Paper short abstract:

Unpacking ‘movement’ as a conceptual, methodological, and analytical modality of knowledge production, we critically interrogate the assumptions of space, time, and theory that constitute ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract:

Unpacking ‘movement’ as a conceptual, methodological, and analytical modality of knowledge production, we critically interrogate the assumptions of space, time, and theory that constitute ethnographic research. Drawing from our ethnographic research done with moving bodies in urban India – gig workers and cab drivers – we explore being “on the move” as more than just a metaphor in structuring ethnographic attachments and dispositions:

First, we tackle a spatial mode by contending that while the field is often visualized as a distinct non-human, physical spatiotemporal entity in which the ethnographer ‘enters’, we conceptualize the field as spontaneous movements of the ethnographer whilst thinking, navigating, making decisions of where to go and where not during the fieldwork itself. Second, we probe temporality in ethnographic research. Going beyond the debates between long-term and short-term (patchwork) ethnography, we aim to move the notion of temporality as central to not just the ethnographer but also the interlocutor. We explore how the interlocutors’ perceptions regarding ‘time’ determine the granular as well as the overarching temporality of ethnographic research. Finally, we think through theory as a modality of research and ask: what in the field moves theoretical, conceptual and analytical paradigms?

Paper short abstract:

As the only social scientist on board of a German research vessel, I mapped myself analysing how my identity, emotions, and environment influenced my own research, using autoethnography to highlight the usually unseen ethical and personal challenges of fieldwork in a confined, moving space.

Paper long abstract:

During summer 2021, I accompanied a seven-week expedition on a German research vessel, which aimed to map large parts of the Northwest Atlantic Mid-Ocean Channel (NAMOC) in the Labrador Sea between Canada and Greenland.

As the only social scientist on board, I followed the scientists and crewmembers in their everyday working routines to understand the knowledge production processes from a practice perspective. Yet, this presentation takes a further step by autoethnographically mapping and diffracting my positionality in this moving field. How did my positionality including my intersectional identity markers, such as gender, age, and origin, but also my socialisation, and social, economic, and political background guide and influence my research on the vessel? How did it change through seasickness, the constant surrounding vast ocean and the confined space of a 100m long vessel?

My findings will be supported by videos and visual storytelling, which include reflections on my shifting emotions during the expedition, my access to the field, and the effects of my research on the natural scientist’s attempt to map a deep-sea channel. Thus, while contributing to mapping the material my findings shed light on mapping the usually unseen in science-making – a researcher’s own positionality moving between physical spaces and emotional landscapes shedding light on questions of ethics, privacy, and (personal) challenges while conducting an ethnography on the move.

Paper short abstract:

Ethnographically following a sampling expedition, I explore the intense sociality and labour behind environmental data collection. Moving with researchers across European landscapes, this study examines how itinerant work dynamics shape scientific knowledge and challenge ethnographic methods.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the methodological challenges and ethnographic opportunities that emerge when following scientific environmental sampling across landscapes. Drawing on fieldwork with an expedition team in Europe, I examine how the intense social conditions of field sampling—sharing houses, enduring weather conditions, undertaking long drives, and navigating unfamiliar territories—create not only valuable scientific data but also particular forms of ethnographic knowledge and social relationships.

Following scientists on the move, I investigate three key dimensions of the sampling expedition: the challenge of contextualizing while on the go, the intense sociality developing in the compressed temporality of expedition life, and the manual labour of collecting environmental samples that underpin digital databases. While this itinerant practice complicates contextual analysis and rapport building, it simultaneously allows close contact with the intricate social relations and work dynamics of scientific expeditions. By moving alongside sampling teams, I demonstrate how environmental data's value emerges through strenuous physical and emotional labour that becomes increasingly invisible as samples transition from field to laboratory to digital platforms.

