Honorary members Dr Italo Pardo and Dr Giuliana Prato have published and edited Urban Ethnographers Debate Legitimacy, a special issue published as Supplement 1 to Volume 8 of Urbanities under the auspices of the International Urban Symposium (IUS), a strong international field of 14 mid-career and senior anthropologists and qualitative sociologists who are engaged in empirical research debate the thorny issue of legitimacy drawing on their diverse ethnographic knowledge and wide range of perspectives.
The discussions identify a theoretical framework that contributes to clarify the empirical significance of the complex ramifications of legitimacy and the processes of legitimation in the political, economic and moral life of today’s urban world. The complex, highly problematic and often rocky dynamics that mark these processes and their ramifications are central in anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history and law. This special issue anticipates an edited volume on Legitimacy: Ethnographic and Theoretical Insights (2018), in publication in the series ‘Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology’, that brings together the contributors’ full-length discussions of their work.
The issue is open access and can be read here, whilst individual articles can be downloaded here.