CALL FOR PAPERS
WORKSHOP DATE: Friday 31st January, 2025, 10:00am - 5:00pm
VENUE: 3rd Floor Conference Room, Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago; and breakout rooms
REGISTRATION:
Collaborative methods can balance power relations between researchers and their interlocutors, as they work together on refining research questions, developing methods, considering analysis and publication. Public-facing research aims at conveying the research findings to different audiences, often in different modes. The shared labour and careful listening that go into collaborative and public-facing work can widen our scholarly imaginations and lead to unexplored possibilities. But developing meaningful, ethical, and mutually beneficial collaborative and public-facing approaches to research and publishing is seldom a straightforward process. This workshop provides an opportunity for us to discuss ideas and practices together.
We begin the workshop with a plenary session in the conference room of Alma Jordan Library. The session consists of presentations by Professor Tawanna Dillahunt (University of Michigan) and the project Imagining Futures at the Margins of the State (University of Helsinki) with ample time for a Question and Answer session.
After lunch, the workshop continues in smaller groups in breakout rooms. In these group sessions, we invite you to present your research ideas, ongoing work, or a project you have recently completed and discuss these with the workshop facilitators and other participants. Each presenter will receive individualised feedback and support. The presentations may include graduate students and researchers’ work, arts-based and multimodal research, or NGO projects that apply collaborative research. You are welcome to present work-in-progress – please don’t hesitate to take part if your work is still at a preliminary stage!
The workshop is free of charge and includes a coffee break and lunch for all participants.
Facilitated by the project
Collaborative ethnographic methods may help to balance power relations between
anthropologists and their interlocutors, as decisions about research design, methods, analysis,
and publication can be made together. Ethical collaboration has become a catchphrase in recent efforts to decolonise our disciplinary practice, but developing meaningful and truly ethical, mutually beneficial collaborative approaches to anthropological fieldwork and publishing is seldom a straightforward process. When successful, the shared labour and careful listening of collaborative work can widen our ethnographic imaginations and lead to unexplored possibilities. This panel contributes to ongoing discussions about collaborative ethnography (for example Fuh 2019; Jarillo et al. 2020; Kalinga 2019; The Fire and River Collective 2021). We welcome papers and multimodal presentations on collaborative projects and more or less successful experiments with collaborative methods, both during and after fieldwork. These may include arts-based and multimodal ways of working together - for example by making music, performance ethnography, or photovoice - or various forms of co-research with more conventional social scientific methods. We are particularly interested in South-South collaborations, where anthropologists living and working in different societies in the Global South explore and create methodology for working together; but we are happy to include presentations on other contexts and regions as well. While the theoretical and methodological approaches of the presentations may vary, we'd encourage all contributors to critically consider the ethical, feminist, or decolonizing potential of ethnographic collaboration.
Please submit your abstracts via the link below. For more information, contact Maarit Forde,
Urbanisation in the Global South continues to be shaped by legacies of colonial segregation, uneven transnational connections, state policies and interventions and stratified local economies. This results in wide disparities in access to public space, services, infrastructure, green spaces, and resources, as well as an uneven distribution of risks. At the same time, cities and towns are in constant flux and re-emerge from the tug and pull of heterogeneous forces in unpredictable and indeterminate ways. Whether in capital cities, secondary towns, resource hubs, border towns, or refugee camps transformed into settlements, urban areas are constantly evolving.
Many urban inhabitants face situations of precarity and adversity. However, rather than being merely at the mercy of grand forces, they appropriate space, bend formal rules, devise do-it-yourself solutions, engage in artistic and aesthetic practice, and imagine different futures to survive and aspire. The presentations in this symposium explore the interactions between structural constraints and inequalities and the creative and generative aspects of everyday city-making. They draw on ethnography and art in assessing this dialectical relationship and the forces that shape urban spaces, lives, and imaginations.
This two-day symposium is organised by the research projects
Invited speakers include Patience Mususa, Kathryn Takabvirwa, Adom Philogene Heron, and Bram Jansen. The programme includes an open screening of the film
You can view the programme and abstracts through the links below. To register,
For more information, please contact
University of Helsinki, 28-29 May 2026
Main Building, room U3039
9.00-9.45 Coffee
Welcome and introductions
9.45-12.00 Panel I
Chair: Stefan Millar
Discussant: Patience Mususa
12.00-13.30 Lunch break
13.30-15.30 Panel II
Chair: Amílcar Sanatan
Discussant: Kathryn Takabvirwa
15.30-16.30 Coffee break
16.30-18.30 Film screening at
The screening is followed by a Q&A with the director, Rosalind Fredericks
9.30-10.00 Coffee
10.00-12.00 Panel III
Chair: Saana Hansen
Discussant: Adom Philogene Heron
12.00-13.30 Lunch break
13.30-15.30 Roundtable Discussion: Production of Knowledge in Urban Anthropology: How, by Whom, for Whom?
