City Seminar: “Doing urban fieldwork: travelling across multiple types of borders for academic research”

Speakers will focus on the intersections of their own fieldwork – in/on the ‘urban’, understood as a simultaneously physical, social and political space – with research methodology, critical urban theory and broader politics. Various case studies and research questions will be discussed in the context of travelling across national, cultural, linguistic, disciplinary and/or other types of borders. Issues to be raised include acknowledging privilege and academic freedom when looking ‘outside-in’ at a specific urban context; research as an alienating/connecting experience in a familiar/unfamiliar context; the political aspect of travel bureaucracy and its technicalities.