Event | Rolling Ethnography: Methodology and Urban Research – Masterclass with Paul O’Connor (University of Exeter)

Event | Rolling Ethnography: Methodology and Urban Research – Masterclass with Paul O’Connor (University of Exeter)
Date: Friday 25 April 2025
Time: 10:00-12:00
Location: University of Amsterdam, room 0.16, Media Studies, BG1 (Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam)
Contact & Registration: L.Kopitz@uva.nl
Registration Deadline: 14 April 2025
Credits: 1 ECTS (Readings TBC)

During this masterclass we will read and discuss recent research focused on interdisciplinary urban methods in the humanities and social sciences. Taking up a focus on skateboarding in the city, we will consider methodological challenges of researching skateboarding as simultaneously play, sport and crime. In response, we will lean into the methodological and ethical issues at the heart of skateboarding research, and how this field requires researchers to develop interdisciplinary approaches. Participants will be invited to critically engage with these texts, to pose questions, and think through the implications for imagining their own research directions.

Paul O’Connor is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. He received his doctorate studying Muslim youth in Hong Kong and has researched and published on issues of cultural hybridity, ethnicity, and religion. He is also a lifelong skateboarder interested in the mystical and arcane practices of skateboard culture, and author of the book Skateboarding and Religion (2020).