Chair: Maarit Forde
Discussants: Adom Philogene Heron, Bram Jansen, Patience Mususa, Kathryn Takabvirwa
15.30-16.00 Closing remarks & thanks
Lalli Metsola
Adom Philogene Heron, University of Bristol
Looting: Hurricane, Calypso and A Clash of Reasons in Dominica
Calypso is an art form that laughs at pain. That's the way we deal with our blues. We begin to heal ourselves immediately, through our culture and our music...
David Rudder (1991)
When a cyclone devastates a Caribbean island with a calypso tradition, the calypsonians respond. Calypso, or Kaiso, is a musical genre and popular arena for speaking truth to injustice; for processing traumatic experiences; and a space of ludic analysis - to play with words and laugh at the absurd or extreme. This paper - an interlude from a current book project about post-Hurricane survivals in Dominica - offers a social analysis of single song called ‘Lootahs!’ (Looters, 2018) by King Dice, Dominica’s most popular calypsonian, sung in the wake of Hurricane Maria (2017). First, I expound Lootah’s grounded anti-colonial and materialist critique of the dominant society’s condemnation of ‘looting’ in Dominica’s capital, Roseau, in Maria’s aftermath. Then I consider a moral economy of looting, guided by diverse Dominican voices, who reveal the fraught classist and (post)colonial contradictions of looting in the contemporary Caribbean. Here, I draw on Sylvia Winter’s notion of 'a clash of reasons’, between logics of accumulation and sociality that animates post-plantation Caribbean economic life. Finally, I will close by opening out a preliminary ethnographic reasoning on post-hurricane looting as a form of Black sociality.
Lalli Metsola, University of Helsinki
Sensory Intensities, Precarity, and Co-presence in Windhoek
Living at Windhoek’s fringes involves constant intense sensory stimuli. These include heat and cold, exposure to sun, wind, dust and rain, congestion, noise, smoke, the presence of excrement and other waste, and monotonous physical activity. Much of these appear as constant nuisances but at times, the material realities shape into unruly and destructive events, in the form of shack fires and flash floods. Such sensory intensities reflect the multiple forms of “pressure” that the residents of informal settlements face, and in turn contribute to the making of a politics of pressure in the city. They arise from the precarious characteristics of the lived environment, including supposedly temporary physical and administrative solutions and the dense co-presence of the residents. This gives rise to sentiments of annoyance, frustration, and insecurity, but also to an ethics of perseverance and mutual forbearance – an acknowledgment of the fact that in these circumstances, such attitudes are required in order to survive and aspire and in order to cohabit one’s neighbourhoods. Dense co-presence generates many types of nuisance and risk, but is also a precondition for the relations and exchanges of the local economy as well as for cumulative claims towards habitable places.
Kathryn Takabvirwa, University of Chicago
Mother, Mind the Gap: Street Vending and the Politics of the Informal
In 2015, Zimbabwean police halted what had become routinized displacement of street vendors across the country. The respite was brief but significant. The First Lady, Grace Mugabe, had spoken out in favor of street vendors. Likening herself to vendors, she wrote herself into the experiences of vegetable traders, claiming that she “planted her little garden” and sold its produce to make ends meet. What was common to her struggle and theirs, she claimed – what allowed her to claim the space of informal economy – was ultimately the condition of womanhood and of motherhood. My paper examines this mobilization of motherhood in gendering the policing of street vending, juxtaposing it with the lived experiences of street vendors, who in turn mobilized the First Lady in claiming a place to the city. I place her narratives within longer histories of the gendering and policing of urban space and urban commerce in Zimbabwe. I argue that framing vendors as mothers, regardless of their actual status, is part of a larger discursive project of mining motherhood to secure political legitimacy by scapegoating vendors. In this, I ask how the figure of the mother is made to mind the gap created in the slippage between the illicit and the informal. The idea of an essentialized “vending mother” – at once historically animated yet whose symbolism is dependent on decontextualization – is deployed as a schema through which street vending and urban citizenship are rationalized, even as vendors are disavowed as transgressive.
