Ethnography is the overarching methodology underpinning this thesis, and has greatly
influenced how the research aims and questions were formulated. A pressing issue to discuss, therefore, is what are the epistemological foundations underpinning ethnography and why is it suitable to tackle and answer the research aims and questions set out in the introduction? The research is a place specific project, and the social uses of space and peoples relationship with it are key concerns in the research objectives. The project is partly an exploration of everyday lived spaces, focusing on the material culture and embodiment that occur and exist in them. The research, thus, takes the ethnographic epistemological viewpoint that social order is embedded in socio-spatial practices, and discourses and structures shape how socio- spatial practices are played out and lived (Herbert, 2000). To clarify, discourses are the sets or representations and texts that circulate in society and impact on how ‘meanings are produced,
identities are constructed, social relations established and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible’ (Campbell, 2009: 166). Structures refer to the social regulations and practices that are established by the societal power of groups, classes or social institutions (Gregory, 2009), and it is in the grounded, lived spaces of society where the social order of discourse and structure are embodied and materialised (Latham and McCormack, 2004). Through this epistemological viewpoint, an ethnographic study becomes theoretically
informed and attempts to uncover how discourses and structures impact the lived experience. As Herbert points out, the ethnographic examination of ‘how different social groups
meaningfully define, inhabit, manipulate and dominate space’ (Herbert, 2000: 551) is a useful tool for human geography, as it helps to determine how place, agency and structure
intertwine.
Important to an ethnographic epistemology is the notion that the ‘everyday’ or the ‘quotidian’ is a revealing lens into societal structures and processes. In recent years the theme of the everyday, in both geography and sociology, has emerged as an explicit empirical concern for analysis (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013; Back, 2015). Prior to the empirical focus, the everyday was primarily engaged with theoretically (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013) . For example, scholars such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau theorised the everyday, propagating its importance for understanding the complexity of society, rather than seeing it as taken for granted part of existence. Lefebvre (2014) theorised everyday life through a Marxist lens, and approached it as an urban phenomenon. For Lefebvre, everyday life is where you can see the articulation of the organizing practices of social life and the possible subversion of these practices by its inhabitants. He argued that the disciplining practices of capitalism are enunciated in everyday life, thus the everyday can shed light on historical and contemporary processes that shape the world. de Certeau (1984), on the other hand, described the everyday as a realm of practice and creativity, revealing how inhabitants make places their ‘own’, even though they are constrained by discourse and structure. Everyday and ordinary practices reveal how people make sense of place and formulate spatial identities and belongings. The theories of Lefebvre and de Certeau demonstrate that the everyday is an empirically rich lens for geographers, revealing vital insights into identities, socio-spatial relations and the effects of power, discourse and structure on society. In many respects, everyday life is a crucible of knowledge for human geographers, a realm where researchers can elicit rich information about people and place.
I now briefly discuss what an ethnographic epistemological framework offers research on diasporas, migration and diversity. In brief, diasporas and ethnic diversity are lived conditions, which are articulated and experienced in the everyday (Wise and Velayutham, 2009). It is through the lens of everyday lived spaces that one can explore how diasporic and ethnic diversity is mobilised and negotiated in embodied practices, personal narratives, material culture, encounters and sensory experience (Mitchell, 1997b; Blunt, 2007; Wise and Velayutham, 2009; Rhys-Taylor, 2013; Smith, 2015). The lived and everyday notion of diasporic diversity challenges ethnicity as essential, bounded and fixed. Rather, it takes the view that ethnicity is a place contingent enactment, resulting in complex and multiple mobilisations of ethnic identity in the life of local place. Ethnography, with its grounded and place specific focus, provides a lens into the complexity of the lived worlds of diasporic diversity and experience. As Hall states, ‘the value of ethnography in understanding
difference is that it renders a situated and multi-vocal sense of people and places as they live in, respond to and shape their social worlds’ (2012: 8). Therefore, ethnography attempts to engage with the sheer multiplicity and complexity of the contemporary lived experiences of diasporas, migration and diversity. It is the methodological approach that takes the researcher into the lived, everyday multicultural, allowing for multiple voices to be heard and multiple socio-spatial practices to be observed. Instead of producing abstracted and ungrounded
knowledge, ethnography attempts to depict the sites and practices that give diasporic diversity a material and tangible existence in the lived world. As argued by Katherine Mitchell (1997b), there is a need ‘to bring geography back in’ and foreground ‘transnational spatial
ethnographies’ in the examination of diasporas, transnationalism and migration.