ethnography

Reviews

An American in Marseille

Olivier Gaudin & translated by Oliver Waine - 17 March 2023
In his latest work, Marseille, Port to Port, the New York-based ethnographer William Kornblum paints a rich and...
Reviews

Episodes from the Social Life of the Delhi Metro

Sneha Mandhan - 20 January 2023
What is the impact of a new metro on a large and growing city? As new metros are cropping up across Asia, Rashmi...
Reviews

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private

Claire Dunning - 14 December 2021
Claire Dunning reviews Jeremy R. Levine’s new book, Constructing Community, an ethnographic study of community...
From the Field

Social Housing in Postcolonial Contexts

Clémence Léobal & translated by Oliver Waine - 25 September 2020
What happens when national social-housing policies developed in mainland France are transposed in overseas...
Reviews

Why School Securitization Fails. Lessons from Morrill and Musheno’s Navigating Conflict

Andrés Besserer Rayas - 8 October 2019
Navigating Conflict describes how pupils are able to address conflicts on their own, and how school securitization...
Debates

Masculine Sports and “Respectable” Men in Working-Class Neighborhoods

Carine Guérandel & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 March 2019
In a work rich in ethnographic material, Akim Oualhaci questions how socialization through sports contributes to...
From the Field

Beneath the Surface of Chinese Cities: Abandoned Places and Contemporary Ruins

Judith Audin & translated by Oliver Waine - 28 September 2018
Urban ruins represent a marginal subject of research within the field of Chinese studies, and yet are a precious...
Reviews

Nature’s Worth: Using Human Markets to Value Ecosystems’ Contributions

Anna Krol & Lisa Jean Moore - 20 February 2018
Mattijs van Maasakkers’ The Creation of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States: The Challenge of...
From the Field

Snowbirds’ Gift Economy in the Arizona Desert

David Frati - 7 November 2017
Each year, 200,000 retired people spend the winter in and around the small town of Quartzsite, Arizona, in the...
From the Field

Liberty, Community and Religion: A Hispano-Moroccan Family in Andalusia

Alain Cottereau & translated by Oliver Waine - 11 October 2016
In Europe, the relationship that migrants originating from the Arab Muslim world – whether first- or...
Reviews

Evictions and Poverty

Hilary Botein - 28 June 2016
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted has drawn much-needed attention to the under-studied problem of unsubsidized rental...
Reviews

On Being Black and Poor in a Small City

Peter Moskos - 24 May 2016
No Way Out, Waverly Duck’s recent examination of how African Americans in an impoverished small city construct a...
Reviews

Neighborhood Change and the Right to the City

Adam Tanaka - 29 March 2016
New York City’s Stuyvesant Town is the largest housing development in Manhattan, and also one of the most...
From the Field

The Other Side of Austin, Texas

Caitlyn Collins & Katherine Jensen & Kristine Kilanski & Javier Auyero - 2 March 2015
Despite a booming economy, Austin, Texas, is a city where inequalities persist and grow in the shadow of neoliberal...
Reviews

How journalists see “the suburbs”: lifting the veil on a cliché

Julie Sedel & translated by Oliver Waine - 10 September 2014
“La banlieue”: in France, few terms convey such a clear and constant image: high-rise social housing, young men “of...
Reviews

Urban Ethnography: A Handbook

Daniel Cefaï & translated by Oliver Waine - 3 April 2013
Since the 1980s, the field of ethnography has enjoyed a return to favour in the social sciences. Richard E. Ocejo’s...

Series

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Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
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Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...
Reviews

The Dangers of Security

Médéric Martin-Mazé & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 May 2015
In Against Security, Harvey Molotch highlights – through various examples, including the New York subway, airports,...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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