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Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums

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  • Tatiana Thieme

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Tatiana Thieme, 2017. "Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(2), pages 219-231, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:21:y:2017:i:2:p:219-231
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1353346
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    Cited by:

    1. J. Miguel Imas & Lucia Garcia‐Lorenzo, 2023. "A postcolonial and pan‐African feminist reading of Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(2), pages 391-411, March.
    2. Sneha Sharma, 2023. "GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION: Reproducing Dispossession and Erasure within a Waste Picker Organization in Mumbai," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(5), pages 861-875, September.
    3. Imas, J. Miguel & Garcia-Lorenzo, Lucia, 2023. "A postcolonial and pan-African feminist reading of Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117418, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Tatiana A. Thieme, 2020. "Rethinking the Affirmative Value, Politics and Materiality of Waste on the Urban Periphery," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 51(6), pages 1613-1627, November.

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