by Patrick Alexander What do you want to be when you finally grow up? In 2014, on a humid September morning, I boarded a crowded subway train to arrive at the New York City public high school where I would… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘ethnography’
Ethnography as being-in-the-world rather than method
A fascinating discussion by Matthew Desmond in the conclusion of his wonderful book Evicted: There’s this idea that ethnography is a “method.” When we see it this way, we tend to ask methodological questions about it. How do I get… Read More ›
Eliminating the first person from ethnography
A powerful argument by Matthew Desmond from the conclusion of his incredible book Evicted. What do you think? Far from being a prerequisite for reflexivity, can writing the “I” into ethnography inadvertently make the text about the author rather than the… Read More ›
Call for Papers: Fieldwork – Doing Ethnographic Research
Call for papers Fieldwork: Doing Ethnographic Research Friday 24th June, Birmingham City University Confirmed Keynotes: Professor Elijah Anderson, Yale University Professor Karen O’Reilly, Loughborough University Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to by Friday 1st April… Read More ›
Dying alone in New York
A fantastic, chilling ethnography of death in the modern metropolis – and of a life forgotten and pieced together from postmortem scraps. This text gives insights not only into the journey of a death person through a number of complex… Read More ›
Blogging your fieldwork
Pat Thompson has written a fascinating post reflecting on her use of blogging to record field notes during an ethnographic project at the Tate summer school. She stresses the ethical challenges of such an activity – particularly the need to negotiate consent… Read More ›
CfA: Ethnographies & Health early-career workshop
CfA: Ethnographies & Health early-career workshop LSHTM, 1st – 2nd October 2015 We are pleased to announce a call for abstracts for an exciting new workshop for early career researchers, entitled ‘Ethnographies and Health’, to be held at the London School of… Read More ›
A scientist discovers ethnography
This is a fascinatingly open reflection upon discovering ethnography for the first time and how it challenges one’s training in the ‘scientific method’: In summary, this experience has been a fascinating one – a new world for me. I have… Read More ›
Book Review: Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts
Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts provides students of anthropological and ethnographical research with a detailed illustrations of British and international accounts of critical social anthropology in the light of methodological issues. The focus of the book is predominantly… Read More ›
A Modest Proposal for Making Actor-Network Theory More than Academia’s All-Purpose App
As someone who suffers the misfortune of having committed to an academic life when very young, my institutional memory is somewhat older than my chronological age. For me the 1960s and 1970s remain very much part of living memory, which… Read More ›
Call for Papers => #Ethnography: Trends, Traverses and Traditions
ESA midterm conference, Research Network on Qualitative Research (RN20) #Ethnography, @Amsterdam #August_27-29th_2014 http://aissr.uva.nl/ethnography Ethnography is often seen as one of the principal approaches in qualitative methodology in general. The ESA midterm conference for the Research Network on Qualitative research (RN20)… Read More ›
Every minute of every day: an experiment in real time research and digitally inscribed ethnography
Every minute of every day is a collaborative experiment in real-time ethnography between Goldsmiths College and Richard House Children’s Hospice (Newham) http://richardhouse.org.uk/about and St Joseph’s Hospice (Hackney)http://www.stjh.org.uk/About-stjosephshospice. The aim of our project is to capture something of the local areas and communities that… Read More ›
Ethnographic Methods: ethics, practice and theory
Ethnographic Methods: ethics, practice and theory , Thursday, 23 May 2013 The University of Warwick At its best, ethnography – often glossed as ‘participant observation’ – has provided sociology and other social researchers with a valuable tool for apprehending a… Read More ›
What does the future hold for ethnography? An interview with Alex Smith
In this interview I talk to Alex Smith (right) about the New Ethnographies book series he edits. I was interested in this series because of its deliberate intention to embrace and ferment the extension and productive growth of this most traditional… Read More ›
