ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how encounters have been enrolled in recent writing about cities - and in particular in research that is concerned with 'living with difference'. It introduces new methods and more literary styles of writing that explore ways of meeting Back's calls for an inventory by documenting the more-than-human spaces of encounter that constitute multiculture. The chapter situates recent work on encounters and argues that the focus on encounters, and a privileging of what Ervin Goffman called 'facework', is a product of the theoretical touchstones to which much of this work turns. Psychogeography, in particular, offers modes of attending to, researching, and writing about the ways in which encounters with places, things, atmospheres and people get caught up in processes of racialization. The chapter considers these sensibilities to work in two narratives that exemplify how processes of differentiation in Keighley involve encounters not only with human strangers, but also particular landscapes and particular things, in this case taxis.
