Registration is now open for the third online workshop of the “Towards innovative mixed-methods approaches to studying living multiculture in small cities” seminar series organised by Stef De Sabbata, Katy Bennett, Matteo Dutto, Maarten Loopmans and Giorgia Mascaro and funded by the (USF Seminar Series Awards).
Furthermore, as part of our USF Seminar Series award, we have some funding to cover the travel and accommodation costs for some of the participants attending our final event in person in Prato (Italy, September 9th to 11th, 2024). To apply for a bursary, please submit the following materials in a single PDF document to me (deadline: May 20th, 2024).
# Collaborative @ Antwerp: Living Multiculture in Small Cities III
In a new era of global migration, diverse forms of urban mobility, migration settlement, and resettlement have contributed to the reshaping of national populations and localities, paving the way for new encounters, exchanges, and tensions (Neal et al., 2018). In this context, cities are not only the terrain on which these entangled relationships unfold, but these relationships shape them. Indeed, studies on multiculture demand a new focus on place and space because they are vital to understanding how multicultural social relations are enacted and lived.
Informed by the recent postcolonial turn in urban studies that calls for a decentralisation of urban theory (Robinson, 2006) and embracing a comparative case study approach (Robinson, 2016), this seminar series will bring together academics, early career researchers and practitioners in thinking and learning about mixed-methods research practices (Bennett and De Sabbata, 2023) for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture across different local contexts: Leicester (UK), Prato (Italy) and Antwerp (Belgium). We aim to explore how a range of diverse historical and material processes have led Leicester, Prato and Antwerp to variously develop the status of “the multicultural” city in their respective countries. We will explore what “multicultural” means in the three different contexts, using geo-spatial, geo-political and cultural lenses to interrogate processes taking place.
The seminar series is structured into four events. This is the third of three online workshops aimed at exploring collaborative research methods. We will then conclude the seminar series with an in-person, three-day event, including training and workshops to bring together these three different methodological approaches and apply them to develop a mixed-method project.
This third online workshop will focus on collaborative ethnographies. Together, we will explore different models of doing collaborative ethnography. How can academic and nonacademic participants collaborate to narrate how particular conditions of multiculturalism are lived and experienced together, investigate or affect state practices to regulate and control super-diverse societies, or strengthen subaltern activism and empowerment? The workshop will discuss the methodological and ethical benefits and challenges of such an approach in different steps of the research process, from data collection to research outputs.
To do so, we will structure the workshop into three interactive parts: a photovoice session, a walk-along-interview and a collaborative analysis. Participants are invited to actively participate in all three sessions, to think and reflect together, to build on each other’s thoughts, and question each other’s ideas.