Blog | Positionalität

How does socio-spatial segregation shape the experience of urban space? In this blog post, Nicolas Zehner reflects on a recent research trip to Cape Town by taking a closer look at the intricate relationships between queer dating, Pokémon Go, and urban transportation. Although seemingly unrelated, these forms of urban sociality are all intimately linked through structural inequality.

The authors of this blogpost are migration researchers. While doing research on the unequal distribution of mobility rights around the world, they make use of the privileges accorded to them by the very same regime. Their position has allowed them to travel to six countries within the last year. Inspired by stories from their past and current fieldwork, the authors reflect on their research within an unequal mobility and migration regime, which has become much more than a mere research object to them.

A thin line between ethics and aesthetics haunts these reflections on field research in an African city, approached through the positionality of a researcher from a European context. Based on some visual impressions encountered during the fieldwork, the researcher Francesca Ceola retraces the process of reorientation in a place geographically and culturally very far away from her habitat recognizing what she knows in what she sees. In doing so, she contests the abstraction of “going to do fieldwork” as separate from everyday scientific practices.