Valentina Gulin Zrnić participated at the conference “Ethnology in the 3rd Millenium: Topics, Methods, Challenges” organized by the Institute for Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Science. The conference took place in Smolenice, 19-21 October 2016.
Valentina Gulin Zrnić delivered a plenary lecture “Approaches to urban culture studies”.
(Summary) Ethnology and cultural anthropology have been involved in urban research for decades: anthropology in the city has evolved to anthropology of the city and new emergent topics and paradigms have been continually incorporated into the field of urban anthropology. One of them refers to „spatial turn“ which has affirmed space and place as important factors of urban life and they have become – together with culture and identity – the third pillar of ethnological and cultural anthropological research into the city. Building on our research on city-making in Zagreb we will discuss theoretical and methodological challenges of space/place in urban anthropology. Namely we will discuss 1) the politics of space as an analytical agenda (production and construction of space, contested spaces), 2) the relationship between performance studies and urban anthropology (embodiment and sensorial turn, art in public spaces), and 3) potential of various forms of urban mapping (walking ethnography, narrative urbanism, interactive urban maps).
