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In order to understand the provocations of these urban political forms, or even to ‘see’ them, we must enter youth urban worlds, share their everyday political gestures. In other words, we suggest that political analysis requires ethnography, and not only ethnography of the state (Bernstein and Mertz 2011). It is, of course, a matter of academic discipline. Political philosophy and other fields have a very important role to play. Yet, this book is a plea for a stronger recognition of an ethnographic approach to political analysis. This means describing how action unfolds in concrete situations before explaining or justifying it. It means adopting an inductive rather than a deductive posture. It means engaging in ethnographic work ‘as a mode of “epistemic partnership”’ (Marcus 2006, cited in Papastergiadis 2014, p. 20).

Ethnography has been a prominent method in urban studies for a very long time. Chicago School ethnographies continue to inspire the field of urban studies, incorporating sophisticated intersectional analyses of power relations (see for instance Duneier 1999; Wacquant 2004; Ralph 2014). In the following chapters, we build on this tradition in order to make the argument that the current urban moment is uniquely in need of ethnography. This book suggests that in order to analyse political forms in the contemporary moment, a good unit of analysis is the relational micro, because it is at that scale that everyday and aesthetic politics come to make sense. Inspired by urban ethnographies such as Caldeira’s (2012) work on taggers and motobikers in Sao Paulo and Ghertner’s (2015) analysis of world‐city making in Delhi, immersing ourselves in youth urban worlds is a springboard for theorizing the political beyond resistance and organized protest.

This book emerges from various ethnographic projects undertaken at the VESPA Lab in Montreal between 2008 and 2016. Taken together, these projects constitute some of the urban youth worlds that we moved through during that period. We selected the following four ethnographies based on a sense of responsibility towards youth and intuitive attraction to objects of analysis often overlooked or disregarded by political analysts, but which open up different possibilities for learning about the transformation of the political process in a world of cities. The selection was based on our aim of presenting a diversity of urban youth worlds in Montreal, balancing the representation of voices and perspectives from within and across them. This is why, in the following chapters, we meet youths from different neighbourhoods, variously racialized and privileged, and learn from the distributed agency of various human and non‐human actors.

We individually, or with students, engaged in various ethnographic observations using diverse methods ranging from the use of mobile, multimedia tools (video, GPS, biometric) and participatory research to more classical interviews and anthropological immersion. Our ethnographic approach has sought to engage with these actors as ‘epistemic partners’ (Holmes and Marcus 2008), recognizing that, in an age of complex interactions and interconnectedness, ‘members of a community no longer see themselves as stewards of a specific worldview that is rooted in a fixed territory, but as agents capable of upholding and modifying the residual forms of their cultural identity as it interacts with forces from remote and unknown parts of the world’ (Papastergiadis 2014, p. 21).

Our ethnographic approach involves, through this process, a posture of aesthetic sensitivity that cultivates open‐mindedness and receptivity, meaning, in part, that we observe with all bodily senses and cultivate engagement in the urban youth worlds we experience. This posture involves using reflexive empathic imagination to make sense of others’ experience of the world – or, when we are not able to engage physically in their experiences, using emotional intelligence to learn from emotional cues and consider what we can sense, what touches us but we cannot immediately name or recognize. In such cases, time is needed to let feelings and sensations ‘sink’ or ‘settle’ in, to create dialogues for generating meaning.

As we became more engaged in these worlds through generative webs of relationships and the co‐constitution of fields of aesthetic perception (where ‘sensations and affect co‐mingle’; see Ioanes 2017), a theory of aesthetic relations came to make sense as a way of illuminating in contrastive and complementary ways the political process that we are witnessing being transformed. The ethnographies therein exemplify dimensions and modes of acting politically through aesthetics, rather than verifying the argument we make. While we focus particularly on seduction and attraction as modes of aesthetic political relations, we do not favour cognitive or noncognitive approaches to aesthetics of urban environments and everyday life, nor do we gesture towards an overarching unifying notion of aesthetic experience and aesthetic practice. We rather let the ethnographies express the various dimensions and ways of acting politically, aesthetically, that we noticed and came to better understand in interaction and dialogue with research participants and colleagues.

In this regard, we have chosen to write through ethnographic material because we see ethnographic description as an act of translation. In their critical work on ‘writing culture’, Clifford and Marcus (1986) break from the ethnographical tradition of the Chicago School that aimed to represent lived experience ‘as it really is’. Instead, they see ethnography as a writing practice involving polyvocality, dialogue, and intertextuality. The ethnographer, they argue, creates affective fictions of the world they describe. This is what we wanted to achieve by writing these ethnographic chapters collectively. We, Julie‐Anne and Joëlle, occupy distinct positionalities in each chapter, depending on the youth world we are entering and on the methods and organization of the research projects. We conceived this book as a sounding board for modalities of political action and expression which do not make the headlines in public debates or academic texts, but which nonetheless transform the global urban worlds in which we live, affecting us by changing our political subjectivities at infra‐empirical and precognitive levels.

Introducing each ethnography is a drawing of a situation described therein. We conceive these images as entry points into the youth urban world analysed in the chapters using artistic rather than scientific language. These situations were illustrated by Lukas Beeckman based on his reading of the chapters, providing a different aesthetic sensibility by which for the reader to feel these youth urban worlds. Furthermore, a footnote at the beginning of each chapter briefly explains the type of ethnographic material used. Consistently in all these ethnographies, we presented ourselves as researchers from the VESPA. Julie‐Anne is Full Professor and thus occupies a different social position than Joëlle, who was a Master’s student at the time of research and writing. It is somewhat awkward to write ethnographic descriptions in the third person, but we did not really see how to do otherwise. If, for instance, Joëlle is the ethnographer in a chapter, she writes speaking of herself in the third person so that the reader can identify who is actually physically with the young people they encounter in the book. As this is a piece of collaborative writing between the two of us, Julie‐Anne has intervened in the chapters Joëlle initially wrote, and vice and versa. In other words, we wanted to avoid individually signing chapters and to freely intervene and connect our ethnographic materials. This process was enriched by reading research reports and articles produced with other students and research professionals who have come to work and study at the VESPA.