EthnoGRAPHIC: An Interview (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lissa": An EthnoGraphic Experiment
Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature
The paper analyzes a recent experiment in the collaborative production of ethnographic knowledge and the use of the graphic novel form as an alternative to the conventional academic monograph. Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution (2017) is discussed here as a useful tool in the age of globalization for building recognition of the need to protect the lives of people other than our immediate kin, tribe, race, or nation. The paper argues that both the collaborative research behind the story and the formal experimentation stem from the authors’ sense of accountability to their informants. By telling a story about distant others who are given names and faces, Lissa’s authors encourage readers to develop empathy across borders.
Retrospective (re)presentation: turning the written ethnographic text into an 'ethno-graphic'
entanglements, 3(2):7-27, 2020
The aim of this essay is to unpack the process of ‘retrospective (re)presentation’. I want to encourage researchers who, like myself, have little experience but a desire to work with visual modes of representation, to experiment with non-academic collaborations. Experimentation is made easier with an example of ‘how to’. To this end I invite you into my incomplete journey of co-creating an ethno-graphic novel. In particular, if you have not set out initially to contribute to graphic anthropology, or are not using drawings as observant tools for recording scenes in fieldwork, I hope to demonstrate how this endeavour can be undertaken retrospectively, drawing attention to the details of collaboration between author and illustrator.
On becoming an ethnographer: Joining an ongoing and dynamic community of social scientists
Linguistics and Education, 2010
in On Ethnography: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research, accomplish what few other authors of books and articles on ethnography have been able to do-bring readers into a dialogic and multi-faceted intertextual web of texts that engage readers in the authors' ongoing conversations, while simultaneously engaging readers in novice social scientist's (Molly) journey to learning how to be an ethnographer. This dialogic approach invites the reader to take a reflexive stance with the authors and Molly by engaging in interactive reading of the arguments proposed by the authors of the text(s). By embedding different kinds of texts (e.g., field notes or dialogue) within the expected theoretical or explanatory narratives about concepts underlying an ethnographic perspective, Heath and Street, or rather Shirley and Brian as they state in the book, interrupt the flow of text to provide an interactive space, not only for their own exploration of ideas using texts from the field, but also for readers.
Journal of Education and Educational Development, 2024
Ethnography is one of the richest research approaches within the qualitative research paradigm for studying the cultural life worlds of others and/or oneself at a deeper level of consciousness. Additionally, it is a genre of writing that uses multi-epistemic lenses to go deeper into the phenomenon in order to inform, reform, and transform lives. The term ‘ethno’(graphy) is a compound word made up of the words ethno and graphy, which stand for culture and writing, respectively. In order to conduct ethnographic research, a researcher must possess a thorough understanding of a specific cultural context, be able to communicate in the language used by the informants, and be able to bracket one’s biases, while understanding how to "recover meaning" from their complex lifeworld. In doing so, it gives the researcher—the ethnographer in the role of an outsider the chance to chronicle the ‘noodle moments’ of the insiders as informants, within their cultural context, by witnessing their way of life and recording what truly takes place there. To this purpose, through their involvement over an extended length of time, ethnographers must generate detailed accounts of the discussions, observations of the events, symbols, artifacts, festivals, and everyday activities of the researched, among other things. Through critically analyzing behaviors, it offers a window into the meaning that people attribute to their cultural sensibility and a source of insights to inform, reform, and transform communities. Thus, it is a more comprehensive way of examining through the perspective of an insider, which sets it apart from other inquiry techniques.
2010
In 1986 George E. Marcus and James Clifford published Writing Culture: The Poetics & Politics of Ethnography, a text that would become a landmark in contemporary anthropology. Twenty-five years later, nine scholars reflect on how the perspectives opened up by its publication have determined the anthropological practice of recent decades providing inspiration for new ideas in the fields of ethnography, cultural anthropology, design and art criticism. The collection of essays begins with a contribution from Massimo Canevacci reflecting on the unexplored potentialities of digital, connective, hybrid media for ethnographic research and writing, and concludes with a conversation between George E. Marcus and Tarek Elhaik, envisioning an anthropology capable of approaching contemporary art and performance. The other eight essays freely move along the boundaries between political anthropology, philosophy of science, phenomenological ethics and anthropology of design, attempting to cross new ethnographic territories and unexplored paths.
The Possibilities of Graphic Ethnography
Computers & Education, 2020
Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri, and Chiara Natalucci are the team behind the new graphic ethnography The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press 2021). The King of Bangkok tells the story of Nok, an urban migrant from Thailand's northeastern region as he moves back and forth from his home village and attempts to build a life in the country's capital across periods of massive economic growth and collapse and periods of democratic expansion, state violence, and political closure. Structured around a series of flashbacks, The King of Bangkok shows how these historical events shaped Nok's life and how Nok's life came to shape those events. The book was originally published in Italian (Add Editore, 2019) and was subsequently translated into Thai as Taa Sawaang (Awakening, อ่ านอิ ตาลี 2020). In this interview we ask Claudio, Sara, and Chiara about their experience creating this text, its relationship with more traditional ethnographic genres of writing, and the effects their project has had in Thailand. We are delighted to feature a small section of the book following the interview. 1
Duke University Press eBooks, 2014
We issued a call for articles on the question of "Why ethnography?" based on our belief that everyone associated with ethnography's various forms ought to have something to say. This could include the communication scholar in the thick of fieldwork, the sociologist who chose ethnography as a method for her thesis, the philosopher investigating the relationship between ethnography and aesthetics, the artist who, using digital techniques, is searching for a novel ethnographic narrative, or an anthropology preparing to give a lecture on ethnography. We now present the Moment Journal under the theme of "ethnography", with range of voices as wide as we predicted in our call for papers.
The Graphic Novel / Comic Book in Transmedia Auto-Ethnography: an Experimental Work-in-Progress
Contemporaneous analysis of auto-ethnographic graphic novel (or comic-book) modes of storytelling and self-representational authorial positionality situate critical reflection as a mode of analytic inquiry. In this, authorial identity is analysed in deference to both the psychologically transformative imprinting of a fan's love of (sometimes described as "addiction" to) the medium and its subsequent influence on pedagogic practice bridging the Academic and the creative. So too, this authorial positionality is being problematized by the nature of graphic self-representation in, primarily, drawing. These auto-ethnographic works additionally begin an incorporation of graphic imagery (drawings) within traditional Academic research report formats but separate their reflective analytical inquiry from the evocative nature of the included drawings, and thus in layout and graphic design keep the drawn graphic content also distinctly separate from the text, which serves as an after-the-fact exegesis: product over process. Likewise, the sequential nature of comic-book panel art is included only as example graphic for textual reflection. The auto-ethnographic work presented in this paper is less a "paper" in the traditional sense than an auto-ethnographic "graphic novel" incorporating sequential panel art, colour graphics, photo-montage, collage and critical reflection to render the transformative, transient effect/affect of temporality in hybridized multimedia In fusing the analytical and the evocative as an auto-ethnographic "comic-book", it presents an experimental hybridization of multimedia-based narrative inquiry (text, graphics, hypertext) and related rendering of authorial self-representation in multiple concurrent modes of identity construction. The auto-ethnographic comic-book presented herein was initially designed as a graphic novel tie-in to a longitudinal auto-ethnographic transmedia project centred on a videographic series of films (the first part completed and pending online journal hosting / screening in the USA in 2024) and related independent research report further detailing the political context referred to in both the comic-book and film. Links to online hosting of the first film in the intended videographic series, as well as the related Academic report, are integrated into the final section of this work.