ABSTRACT
In fact, the idea for textually re-staging conversational exchanges emerged during a walk the people took through East London. Indeed, more often than not, the relational infrastructure that underpins fieldwork remains obscured by the ethnographer’s theoretical excursions, as opposed to being treated as a source of collective creation. Evoking co-involvement feels a great way to acknowledge that the politics of the everyday and any ethnographic encounter that emerges out of it is shaped by broader political trajectories and impulses. Disparities and differentials around freedom, mobility, access, and resources often define relations in and across home and field. It certainly is the case that inventive projects sometimes fail or generate refusal because of the political conditions that circumscribe it. Rather than exercises in co-invention, they became stages where artistic ideas, political commitments, inherited privileges, or personal ambitions clashed.
