The volume’s chapters are also united by the shared commitment of early career social science scholars to ethnography as a research method. This gives a common methodological focus to diverse topics of substantive concern located in various cities of the world from Manchester, Newcastle and Salford in the north of England, to Detroit in the USA, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Turin in Italy and Beirut in Lebanon. Ethnography, relying as it does on long-term participant observation and in-depth open-ended interviewing, is uniquely valuable as a resource for bringing to life the unpredictable ways in which humans survive and develop forms of resilience among, for example, the ruins of dying cities. Ethnography also enables social scientists to understand and add depth to the surprising stories and apparent contradictions of everyday protest in the face of the increasing privatization of the public good and extreme inequalities of wealth. Ethnographically grounded analyses of urban life are therefore uniquely positioned to explain and critically analyse the new politics of popular resistance as the people who feel ‘left behind’ by society, or expelled from what might be described as the ‘exclusification’ of urban environments, push back against an economy and politics that appears to exist only for the private benefit of an indifferent elite population.
Dr Gillian Evans is an urban anthropologist and senior lecturer of social anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has a special interest in the transformation of post-industrial cities, in particular London, England, with her research focusing on the material and social transformation of the Docklands and riverside industry on both sides of the River Thames. She is concerned to explain what it means for the societies we live in that once thriving industries and manufacturing sites like docks, coal mines, steelworks, potteries and so on have declined and closed down whilst a new service sector, retail, knowledge and financial services economy has grown and prospered under conditions that are increasingly liberal to capital interests at the expense of people living in poverty.