Guma, P.K. (2025) ‘Everyday Infrastructures of Urban Life’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13324
Guma displaces infrastructure from the spectacular register of megaprojects and technological novelty toward the ordinary systems through which urban life actually persists. His central intervention is to oppose the “modern infrastructure ideal” with a plural account of integrated, hybrid and techno-popular arrangements that operate through incompleteness rather than despite it. Three analytical registers organise the argument: incomplete relationalities, mundane temporalities and heterogeneous modernities. Together they recast infrastructure as processual, contingent, maintained and embedded in broader social and ecological relations. The methodological operation is comparative and conceptual, drawing on eastern African cases to show how roads, kiosks, networks and improvised arrangements coexist, overlap and mutate through use. Maintenance, waiting, repetition and repair become epistemically consequential rather than residual. Guma’s wider contribution is to urban theory and STS: he provides a vocabulary for analysing infrastructures that are neither failed versions of an ideal system nor temporary anomalies, but ordinary socio-technical conditions through which urban worlds are continuously composed.
Bartoletti, R., Sacchetti, F. and Mariani, E. (2025) ‘“It almost seems as if, in the forest, the city has disappeared”: Walking ethnography in an urban wilderness’, Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381251377865
Bartoletti, Sacchetti and Mariani treat walking as a situated epistemic relation rather than a transparent route to authenticity. Their ethnography of the Prati di Caprara urban forest in Bologna shows how movement through spontaneous urban nature recalibrates sensory attention, orientation and the relation between city and wilderness. The paper’s iconic operation is “controlled getting lost”: temporary disorientation becomes analytically productive because it exposes how place is known through recursive acts of orientation, displacement and reorientation. The go-along method is deliberately non-directive and minimally pre-structured, enabling detours, surprise and contradiction to enter the research process rather than be filtered out by a rigid itinerary. Crucially, the authors refuse the claim that walking automatically produces privileged access to experience; its value depends on context, attunement and the combination of routes, notes, audio and observation. The work bridges sensory ethnography, mobilities research and urban political ecology by making movement itself part of the object and condition of knowledge.
Witt, G. and Bernzen, A. (2026) ‘Solving space-related conflicts through degrowth approaches? Navigating tourism-driven housing challenges on the East Frisian islands’, Geoforum, 174, 104679. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104679
Witt and Bernzen reposition degrowth as a spatial governance problem rather than an abstract macroeconomic doctrine. Their study examines tourism-dependent island economies where housing scarcity, second-home ownership, seasonal labour and visitor infrastructures produce conflicts between growth-oriented development and resident wellbeing. The theoretical contribution lies in joining housing degrowth to tourism degrowth, thereby treating land and dwelling not as passive containers of economic activity but as contested resources whose distribution structures everyday life. Methodologically, the paper combines qualitative content analysis of regional planning documents with forty-eight semi-structured interviews across four East Frisian islands, using peripheral island conditions as analytically concentrated environments in which growth pressures become unusually legible. Its wider significance lies in showing that degrowth becomes operational when translated into spatial priorities: decent housing, social equity, long-term quality of life and limits to touristification. It therefore connects political ecology to housing studies, regional planning and the geography of tourism.
Owton, H. and Allen-Collinson, J. (2013) ‘Close but not too close: friendship as method(ology) in ethnographic research encounters’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241613495410.
Owton and Allen-Collinson challenge the conventional assumption that emotional involvement contaminates qualitative research. Friendship is examined neither as methodological innocence nor as a licence for intimacy, but as a relation that can generate forms of access, disclosure and embodied understanding unavailable to detached observation. Their key operation is reflexive calibration: proximity must be made analytically visible, including its affects, asymmetries, expectations and ethical limits. The friend-researcher occupies a shifting position in which knowledge is produced through trust but is never guaranteed by it. This reframes bias as a problem of provenance rather than a defect solved by distance. Emotional reflexivity becomes evidentially productive when the researcher records how the relationship conditions what can be asked, seen, remembered and interpreted. The article links ethnography to feminist and relational methodologies, providing a vocabulary for long-term research situations in which fieldwork and ordinary social life overlap. It is especially important for any archive produced through recurring companionship rather than episodic professional access.
