From a blog post tield Disciplines:
My writing - perhaps excessively self-referent - does not feel like an attempt to galvanize acquired knowledge, but rather to draw lines from my own embodied experience and learnings. My friend and former supervisor at my master’s in Unicamp Rafael Evangelista is a social scientist with a PhD in social anthropology. I remember problematising ethnography and anthropology at class and while writing my dissertation. That distinction is made very clear by Tim Ingold: “Anthropology is studying with and learning from (...). Ethnography is a study of and learning about”. I tend to align with the former. I do not investigate practices of reuse in cities as an uninterested, objective observer. Being twice during the project - first in Dundee, now in Berlin - a foreign citizen in a new city trying to adapt to different social organisation, culture, weather and language, I feel particularly well positioned to consider my own lived experience as a good source of insight for the research. Not the only one, naturally. But even when interacting with participants, which I do enjoy and take pleasure on, I don’t approach them as if I was merely a design researcher hired by a company or institution to investigate (through “ethnography”?) how they can help such company or institution to create better products or services. I am part of the ecosystem, as an individual as well as citizen, activist, policy-maker and any other hats I might use.