The Wandering Ethnographer: Researching and Representing the City through Everyday Encounters

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork I conducted in Milan, Italy, in2004-05 and in 2009, this paper is an open invitation to createexperimental forms of ethnographic representation that couldbecome part of the unfinished production of the everyday inurban locales. To this end, I reflect on several fieldwork encoun-ters - Milanese people's commentaries, everyday incidents, aswell as local cultural and activists' projects - that can provide ahelpful model for such a practice. I argue that these varied inter-ventions offer insight into complex social processes and dis-junctures in contemporary Milan because they are small, quo-tidian, and temporary, and because they can easily travelthrough the urban terrain. Learning from these encounters, Ipropose that we, too, can produce stories and objects that speakby circulating: ethnographic interventions that use public space,activate affect and become companions to people's embodiedjourneys in city spaces.

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