Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the concept of representation(s) and notions of space and place, this paper reflects on the methodological and epistemological implications of a research project on representation(s) of mobility and success and the relation to the city of Senegalese and Malian migrants in Johannesburg.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on the methodological and epistemological implications of a research project on the representation(s) of mobility and success and the relation to the city of Senegalese and Malian migrants in the inner city of Johannesburg. Starting from a project on migration, the paper shows how the city itself gradually became both an object and protagonist of research.

Together with recent approaches to the notion of space and place, the paper draws on the analytical and epistemological potential of a concept of representation(s) which lies at the intersection of anthropology, social psychology, and German philosophy of culture and which fully accounts for the dynamic construction of representation(s), of places, and of academic knowledge through creation, sense perception, symbolic processes, and social interaction and practices. I will show how old and new lines of exclusion in the inner city of Johannesburg influenced on the migrants' emplacement and ways of navigating the city and how these dynamics imposed restrictions on my methods, mainly ethnographic observations and non-directive interviews, but also opened up unexpected possibilities. This will contribute to wider debates on how methods like non-directive interviews adapt to different contexts, on how they can contribute to theoretical questions, as well as on questions of fragmentation and diversity in the inner city of Johannesburg.