Digitally Democratizing the New Ethnographic Endeavour (original) (raw)
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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.
At the intersection of the unfolding of the seventh, eighth and ninth moments of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2006) and the development of new forms of information and communication technologies lies a powerful possibility for the application of more democratic and authentic forms of ethnographic research and representational work. For those who embrace the emancipatory potential of the ‘new ethnographies” (Goodall, 2000) inclusivity, authenticity and decolo- nialist practice emerge as markers of rigour in qualitative research. Digital technologies provide a mechanism to this end by strengthening the data-collection part of the ethnographic process while at the same time opening up rich and evocative means for the presentation and distribution of research outcomes. The first section of this paper looks at the use of a number of new forms of digital technologies- specifically the mobile phone, iPod and digital camera – in ethnographic research work and explores how the forms of data made accessible by these are able to significantly enhance the ‘thickness’ of eth- nographic description (Geertz, 1973). In the second part of this paper, we explore the major contribution new digital forms of technology potentially make to the democratizing and de-colonising of the ethnographic process. In particular, we elu- cidate the effect of authentic research participant engagement in the research endeavour through the use of commonplace digital tools.
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum Qualitative Social Research, 2019
In the following conversation Eric LAURIER talks about the role of ethnomethodology's foundational account-the "Studies in Ethnomethodology" (GARFINKEL, 1967)-within the UK and the influence of the book on his own research as well as on human geography, mobility studies, actor-network-theory, and a general social science methodology. He therefore underlines the peculiar focus of GARFINKEL on the everyday, his non-ironic position towards member's practices, and the plurivocality of the book. Giving an elaborated account on the methodological challenges with an ethnomethodological approach including video recordings he differentiates between the video as a research tool and video usage as a member's practice. LAURIER demonstrates the inspiring and initiating content of the studies as well as its limits. By doing so he can show the prolific quality for current research fields like the study of mobility and movement, the question of space and place, and the role of the "Studies in Ethnomethodology" as a political text.
The Problem of the Ethnographic Real 1 by I . C . Jarvie
2010
STATED SIMPLY, THE PROBLEM of the ethnographic real is, what exactly is it that the ethnographer sets out to record and study? It is a serious problem not because ethnographers do not know what reality is, but because they constantly invoke it as a standard (Heider 1976:79); this renders vicious the otherwise possibly innocuous and unavoidable fact that the activities of perceiving, recording, and thinking are fraught with distortion. It is an interesting problem because the aims of ethnography are vague and the philosophical assumptions behind those aims poorly understood. By looking at this problem from the angle subtended by ethnographic film, rather than that of classic one-man fieldwork, it may be possible to illuminate philosophical issues in the basis of anthropology as well as of film.