The Nightshift - Julius-Cezar MacQuarie

Most ethnographic research projects are conducted during the day. But how suitable is such a work schedule in global cities that operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, or where potential interlocutors work during the night? Researching at night, as I found out, is not very suitable. So for some time now, but especially while researching the labour opportunities of migrant manual workers in London, I have been developing a set of methods for doing ethnographic research during the night. I started from classic ethnographic methods, such as participatory observation and free or semi-structured conversation and then used a type of body-mediated ethnography. I used various digital applications and cyber tools to monitor, evaluate, and translate into infographics both my own sensory experiences and the participants in my research. After a year in New Spitalfields, a night market in London, I understood in my own body how precarity takes a corporeal form. In this piece, I therefore try to articulate in writing the bodily experiences of pain and exhaustion along with the isolation and social alienation from both society and their own families that these night workers feel night after night. Through this mode of night-time body-mediated ethnography, my contribution to the specialist discussions about the precariousness of manual labour conditions consists in pointing out the aspects of the highest degree of existential precariousness.Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Alex Săvescuhttps://theanthro.art/the-nightshift-julius-cezar-macquarie/