Paper short abstract:

Movement within the urban space initiates a process of spatial (un)learning that challenges researchers’ personal geographies and representations of social and racial inequalities. It creates intersubjective junctions, as places from which to observe how privileges are (re)constructed and contested.

Paper long abstract:

Fieldwork, as an embodied practice, requires moving through space as constituted by social and racial boundaries and systems of privilege. While anthropologists walk into the field with a specific understanding of spatial inequalities, their perceptions can change depending on the reality of the landscape that they discover. This paper focuses on the two authors’ experiences of spatial (un)learning in the context of ethnographies with migrant populations in European cities. It reflects on the researchers’ everyday movements that can make the familiar unfamiliar and create new personal geographies of spatial boundaries and junctions that can be later integrated into data analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldworks in Belgium and France, we show that moving across the city rests on a personal ‘imagining’ of urban infrastructure that is called into question as the research progresses. Walking with her participants in neighborhoods of Antwerp and Ghent, Weyers demonstrates that their experiences informed her own representations of urban neighborhoods developed over time, either aligning with or challenging her own position as a white, middleclass, female researcher. Reflecting on the use of public transportation in the suburbs of Paris, Ménard analyses how daily im/mobility challenged her embodied practice and mental mapping of the urban space, leading to a different understanding of urban segregation. Both cases illuminate how movement can create intersubjective junctions, as places from which to observe and discuss how privileges are (re)constructed and contested within the urban space. Movement changes perceptions, but also encourages us to analyze spatial inequalities as a deeply relational process.