Nightnography® is a portmanteau of night and ethnography. At its core, nightnography mixes bodily, audio-visual methods, which include short films and podcasts capturing images and stories at night. As you surf on this page you will learn about my foundations and the source of my inspiration for this approach to study about night work-/ers. Let me take you on a journey through image, sound and text as i describe each of these critical elements.
illustration courtesy of Ghibli Studios
/ immersive ethnography//
I IMMERSE IN THE LIVE OF THOSE I STUDY ABOUT to understand their world from within or from 'under-the-sking' as it were.
I collect, produce and LATER convey THE knowledge about corporeality and the rhythms, noises and thoughts of the night and lives of night workers in ‘big cities’, usually ‘invisible’ to the dominant diurnal eye and mind.
to learn more about this method go to nightworkshop
illustration courtesy of Ghibli Studios
/ cyber-ethnography /
This method links the sensorial experiences with space and distance, to learn more about this method go to nightworkshop
illustration courtesy of Ghibli Studios
/ visual ethnography/
the data that i collect via immersive and cyber ethnography, ends up as digital storytelling about people working the night shift in global and smaller cities. You will find films and podcasts at the nightworkshop
illustration courtesy of Ghibli Studios
NIGHTLABORATOry
Nightlaboratory is a research and fieldwork blog. It was founded in 2012 by anthropologist Ger Duijzings, and myself. At the time, both were 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.
Nightlaboratory Budapest (2014)
Nightlaboratory Sofia (2012)