviewing, discussing and interpreting collected data, in a joint effort to reflect on the experience/experiment, and look for further insights into the larger cultural meaning of the city.
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Format
– day 1  (morning): introduction: lecture + some general methodological instructions
– day 1 (afternoon) & day 2 (morning): fieldwork, urban walk
– day 2 (afternoon): feedback: collectively reviewing, discussing and interpreting collected data