 Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slumsTatiana Thieme City, 2017, vol. 21, issue 2, 219-231 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. Date: 2017 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:21:y:2017:i:2:p:219-231 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1353346 Access Statistics for this article City is currently edited by Bob Catterall More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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