Co-implicated Urban Ethnography in the Portuguese context

Abstract

Urban Dynamics has been studied by researchers from social sciences. Often, they choose an ethnographic approach as a way of describing and analyzing the diversity of urban practices. Among classical topics, migration, poverty, housing, these topics have never stopped from being key research questions for those who do research about the cities.

Resulting from a work centered in collecting and analyzing professional trajectories of urban 
ethnographers in Portugal, this article is focused on one of the aspects that became clear from those trajectories – the fact that these researchers are somehow activists in their area of studies. Sometimes this is a strong feature in their professional lives, while for others, it is a subjective feature. This situation is evident in the context of Brazil and South America from ages, but in the Portuguese context, which is in straight connection with Urban Anthropology in Brazil, co-implication seems to be more recent.