Thieme, T;
(2017)
Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums.
City
, 21
(2)
pp. 219-231.
10.1080/13604813.2017.1353346.
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Abstract
This paper reflects on doing and writing ethnography on the urban margins, where uncertainty and provisionality mark the everyday city. The discussion is situated within a postcolonial approach to ethnographies of ‘hustle’ in Nairobi slums, critically reflecting on methodological choices made to facilitate the licence to linger in intimate and interstitial spaces of neighbourhoods often closed off to visitors. The paper argues that while urban ethnography is foundational to postcolonial scholarship on African cities, it is also vexed with tensions between ethnographic experience of the provisional and uncertain lived reality in which ethnographers seek to embed themselves for periods of time, and the ethnographic representation that emerges in the form of ethnographic authorship. The paper engages with the methodological tactic of engaging in waste work as an ‘apprentice researcher’; and with the theoretical choice of deploying the very vocabularies and expressions of struggle of interlocutors living and working in the ‘slums’ of Nairobi.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/13604813.2017.1353346 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1353346 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Urban ethnography, hustle, Nairobi, slum urbanism |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10028056 |
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