This section brings together my PhD project—an ethnography in and with Times Square after its pedestrianization—and the trail of work that followed from it. The dissertation was written as a formal experiment: instead of a single, linear narrative, it set out to interpret and repeat movements and flows inside a bounded place, composing an unstable and effervescent geography from spaces, practices, and situations gathered on the ground.
I built the project as a labyrinthine palimpsest: a field of paths, associations, and shortcuts. The text navigates vignettes, inserts, and hyperlinks, shifting across different versions, temporalities, and spatialities of Times Square. To orient that drifting, I proposed the thesis as a kamal—a navigational instrument made of an instruction table and a set of cartographic elements—designed not to prescribe one route, but to let the reader simulate multiple realities by linking stories, reflections, and other ethnographic materials.
Here, I return to that kamal and keep using it: to revisit the project’s stakes, to unpack how learning from Times Square(its simultaneity, multiplicity, and effervescence) became a way of thinking and writing, and to trace how the dissertation generated further outputs—new texts, formats, and experiments—without abandoning its central commitment: representing a heterogeneous reality without closing it down.
Before / During / After: Notes from a Times Square PhD Trajectory
Funding for this research and my whole PhD was provided by the Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (COLCIENCIAS) [756/2016].