Learnings from an East London-night walk

When venturing into new-to-me-places for ethnographic research, I do like to either chat up-taxi drivers or random people in the streets in order to get to know their framing and perspective on their place. This helps me with settling-in and also with what you could call ‘cultural calibration’.

This time round, I took a spontaneous night walk in East London, just after prepping the following day’s research activities. While street-strolling, I chatted up a Bangladeshi dude that had just tossed away the remainders of what was a joint. He said that he would walk East London’s streets at nights endlessly, and that he would love taking me for a ride, if I were up for it.

The alleys and corridors of East London were full of energy and subversive art. Mostly graffiti. At some point, we passed by a brick wall, plastered with tiles of miniature artwork. While I generally photo-shot the hell out of the district, I also took an image of a ‘Mr. Dick Pic’-tile. Just because I thought it was a good laugh, I shared this image with my spontaneous night-guide – right from the back-display of the camera.

Now, it turned out that this photograph elicits quite a story in my new-found-friend:

He went on narrating that this tile must refer to what we might call subversion or street hacking: because parts of East London were pretty run down, and because of the city government refusing to refurbish, an artist was seeking own inventive ways. Spraying ‘dick pics’ onto public space, it turned out, made the government fresh-paint walls and even redo street-asphalt, all in an effort to erase the disturbing imagery from public gaze.

Turned out this ‘adverse effect’ encouraged many more people in East London to roam out into the streets, and to do just the very same: ‘dick pic-mark’ whatever they considered to be in need of some fresh paint or renovation. The rule was simple but straightforward: spray a dick-grafiti onto whatever, and the next day it will be all covered-up, in new fresh color.

The learning of the story might be three things:

  1. The power of cultural calibration as a technique of settling into the scene;
  2. the power of an image as a research stimuli to generate rich narrative insight; as well as
  3. the inventiveness of people to life-hack, subvert and appropriate their immediate life-world.

My PhD-ethnography “The mobile phone in urban Kenyan everyday life” is published as a book with Springer VS

Das Mobiltelefon im Alltagsleben des urbanen Kenia_books

After years of fieldwork and writing, I am proud to announce that my PhD-media ethnography has recently been published as a monograph with Springer VS:

Waltinger, Michael (2018): Das Mobiltelefon im Alltagsleben des urbanen Kenia. Eine medienethnografische Studie zur Mobiltelefonaneignung. [The mobile phone in urban Kenyan everyday-life. A media ethnography on mobile phone appropriation.] Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 435 pages. Book details and table of contents [in German] available via Springer VS. ISBN: 978-3-658-25220-5. 49,99 € [Softcover] / 39,99 € [eBook].

Abstract
In this media ethnography, Michael Waltinger describes the appropriation of mobile phones in the everyday life of an urban community in Eastlands Nairobi (Kenya).
As its vantage point, the fieldwork studies people’s socio-structural living conditions in order to see how these are a pre-condition for and intertwined with everyday media appropriation. This is to contextualize social action on the micro-level of the subject with the larger societal macro-structure in which media action is embedded.
Everyday phone usage in the urban community of the ethnography spans different spheres of life in multifaceted ways. While the mobile phone is perceived as an ambivalent artifact that interacts with peoples life-worlds in both positive and negative ways, it undeniably is an integrative part of the ‘way of life’ in contemporary urban Nairobi: among others, the mobile phone is a symbol for being part of the ‘global village’, it is a culturally codified and polysemic sign of social distinction, and it is a significate of a locally defined afro-modernity.

Preview on Google Books

Mascara…anyone?

Mascara anyoneObservation in Alby, a Stockholm suburb (© Michael Waltinger, 2014)

Dissolving the border between subject and object — Personifying STUFF. 

Making THINGS mine — Appropriation.