Telling Stories of the City

Abstract

While ethnographic work has been a core part of teaching in many geography courses, the process of entering the field, “being-in” the midst of data collection, and leaving it has rarely been made explicit for discussion at the National University of Singapore. This article draws on fieldworking experiences at two urban sites in Singapore and discusses the insecurities, distractions, and reorientations that shape the spatialities of fieldwork. Apart from photography, I suggest that fieldnotes and video-recording techniques are important tools to be deployed alongside walking in order to apprehend affective, ineffable, and mundane moments in the field. By highlighting urban materialities as affective materials for organizing everyday experience, and urban mobilities as heterogeneous and rhythmic, I demonstrate how walking ethnographers’ bodies are attuned to a host of affects and mundane vignettes of the city, in the process sensitizing us to the networks of rhythms weaving urban life into form. In this sense, there is both a poetics and politics to walking as a mode of embodied ethnography.

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