This paper examines how movement shapes both the social dynamics under study and the ethnographic practice itself. It shows how following sampling practices allows ethnographers to explore the physical mobility of field teams and the conceptual mobility of samples as they transform from material specimens to digital data. It concludes by illuminating how increasingly digital biosciences depend on—yet simultaneously devalue and render invisible—the intense sociality and labour inherent in field sampling.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the spatiality of trainwriting using an ethnogeographic approach. Through ethnographic fieldwork and mobile methods, it uncovers the circulatory territories and infrageopolitics of this practice, offering a unique methodology to understand sociospatial dynamics in urbanization

Paper long abstract:

Graffiti has become a significant part of city life worldwide, often regarded as one of the most visible expressions of global urban culture. Paradoxically, in some places, such as on the static and mobile surfaces of urban infrastructure along railway lines, its presence often goes unnoticed, like cigarette butts scattered along station platforms. From an ethnogeographic perspective, the transgressive graffiti on trains (trainwriting) at the core of this paper is far from ordinary. By tracking the ephemeral inscriptions left by trainwriters and connecting places as in a game of dots, the ghost trail of their off-route trajectories reveals the rhythmic movements of a ‘heretical dance’ shaped within the underground arenas of public urban life.

Based on multisited fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2015 as part of my PhD research, this paper examines a group of trainwriters based in Switzerland but networked across Europe. It describes the conceptual approach and mobile methods used to uncover the choreography of graffiti trainwriting and map the 'infrageopolitics' (Tadorian, 2021) that underpin it. More importantly, it introduces an original methodological approach that provides a deeper understanding of the socio-spatial dynamics specific to contemporary urbanisation, particularly the production of social spaces under circulatory conditions—what I term “translocational social spaces.”

Paper short abstract:

Refugees resettled in the US are recruited to truck training schools by the imaginary of the "American dream." Documentary work in truck training and testing yards reveals these as sites of international friction that challenge ethnographic assumptions about the sedentarism of migrant destinations.

Paper long abstract:

The ubiquity of e-commerce in the United States has led to a labor shortage of an estimated 30,000 truck drivers. What used to be regarded as a respectable working class job and a pathway to the “American dream” has since degraded into poor working conditions. To address this disjuncture, newly arrived immigrants are being recruited for truck driving jobs, driven by the promise of financial freedom and the chance to work for themselves as owner-operators. The “American dream” persists, but is it achievable? This paper describes the theoretical implications, ethical struggles, and methodological challenges that emerged from an ethnographic film project following the experiences of Afghan refugees resettled in the United States in their attempts to train and test for a Commercial Drivers License. We rethink mobile subjects, considering how the eponymous figure of the “migrant” is moved and changed through economic conditions that demand new forms of imagined and empirical mobility, and which produce new forms of mobility injustice (Sheller 2018). Simultaneously, we rethink the sedentarism of traditional ethnography, showing how the empirical and practical demands of documenting trucking parallel the lived realities of migrants as mobile subjects whose dreams of place-stability are never guaranteed within the conditional and precarious conditions of international refugee resettlement. We present the truck training yard and its ethnographic contours on and off the road as a space of friction where international mobilities and localized constraints intersect.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the value, limitations, and implications of an “analogic” research practice emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in attempting to get embodied insights about the experience of walking a Himalayan trekking route, while faced with the impossibility to leave a village in the Alps.

Paper long abstract:

Every year, thousands of trekkers, mainly from Western countries, walk the Annapurna Circuit in the Nepali Himalayas. One of the villages along the route is Kagbeni, the historical capital of Lower Mustang. During my fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, initially focused on the local community’s engagement with the landscape, I became increasingly interested in how trekkers experience the same landscape. This shift in focus grew more urgent after the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to return to Europe, interrupting my research.

Once in Europe, while conducting digital ethnography and interviews with former trekkers, I realized walking the Circuit myself would have been invaluable. However, travel to Nepal being impossible anytime soon, I had to seek alternative ways to develop a more embodied understanding of trekkers’ experiences than that offered by interviews. Living in a village in the Italian Alps, and inspired by “go-alongs” (Kusenbach 2003), I invited some trekkers who had walked the Circuit to hike with me in the area. Through the ensuing conversations, where the trekkers compared their experiences in Nepal with walking in the Alps, I gained deeper insights into their time in the Himalayas.

