Interfering with others. – Re-configuring Ethnography as a Diffractive Practice (original) (raw)
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Introduction to Special Issue: The Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
The theme for this special issue, which examines the transdisciplinary travels of ethnography at the intersections of anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, performance studies, sport and physical culture studies, as well as theology, emerged from a roundtable panel co-convened by -Champaign. This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies offers a unique opportunity to enter into a cross-disciplinary dialogue by opening this discussion to an international community of qualitative researchers whose work engages with ethnography. In recent years, the transdisciplinary romance with ethnography has become an urgent topic of concern vehemently debated among social sciences and humanities scholars in informal conversations and graduate seminars. Responses to this romance have varied, ranging from an outright scepticism and criticism to initiating conversations and ethnographic collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. Notwithstanding, thus far no special issues or edited volumes have taken up the question of what is at stake for researchers employing ethnography within, as well as across, disciplinary formations sanctioned by the neoliberal university. This issue addresses this publication gap by asking: What is lost and gained when ethnography "travels" across disciplines? How can ethnography's transdisciplinary travels contribute to how we might conceptualize, reimagine, and practice ethnography today and in the 2 years to come? What does it mean for ethnography to "travel" within a competitive and profitdriven neoliberal academia, where the pursuit of knowledge is no longer seen as a public good and an end in and of itself? While many anthropologists and ethnographers in cognate disciplines have been critical of the pursuit of knowledge detached from real-life concerns and social problems, and have, instead, practiced socially engaged and interventionist research that benefits the people with whom they work, the utilitarian notions of knowledge under the neoliberal academic regime represent something quite different entirely. As Kazubowski-Houston (see this special issue, p…) asserts, the language of social justice and activism has been coopted by the neoliberal academia to disparage the notions of knowledge for knowledge's sake in order to advance its entrepreneurial goals and agendas. Also, as prominent anthropologist Paul Stoller notes in his recent Huffington Post blog, ethnography has come under attack from other scholars, most frequently from legal and quantitative researchers. Its plausibility, accuracy, and honesty are questioned and contrasted with the rigour and verifiability of "scientific" methods (Stoller, 2019, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stoller/in-defense-of-ethnography\_b\_8028542.html).
Herraz & Haye - Shot and fragment The Place of Researches in Ethnography
Springer Nature Singapore. 2019 C. Matus (ed.), Ethnography and Education Policy, Education Policy & Social Inequality 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8445-5\_2, 2019
The critical self-description of the researcher’s position is key to understanding how knowledge is constructed from the field to fuel fieldwork and knowledge communications. We specifically discuss the production conditions of ethnographic writing, focusing on theways in which images of the field that the researchers elaborate by means of notes, descriptions, pictures, videos, and narratives, are generated and transformed in the context of the folding and unfolding of the fieldwork, and particularly through the intertwinement of writing and reading. Drawing on the comparison with cinematographic composition of moving images, we argue that the position of the researcher is not reduced to the abstract point of view entailed by any image, a particular view, or selective angle of the field, but is part of a technical assemblage of operations, such as framing, cutting fieldwork into fragments, juxtaposition of these fragments, and projection of a continuous movement of the field. From the disposition involved in ethnographic field notes, to the composition of an ethnography, we stress how the place of the researcher is crossed by the technical and the aesthetical. We discuss methodological and epistemological implications concerning the role that reading ethnographic texts plays across the assemblage of ethnographic writing. We argue that the critical account of this intermediate place of the researchers has the potential to displace and suspend the problems of both the representation of reality and the authorship and authority of ethnographic knowledge, thus projecting the fieldwork to increasingly wider and open distancing positions that enable analysis, criticism, and thinking.
The Ethnographic Edge
In this essay, I overview Keyan Tomaselli’s contribution to the inaugural edition of The Ethnographic Edge; further some of his discussion of the sacred in terms of ethics; and make a call for ethnography “to be”. Ethnography “to be” prefaces hope; calls for ongoing contemplation about ideas of universalism-universality-universal; and critiques the dominance of the triumphal and utopian, for instance surrounding initiatives in peace and development in the humanities and ethnography. My influence for the critique and call for ethnography “to be” lies in influential works like that of Prashad, but also foundational readings such as Gregory Bateson and Susan Sontag. The work Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity by Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon (2008), informs my conclusion/condensing.
Introducing the Multi-Sided Ethnographer
transcript Verlag eBooks, 2024
Ethnographic fieldwork and its representation, often in the form of an ethnographic text, are two sides of the same coin. At least since the Writing Culture debate in the 1980s, reflexivity in relation to the ethnographer's positionality has been crucial for writing ethnography, thereby making anthropological knowledge more transparent. However, the same cannot be said about anthropologists' everyday life in the field, which is commonly-if not intentionally-ignored in ethnographic texts. While outmoded stereotypes of the lone anthropologist immersed in a distant society, studying mysterious native customs, have now been widely challenged by the reflexive, relational and engaged practices of anthropology, some assumptions around what ethnographers actually do in the field remain unquestioned. This volume aims to uncover sides of the anthropologist and their lives invisible in ethnographic publications and hopes to disrupt misleading images that persist of what they do or do not do in the field. Since fieldwork tends to blur the boundaries between private and professional life, ethnographers appear to be always on duty, eliciting valuable encounters and lying in wait for that next moment of serendipity, revelation, epiphany or insight. Yet what happens when the recorder is off, when the notebook stays in the pocket? What lies in the gaps and the pauses of a busy fieldwork schedule? What concerns and commitments drive ethnographers beyond and amidst, because ofand in spite of-their fieldwork? And crucially, how do these ideas and
Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century
Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 1997
As I read Norman Denzin's latest epistle on postmodern ethnography, or the new writing, I felt a quite pleasurable sense of deja vu. I was swept back to my graduate school days at UCSD, and my initiation into ethnomethodology via Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood's The Reality of Ethnomethodofogy (1975). After tantalizing intellectual trysts with Husserl's philosophic search for the Transcendental Ego and Garfinkel's playful experiments with the taken-for-granted grounds of everyday life, reading The Reality of Efhnomethodofogy on the beach at La Jolla served as a full-blown affair with the most formidable challenge available to both Parsonian sociology and pragmatist interactionism. The Reality of Ethnomethodology did not simply extend or refine sociology at the three-quarter century mark; it proposed a radical alternative to the way we see social life. Sociologists who read The Reafig of Efhnomefhodology back then either loved it or hated it, seeing it either as a remedy for sociology's malaise or as the ultimate schismatic threat to our discipline.
2021
The interview focuses on the book series EthnoGRAPHIC (University of Toronto Press) and the graphic novel Lissa. A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship and Revolution, the first book of the series. Four points arise from the interview with authors Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye, and with the filmmaker Francesco Dragone, who documented their research process. First, the problem of funding multimedia and innovative research projects, aimed to find new ways of communicating social research. Second, the question to what extent such projects are recognized and legitimated within the Academia. Third, the audience potentially interested in reading (ethno)graphic novels and, relatedly, their usability in teaching social sciences. Finally, the concerns and practicalities in putting together different narrative forms. This effort of combining several ways of representing social reality, also concerns the organization of the research itself as well as conducting fieldwork and the capability ...