Decolonial Flânerie

Public City Walking as Collective Ethnography

Abstract

With Decolonial Flânerie, the Amo Collective Berlin has developed a format of public city walks that claims to be an ethnographic method of joint knowledge production. In the spirit of the new namesake of Berlin's M*Straße, the Afro-German Enlightenment philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo and his pioneering anti-racist position, the collective has tested and further developed this format four times between 2020 and 2023. In this article, we will present and discuss the extent to which the format makes it possible to perceive and explore urban space differently through walking together - that is, to read and experience the city's archives against the grain of their colonialist inscriptions - and thus to create space for excluded and silenced voices, bodies and histories. The paper includes tangible impressions of this collective research practice. Above all, we are interested in the question of whether and how this form of "collective ethnography" crosses academic boundaries of knowledge production, thereby opening up a "transacademic" field that holds new forms of collaboration with civil society for the further development of a public, engaged European Ethnology/Anthropology.