Chapter 5 - Running in the City, Capturing Urban Life

Summary

Austrian sociologist Roland Girtler (2004) specifies ten principles for ethnographic fieldwork. These include the taking of public transport, walking or cycling around a chosen location for fieldwork (rather than retreating to the isolation of a car); the visiting of local cemeteries (i.e., ideal for biographical glimpses relevant to the locality in question) and of high vantage points (i.e., to appreciate its fundamental geographical parameters). On one of my recent returns home, to the city in which I grew up, which I know better than any other place in the world, and which features in some of my previous research (Karner 2007b, 2011, 2021b), I stumbled—almost literally and quite by accident—across a methodological dimension to be added to Girtler's principles. This addition offers, so my claim in parts of this chapter, surprising benefits to the sociologist of any “global-local-nexus.” It also, however, presupposes considerable amounts of prior local knowledge.

There is no established name I know of for my proposed methodological innovation yet. Bizarre though it may appear, I propose to term it the historically informed jogging-method (or, in inter-textual allusion, insights-and-memories of the long-distance runner). Running is part of my life, almost as much as sociology is. Without long and regular runs, I am not sure how or where I would generate new ideas for potential research projects, nor how I would manage to finish older projects. On one of my recent runs, in Austria's second city, it suddenly dawned on me, quite fortuitously, that running might provide yet more than merely momentum for new or developing ideas. What if running, in certain places and under specific circumstances, could metamorphosize into a form of auxiliary, quasi-ethnographic data collection? Here is an extract of a field diary of sorts, jotted down soon after my return from running that day:

I run along the river that structures some of my earliest memories […] of cold winters when this river was almost frozen over. This hasn't happened since. Along long stretches, the previously dense river-woodlands have recently been destroyed, causing great local controversy, to make way for the mayor's “prestige project,” a new hydroelectric power-station. Aware of the many objections, the council has put up public information signs promising that eventually the power-plant will generate “green energy” and “be in harmony with nature.”