About this Event
17.11.2026. Day 1 – Methodologies and Ethics
18.11.2026 Day 2 - Fieldwork: participant ethnographic exercise
19.11.2026 Day 3 - Representation and Publication | Reporting Back
You are warmly invited to chose to join a single day or all three days
Delicious lunch will be provided
Day 1 – Methodologies and Ethics
Speakers:
Dr Marco Veneri: Becoming Implicated: When Fieldwork Changes the Method
Dr Cyan Cheng: Drifting Bodies
Welcome by workshop leaders Dr Christoph Lueder and Dr Dimitris Venizelos
Ethnographic fieldwork
Guest speakers
o Dr Marco Veneri,
Marco is an architect, researcher and educator with a PhD from Kingston School of Art, London. His research examines community gardening and other ecological practices in temporary urban spaces, focusing on commons, more-than-human relations, care and situated knowledge. Working across architecture, landscape, installation and scenography, he brings visual and embodied ethnography into dialogue with making and collaborative pedagogy. He has taught at the University of Greenwich and the Architectural Association and currently teaches spatial design at IED Milano.
Becoming Implicated: When Fieldwork Changes the Method
Drawing on visual and participatory research in community gardens and a collective design workshop, this seminar follows moments when encounters with people and materials changed the direction of an inquiry. Through photographs, fieldnotes and workshop work, Marco asks how observation, making and return reshape what counts as evidence, where authority lies and what responsibilities follow; he proposes this as an ecology of methods. Participants will test these questions against their own research, whether they are planning fieldwork or revisiting material already gathered.
Workshop led by Marco Veneri
Informal participant discussion on research interests and on fieldwork reports shared by 2023 and 2025 participants
13.00 Lunch at Lollapalooza Café Kingston
o Dr Jingru (Cyan) Cheng,
Cyan works through fieldwork, following drifting bodies—be they sand, water or migrant workers—to confront intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Her awards include the Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for TRACING SAND, RIBA President’s Awards for Research commendations in 2020 and 2018, the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024) and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023). Cyan is co-founder of field-0, operating at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, art, and filmmaking. Their recent exhibitions include solo shows HOW MUCH WATTAGE IS ONE HANDBREADTH OF WATER at Storefront for Art and Architecture (NY, 2025) and RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING at the Architectural Association (London, 2024), and at the 2025 Singapore Biennale.
Cyan holds a PhD by Design and M.Phil Projective Cities (AA) and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015-17). At the RCA, she co-led the studio Politics of the Atmosphere (2019-22) before teaching at the AcrossRCA and MArch Design Practice. Cyan is also a CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Researcher (2024-25) on field research as a land-dependent practice.
Drifting Bodies
This presentation brings together two long-term projects by field-0 — and — as situated inquiries shaped through years of fieldwork across rural China and Southeast Asia. Ripple Ripple Rippling grew from a decade long relationship with one community and one site, while Tracing Sand trials a nomadic form of fieldwork, following rivers and power grids. Moving between sustained proximity and nomadic research, the projects ask how practice might emerge through lived entanglements with communities, landscapes, infrastructures, as well as material and energetic flows.
Group discussion: How might visual ethnography work for me?
Fieldwork briefing and preparation
Day 2 – Fieldwork: participant ethnographic exercise
Day 3 – Representation and Publication | Reporting Back
Speakers:
Dr Sabina Andron: What is the surface? Where is the surface? What good is the surface?
Dr Sabrina Puddu: Publishing visual ethnography
Organising, evaluating and disseminating
Mixed methods, understanding multiple perspectives, dissemination formats and paths, restituting knowledge to participants and communities
Guest speakers
o Dr Sabina Andron
Sabina is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and creative practitioner working on urban visual cultures. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities, leading the project “Visual governance in the city: rethinking graffiti and public images” (2026-29). Her first monograph, Urban surfaces, graffiti, and the right to the city was shortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award in 2024. She co-founded the international Urban Surfaces Research Network (USRN).
What is the surface? Where is the surface? What good is the surface?
This presentation will take three perspectives on the research subject that has defined my practice and trajectory: the urban surface. I will begin by offering some definitions of the surface in the context of urban and architectural thinking; then I will introduce some of the work of the USRN (Urban Surfaces Research Network) to talk about the super power of finding peers; and I will end with some reflections on what surfacing methods can do to our work in urban, geographical, and social sciences work.
o Dr Sabrina Puddu
Sabrina is a Sardinian-Italian architect and researcher who has worked internationally at KU Leuven (Belgium) as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Post-doc Fellow, at the University of Cagliari (Italy), and in the US as a Visiting Scholar at GSAPP, Columbia University. Her research explores the role of major public institutions across the divide between the urban and rural conditions. Her main research project, Territories of Incarceration, focuses on the spatial paradigms of carcerality, touching on debates about restorative justice, the abolition of prisons and the territoriality of carceral institutions. Sabrina is Director of Studies and Design Fellow at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, History and Theory Studies Lecturer at the Architectural Association, and at the University of Greenwich, having previously taught at the RCA, CSM, KU Leuven and the University of Calgari.
Publishing visual ethnography
Sabrina will share insights from her research and publication project “Territories of Incarceration” which links across anthropology, geography, history and architectural scholarship. She edited a special issue of The Journal of Architecture, Volume 28, 2023 - Issue 7. Sabrina will use this as a point of departure for a broader reflection on representation, including photography and drawing, and on the processes of producing and publishing these forms of research output.
13.00 Lunch at Lollapalooza Café Kingston
14.00 Workshop
Reporting back: participants’ 6-slide presentations
Exercises:
“How might I use visual ethnography in my PhD?”
“How might I use ethnographic evaluation methods to understand multiple perspectives and voices?”
Disseminating ethnographic research: bespoke formats by PhD researchers
Event venue & nearby stays
Kingston School of Art, Knights Park, Grange Road, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.