The Nightlaboratory is an experimental ethnography project providing brief portraits of people working or carving out one way or another an existence at night. It was established in 2012 by anthropologists Ger Duijzings and Julius-Cezar MacQuarie, who at the time were both associated with the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London.
The Nightlaboratory reports on people that have little other option or indeed prefer to work under the cover of the night, wanting to benefit from the darkness, quiet and relative lack of social control and surveillance offered by the night. Instead of night revellers -- all too familiar characters in the nocturnal city -- we bring into focus those individuals who spend their nights labouring: on the street, in wholesale markets, hospitals, factories, call centres, public transport hubs, offices, etc. Night workers are usually immigrants; here we are particularly interested in those coming from eastern Europe, from countries such as Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.
Using an experimental ethnographic format of brief vignettes or carefully crafted 'miniatures', we rely on observations and spontaneous conversations held during our nocturnal fieldwork. All descriptions are anonymized to protect people's identity; in case we know their names, we only use pseudonyms. If needed, we modify details, without changing the bottom line of our collocutors' stories. The purpose is to offer experience-near and on-the-ground ethnography.
Ger Duijzings is Professor of Social Anthropology (with focus on Southeastern and Eastern Europe) at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is editor (with Lucie Dušková) of: Working at night: the temporal organisation of labour across political and economic regimes. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022 (Open Access).
Julius-Cezar MacQuarie is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork, Ireland. He is author of: Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London. Cham: Springer, 2023.
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