Amílcar Peter Sanatan, University of Helsinki
“The Hair is in Meh”: Entrepreneurial Future-making in the Urban Margins
In this paper, I explore the intersection of urban geographies, gendered labour, and economic autonomy among women hairstylists in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Drawing on immersive field work conducted between November 2024 and June 2025, I utilise flânerie as method and podcast ethnography to analyse how entrepreneurial women in urban malls leverage kinship economies and social solidarities to sustain livelihoods. I reframe the understanding of entrepreneurship in urban postcolonial contexts for interlocutors as processual, where notions of growth is cumulative and adaptive for securing resources and physical space. This transition from “hustling” to more established mall environments is driven by specific aspirations for social and spatial legitimacy. The economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a critical juncture in this trajectory, forcing a pivot from non-essential service while simultaneously straining informal financial mechanisms, such as the sousou, and the stability of kinship networks. I position the mall salon as a site where entrepreneurs negotiate urban boundaries and materialise their aspirations as legitimate urban actors.
Saana Hansen, University of Helsinki
The Ambivalences of Collaboration: Multimodal Ethnography in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
This paper examines the methodological, ethical, and epistemic possibilities and tensions of multimodal, “collaborative” approaches in ethnographic research. Drawing on long-term research relationships developed through the study of economies of care and return migration in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, it situates everyday urban life as dispersed across borders, sustained through remittances and cross-border practices in conditions of “mutuality of precarity” (Takabvirwa 2023; Hansen, forthcoming 2026). Focusing on recent arts-based research, including poetry, podcasting, and visual art, developed as part of the podcast series Bulawayo Conversations (Chirwa and Hansen 2026), the paper asks how multimodal practices can respond to the ethical demands of representation and attend to the “textures of everyday life” (Das 2015) beyond textual form. I argue that such approaches enable more dialogical and publicly engaged forms of research. However, framing research as “collaborative” can obscure existing hierarchies and instrumentalise both participation and creativity, even as these approaches seek to do the opposite. Furthermore, attending in particular to urban economies of care and the possibilities of sustaining everyday life, the paper also reflects on how workshop-based modes of engagement become entangled with longer histories and more recent experiences of humanitarian and welfare interventions, contexts in which project-based collaboration is both familiar and fraught. In doing so, I reflect my own position within these collaborative arrangements and the ways in which my methodological choices may reproduce the very dynamics they try to unsettle.
Florence Ncube, University of Helsinki
“Free Riddims for Ghetto Youths”: The Fresh ‘Equalizer’ in Harare’s Zimdancehall Music Landscape
Consider how ghetto youths who have been given the opportunity they dreamed of would use it? In this paper I explore the role of free music recording in identifying and nurturing Zimdancehall music talent among youths in Harare’s impoverished urban townships where music-making has become the viable and useful hustle. I attend to the relations, creativities, solidarities, technologies and prowess that shape music-making in marginal contexts in order to understand how music can provide a route to shifting pre-structured social, cultural, political and economic hierarchies and patterns of exclusion in Zimbabwe’s local music industry. Existing literature on music-making privileges the psychological well-being of audiences in the global north and expressions of artists doing rather than undoing marginality in the global south. But, the inventiveness, altruism and nurturing work of the ‘not-so-well-known’ music producers operating outside popular music production brands seems to elude scholarly attention. I argue that as a landscape for creativity and innovation, free-riddims can contribute to the flattening of structural and systemic hierarchies of exclusion and transform the local music industry from below. Music artists who take such opportunities seriously do break out of vicious cycles of marginality and chart new ways towards better futures. This paper is drawn from a larger ethnographic study conducted over 5 months in Harare’s urban townships with seventy ghetto youths who frequented different music recording studios in Mufakose, Highfields, Budiriro and Glenview which offered free riddims.
Bram Jansen, Wageningen University
Refugee Camps as Accidental Cities - (R)evolution and Effect of an Idea
Roughly two decades ago, the language and idea of refugee camps as urbanising environments gained ground. This signified a recognition of the continuation and emergence of particular forms of social and political life in protracted refugee camp settings and showed that camp dwellers inhabited and transformed camp space into human settlements rather than temporary humanitarian constructions. As concentrations of people, services and resources, such settlements, albeit informally, inspired studies and interventions to make sense of and govern refugee camps as emerging urbanisms, particularly in the global south.
