GEOG242

Description

This course is about exploring everyday urban life through the use of ethnographic methods. The course brings together ethnographic fieldwork with readings in critical ethnography and urban studies. In this course, the city serves as a laboratory for understanding matters of space, place and power. Alongside engaging critical literature, and fieldwork, students will gain experience with a range of tools and methods from creating ethnographic toolkits and interviewing, to mapping and visual ethnography, to coding and analysis. The course invites participants to think critically, both about the role of ethnography in creating urban fictions, and also about the possibilities of using ethnography for engaging questions about difference and power, for mapping and imagining a diversity of urban life, for ethically approaching communities and collaborators, and for creating just urban futures. The primary course objectives are (1) to familiarize students with ethnographic methods, (2) to orient students towards employing ethnography in the study of space and place, and (3) to engage critiques of and critical approaches to using ethnography to examine urban life. Satisfies Geography major skills requirement.