Presentation short abstract

Event ethnography of Kolkata’s annual hawker mobilizations offers a methodological lens on how urban political ecology and urban informality intersect, revealing the sensory, embodied, and relational practices through which street vendors contest precarity and claim urban space.

Presentation long abstract

In India, street vendors, commonly known as hawkers, are highly visible and central to the lifeworld of the street, yet they remain legally invisible and structurally precarious. In Kolkata, where my work is empirically situated, hawkers are frequently targeted by clean-up drives that cast their presence as antithetical to the visions of the world-class city. In this presentation, I examine how event ethnography, conducted during “Anti-Eviction Day” and “International Hawkers’ Day,” celebrated annually, opens an imaginative and methodological window for studying urban informality through the lens of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). Such events transform ordinary streets into charged arenas where memories of past evictions are reconstructed, bodies gather in dense proximity, and sound, smell, and emotion intermingle to create atmospheres in which political meanings are not only articulated but viscerally felt. In these moments, UPE gains access to the embodied, affective, and relational practices through which hawkers negotiate urban life. While these gatherings create temporal ruptures in the ordinary functioning of urban space, they also reveal the bonds of solidarity that sustain political organizing. These events become sites of knowledge production, where marginalized actors recall the trauma of eviction raids, circulate stories of survival, and produce counter-narratives that unsettle elite imaginaries of disorder, pollution, and congestion. Event ethnography thus foregrounds their agency in shaping city spaces, advancing political claims, and imagining more just urban futures.