This presentation will take stock of the evolution of the idea of seeing refugee camps as emerging urbanisms and the practical, governmental and environmental effects of engaging with such sites accordingly. The presentations uses examples from East Africa and the Middle East and identifies prospects and challenges of casting camps in such ways. It follows camp studies and designs to understand how camps as accidental cities became embedded in their host regions and became integrated in longer term development trajectories.
Stefan Millar, University of Helsinki
Hydropolitics at the End of Aid: The Governance of Water Infrastructures in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
In Kakuma Refugee Camp, water infrastructures are transforming how the urban space of the camp is negotiated. As international aid declines and humanitarian infrastructures enter a period of ruination, the rationing of water has come to structure the organization of the camp. Water scarcity now shapes everyday urban practices, from the management of communal taps, the vandalism of pipelines, to the informal markets around boreholes, producing new forms of water inequality and politics. Humanitarian agencies present water scarcity as a technical challenge, yet decisions about allocation, scheduling, and infrastructural investment reflect deeper failures in humanitarian governance and a persistent disinterest in refugee-led solutions. Across Kakuma, refugees and host-communities respond to these constraints by creating vital infrastructures of water management, from women-led water-collection collectives, the unionization of water pump employees, shared storage systems, and neighborhood-level governance committees that mediate disputes and ensure equal access. These initiatives offer more adaptive alternatives to centralized, top-down aid models. Yet humanitarian organizations counteract such autonomy, maintaining control over the remaining formal water infrastructures through coercion and collective punishment. This paper examines how vital infrastructures of water function as key sites of political negotiation in Kakuma. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research, I show how water governance shapes the camp’s urban space and how refugee-led infrastructures emerge in the wake of global aid withdrawal. I argue that these forms of everyday water politics reveal both the fragility of humanitarian governance and the potential of locally grounded alternatives to reimagine the management of displacement.
Kirsten Nielsen, University of Helsinki
Cultivating the Unwanted: Urban Governance and Waste Management at the Fringes of Gulu, Northern Uganda
In this paper, I ask what solid waste disposal and associated soil pollution at the fringes of a secondary city in Uganda can tell us about the dynamics of city-making and the possibilities and tensions of urban life. The management of waste is central to the governance of urban space, lives, and bodies (Fredericks 2016; Doherty 2023). As a process of spatial ordering through the movement of unwanted material, it simultaneously relies on and produces sites for disposal. In Africa’s rapidly urbanizing cities, sites of urban waste dumping that used to be located outside the city are now often within the city boundaries. In this paper, I draw on collaborative fieldwork that I conducted in Gulu with fellow anthropologist and local resident Leo Okoya in 2025. While our initial interest had been a new sanitary landfill, our attention was soon drawn to the people growing crops in the surrounding area where waste had been dumped over a period of fifteen years, either as spillovers from the old landfill or to fill quarries after the extraction of murram for road construction. Based on interviews with landowners, residents, seasonal farmers, and city officials, I use this paper to reflect on 1) how dumping sites emerge as central sites of urban governance, and 2) how pollution, economic precarity, and uncertainty shape urban land use and relations.
Patience Mususa, The Nordic Africa Institute
Invisible Voices: Urban planning amid Zambia’s Mining Resurgence
This paper examines the experiences of urban planners in Zambia's Copperbelt during a mining resurgence driven by critical mineral demand. It explores their practice and their efforts to govern the region amid plans for mineral-focused industrialisation. Based on semi-structured interviews with planners and environmental officers, as well as ethnographic observation, it explores how planners manage land for mining, industry, housing, agriculture, and infrastructure, especially as residents increasingly address these needs themselves. The paper also considers their responses to environmental issues and regional development, including transboundary links like the Lobito corridor and the Tanzania-Zambia railway, connecting to African trade and geopolitical interests around critical minerals. The paper highlights a gap in urban governance studies in Africa, especially regarding research on the Zambian Copperbelt. While such research has enriched understanding of civic engagement, life in mining towns, and mining-driven urbanisation, it has less systematically examined the practices and viewpoints of city officials and administrators. It underscores the vital yet often overlooked role of practitioners in implementing industrial policies and regional development, emphasising the importance of technical expertise and cross-sector collaboration, and how these aspects intersect at the nexus of local and global politics.
Please register to the symposium by filling in this e-form by the 15th of May 2026.