In this paper, I will discuss the implications of this “analogic” research mode. Is the ethnographic data produced by these encounters truly valuable in understanding an experience removed both in time and space? How does the researcher’s positionality play out in such a research practice? Does this way of gathering ethnographic material remain valuable now that travelling is again allowed?

Paper short abstract:

Language is rarely considered in discussions of mobility. This paper explores the “conversation trails” of migrants and advisors, spanning multiple speakers, sites, and time. In doing so, it demonstrates the mobility of language and speakers and offers new opportunities for ethnographic practice.

Paper long abstract:

Language is rarely considered in discussions of mobility in ethnography, both as a driver of human movement and as something that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries itself. Drawing on 12-months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the mobility of language and speakers among migrants accessing the UK advice sector. Specifically, it identifies how common expectations of advice interactions as static (bound to a particular place and time), monologic encounters (Bakhtin, 1986) are challenged when people get to talking.

Any given conversation between advisors and those seeking advice is unlikely to be the first or, depending on the outcome, the last its kind. Participants are often required to travel between multiple sites and speak with multiple advisors to access the advice they need. Resultantly, conversations about individual issues are best understood as “conversation trails”, that move with participants across different spaces, different speakers, and over prolonged periods of time. For advisors and those seeking advice, a key challenge becomes picking apart these trails and relating the subsequent information and expectations to the present space and time.

The paper concludes by considering some of the benefits and challenges of conversation trails for ethnographers trying to follow participants’ experiences. Although conversation is already a staple of ethnographic practice (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019) a language-centred approach to mobility creates new opportunities for methods, including taking influence from common practices in journalism and sonic studies.

Paper short abstract:

The study shadows Indian Muslim women as they move across city spaces, and employs a 'mazedaar methodology' to centre moments of fun interspersed in the interlocutors' constant negotiations with interlock of gender and religion that impacts mobility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper comes from a larger research that looks at the everyday spatial mobilities of Indian Muslim women in urban spaces. Situated in the metropolis of Hyderabad, India, the primary use of the tool of shadowing highlights how conscious negotiations for accessibility by marginalised groups are interspersed with instances of joy and fun in public spaces. Being cognizant of my own positionality as a Muslim woman who is not local to the field site, following my interlocutors as they moved across city spaces also meant collectively experiencing vulnerabilities, and being part of spontaneous moments of pleasures. In allowing myself to be drawn into the embodied experience of pleasure and fun imbibed in mobility itself, I understand the role of ‘mazedaar methodology’ (put forward by Jonathan Anjaria and Ulka Anjaria) in working with marginalised groups as lives marred by precarity but also hope, self-reimagination and worldbuilding. In doing so, I also highlight how dwelling in 'mazaa' or fun with interlocutors centres the lens of the researched and has an epistemic influence on the knowledge produced to reflect the nuances of lived realities without essentialising identities, actions and ways of living through the dichotomy of conformity or resistance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores walking as a shared activity between migrant women and ethnographers. Based on multi-site ethnography from Abidjan to Marseille via Tunis, it examines how walking shapes spatial and sensory experiences and serves as both a strategy for crossing borders and a reflexive method.

Paper long abstract:

Globalised, interconnected, and cosmopolitan cities are navigated daily by diverse publics, including migrants and ethnographers who observe their movements. But what happens when these two groups meet—not in a café, home, or office—while walking together, wandering the streets and neighbourhoods, or simply hanging out? Walking, both a physical and social activity reshapes space and offers a way of engaging with and understanding the world. It provides the opportunity to explore the city, observe its practices, landscapes, and actors, and experience the lived reality of urban life. Drawing on multi-site ethnography conducted across various urban terrains—from Abidjan to Marseille via Tunis—this article explores the sensory, spatial, and emotional dimensions of walking as a shared activity between migrants and ethnographers. The first part examines how walking functions in the lives of Ivoirian migrant women, especially in spaces shaped by power dynamics, and how it serves as a strategy for crossing and defying borders. The second part focuses on walking as a meaningful activity for the ethnographer, placing them in a reflexive and material interaction with the world they are studying.

