about nightlaboratory
Nightlaboratory is a research and fieldwork blog, created by anthropologist Ger Duijzings and research student Cezar Macarie, both associated with the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. It reports on people who work, make a living, survive or operate in one way or another in the nocturnal city, because they have no other option or because they want to benefit from the darkness, quiet and lack of control and surveillance which the night offers. Instead of night revellers, who are familiar characters in the public imagination, we will particularly look at those invisible and unseen individuals who spend their nights at work or on the street. In London, many of them are immigrants from Asia, Latin America or Africa — we are particularly interested in those coming from eastern Europe, from countries such as Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.
This blog offers brief ethnographic portraits of night workers and people up and on the street at night, as well as vignettes from the interviews we do with them and the situations we encounter during our nocturnal fieldwork. All the entries are anonymized, unless our subjects explicitly want their identity to be revealed. We use pseudonyms and if necessary we change details about them or modify aspects of their stories, without changing the bottom line. The main purpose of this blog is to offer experience-near and on-the-ground ethnography.
Everything that is published on this blog is the copyright of the authors. For our most recently published posts please scroll down. We welcome comments, but reserve the right to edit or shorten comments if they are not absolutely relevant to the blog’s key themes. We encourage night workers, homeless people, and all those who are up and working during the night to contact us if they would like to talk (or to be interviewed) about their nocturnal work, activities, or experiences.
Our latest posts:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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