The Public Understanding of Science is a Political Issue: an interview with Alex Smith
In this interview Mark Carrigan talks to Alex Smith (right) about his recent fieldwork in Kansas City, part of the larger Making Science Public project, exploring the role that debates about the status of science are having in the unfolding of the… Read More ›
The Nature of Cities
For me, good urban sociology reminds us that cities are small, intimate things that won’t be around forever. They might seem vast and tall and solid and permanent, but they’re not. Cities are living, breathing organic matter, like a flower… Read More ›
What Oprah’s Research Staff Failed To Inform Her About India
Note: This list was written as a quick response to Oprah Winfrey’s visit to and report on South Asia in the Summer of 2012. 1) Yes, it is customary in (most parts) of South Asia for people to eat with… Read More ›
One Story High
One Story High is a collection of very short sociological biographies I curated and edited for the on-line journal Fast Capitalism late in 2009, featuring the work of novelist and literary critic Amitava Kumar, anthropologist Katie Stewart and filmmaker John Cohen… Read More ›
The Facebook Project
* In my Introductory Sociology course, It’s Not Rocket Science, students create faux Facebook profiles of people who are their exact social opposite, then interact with one another for ten weeks, (as well as observe and analyze these interactions), finally… Read More ›
ANNOUNCEMENT: Summer School on Vampires and Vampirism
Apply for this summer school at your own peril! Euro-Balkan Institute for Social and Humanities Research, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia 15th OHRID SUMMER UNIVERSITY 2012 Summer School “Vampires and Vampirism: Between Anthropology, Folklore and Popular Culture” to be… Read More ›
A Biography Like A Match
The very best sociological biography I ever read was Kate Moses’ Wintering. In it, she takes Sylvia Plath’s collection of poetry Ariel and then re-orders each poem so they are laid out in the way Plath left them with/as her… Read More ›
The Traces We Leave Behind
For years I wrote about small communities of people who were not famous, but were, at least, breathing, that is, alive. Now I mostly write about one famous, (or, perhaps to some, infamous), man, who, though an internationally recognized, (not… Read More ›
With Ten Dollars
I couldn’t have invented an ethnographic field site more perfect than the Winnipeg River. With Clark’s Corner at its center, it was every bit as iconic as William Foote Whyte’s Cornerville, Elliott Liebow’s Tally’s corner or Elijah Anderson’s a place… Read More ›
Boys Named Kip, Not Kim
There’s an episode of the American television show Seinfeld where Elaine has to hide from everyone the fact that she hated the Academy Award winning movie The English Patient. You can watch a clip from this episode here. For me,… Read More ›
Communities Are Social
Note: All the names in this story have been changed. But the photograph above gives a clue to the identity of one of the towns mentioned. No matter how hard we labor to make our homes more permanent, more stable,… Read More ›
The Solitude Trilogy
After he became heralded as one of the greatest pianists to ever play, Glenn Gould stopped performing live. Doing so just didn’t allow him to perfect the way he wanted to play like performing in a studio did, where he… Read More ›
Where New York Stops & Bombay Starts
Note: I went looking for Bombay in New York City last night inspired by Bombay V. New York, a brilliant on-going photo essay by Nisha Sondhe. An earlier It’s Not Rocket Science post on India is right here.
Living Above The Martinis
For a year I lived above a pizza parlor, just like the sociologist William Foote Whyte did in 1936, the year he was doing field research for what would later become his famous urban ethnography, Street Corner Society. And every… Read More ›
Three Truths & A Lie
I was never really very good at that game Three Truths and a Lie, the one where (when you’re a slumber party or living in a dorm) you’re supposed to tell four things about yourself, three true, one untrue and… Read More ›
Casting My Net wide*: Ethnography and today’s ‘Knowing Capitalism’
Traditional anthropology and ethnography are all about daring researchers originating from civilised Western European countries venturing into unknown territories to spend half their lives living with fascinating, backward tribes. They defy the comfy practice of armchair theorising and instead theorise… Read More ›