Paper short abstract:

Studying transborder work between Poland and Germany, we use sensory and collaborative methods: photography, soundscapes, videos with participants, videos of our travels, and a collaborative artistic-academic project. In this paper, we discuss some of the innovations and challenges of our research.

Paper long abstract:

In the project "VISION: Envisioning convivial Europe," we research the work and everyday lives of transborder workers who wake up around 2 am in their towns and villages in western Poland and travel 2-3 hours each way to work in one of the many warehouses in Brandenburg, the region around Berlin, or the giga-factory producing electric cars in Grünheide, close to the Polish border. Both Brandenburg and regions on the Polish side of the border are often considered “inner peripheries” and suffer from remoteness, outgoing migration, and aging, which all contribute to gradual decline. As an object of research, these areas are fascinating but also challenging as we focus on a geographically dispersed region with poor communication links. We research people who are a big part of their days (and nights) “on the move” and to meet them or follow their paths, we are also often on the move, struggling with long commuting (to the different research sites), border controls, traffic, lack of public transport between some of the sites, and our own bodily limitations.

In our research, we employ multimodal and collaborative methods as we aim to produce research that is both academically innovative and socially powerful. We work with photography, video, and soundscapes and facilitate a small collaborative project with recent migrants and transborder workers. In this paper, we discuss some of the innovations (e.g., in film editing or our collaborative work) and challenges of this sensory “ethnography on the move.”

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the mobility of a recent cultural heritage documentation project in Mongolia articulated with the mobility of nomadic pastoralist interlocutors, producing unanticipated negotiations, contestations, and exchanges in its wake.

Paper long abstract:

The Nomadic Material Heritage Project (2022-24) employed a mobile fieldwork strategy to document object biographies and craft practices in dispersed mobile pastoralist Kazakh communities in Western Mongolia. Local environmental and infrastructural conditions, as well as the array of social strategies that Kazakhs in Mongolia employ to manage them, affected how we approached our research and raised fundamental questions about what community-engaged scholarship means in practice. In this paper, I explore how our project's mobility, covering more than 250 miles over the course of two field seasons, impacted our relationships with interlocutors and produced unanticipated negotiations, contestations, and exchanges. Local Kazakh team members played a central role in shaping our mobility: our movements through space relied on and reinforced their positions in existing social networks and even brought new relationships of obligation into being. At times, other actors sought to control, manipulate, or make use of our mobility, shedding light on the politics of (im)mobility in a region where mobility has been construed as a liberatory force. Ultimately, the mobility of our project and how it articulated with the mobility of our interlocutors became as much an object of study as the material culture practices we'd set out to document.

Paper short abstract:

Departing from an investigation of the practices and conceptualisations of everyday journeying among the Makushi in the triple frontier region of southern Guyana, this paper critically interrogates movement as a tool and method for ethnographic inquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Rather than permanent migration or nomadism, this paper explores the insights derived from those often overlooked, mundane, daily micro-mobilites, like crossing the border to go to a medical appointment, visiting a relative in a neighbouring village, embarking on a shopping trip in a nearby town, going on a group expedition into the forest or to the capital, or simply taking a walk. Thus, methodologically, this meant travelling with research participants, especially women, using whatever technologies necessary - walking by foot, hitching or paying a ride by vehicle - and learning how to move appropriately within savannah, forest and urban landscapes. Here, especially relevant to the creation of knowledge are the spaces in between, the process of the journey, interrupted frequently through moments of waiting and immobility.

It signifies paying attention to how people communicate, orient themselves, form relationships, narrate their journeys and make themselves at home outside one’s village, shedding light on bigger themes such as power relations, gender and identity. This paper revisits the idea of fieldwork-in-motion as a method and further discusses this concept within recent mobility studies.