Cross, L. (2020) ‘Artist interviews and revisionist art history: women of African descent, critical practice and methods of rewriting dominant narratives’, Journal of Art Historiography, 23.
Cross treats artist interviews as a method for historicising experience that dominant art-historical structures have often failed to preserve. Drawing on more than a decade of interviews conducted through narrative arts writing, academic research and documentary film/video, she argues that the artist’s experiential knowledge can disclose social, cultural and institutional conditions obscured by canonical accounts. Her methodological operation is explicitly positional. Black feminist thought and the ‘outsider within’ perspective make shared cultural knowledge a resource for interpretation while retaining attention to differences within apparently common identities. Interviews become extended conversations rather than neutral extractions of information, capable of registering career navigation, exclusion, aesthetic inheritance and forms of knowledge that remain marginal to institutional archives. Cross therefore connects oral testimony to revisionist historiography and curatorial practice. The larger implication is that the archive is not merely incomplete by accident: methods of access, trust and listening determine which artistic lives become historically legible and which remain structurally under-described.
Thatcher, J. (2021) The Lives of the Interview: The Development of the Artist Interview in Twentieth-Century Britain and the United States. PhD thesis. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.
Thatcher transforms the artist interview from a transparent vessel of biographical information into an object with its own material and institutional biography. Interviews are performative and co-constructed encounters that continue to change after the conversation ends: recordings become transcripts, transcripts are edited, excerpts circulate in print or broadcast, and later repetitions alter both the artist’s position and the interviewer’s questions. Her diachronic method is particularly powerful because it refuses the fantasy of a definitive statement. An artist can revise, contradict or reframe earlier positions, while the same interview can acquire new authority through publication, citation and archival preservation. Thatcher’s emphasis on production chains—interviewer, artist, producer, editor, transcriber, publisher, broadcaster—also relocates authorship from a dyad to a network. The work bridges oral history, media archaeology and art historiography, showing that evidence about artistic life is inseparable from the technical forms and institutional passages through which speech becomes record.
Nilsen, A. (2023) Biographical Life Course Research: Studying the Biography-History Dynamic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44717-4.
Nilsen reconstructs biographical research as an inquiry into the dynamic between individual lives and historical conditions rather than as the recovery of self-contained personal narratives. Her decisive contribution is temporal stratification: biography is intelligible only through the interaction of individual timing, family time, cohort position, institutional change and historical period. The life course is therefore neither a fixed developmental sequence nor a retrospective story of self-realisation. It is a contextual trajectory whose transitions acquire meaning through their relation to changing structures. Methodologically, Nilsen defends biographical interviews, lifelines and mixed forms of evidence while resisting both causal reductionism and an unrestricted constructivism in which factual distinctions dissolve into narrative. The book provides a rigorous bridge between qualitative longitudinal research and historical sociology. Its relevance extends beyond sociology because it offers a precise way to study persistence and change without converting duration into destiny: the same life can be followed through different phases while preserving the asymmetry between event, memory, narration and historical circumstance.
MontageCitizenship, ZoningCustody, ObligationDebt
MontageCitizenship understands citizenship as a montage of documents, images, permissions, archives and recognitions. ZoningCustody indicates how urban space administers belonging through limits, uses, exclusions and territorial custodianships. ObligationDebt introduces the ethical debt that every form of belonging maintains with bodies, places and previous memories. The triad reads politics through spatial inscription. To belong is not only to possess a right; it is to be composed, situated and obliged. Socioplastics turns citizenship into a material operation where archive, zone and debt intersect. The subject appears as montage under custody.
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