Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment: An Anthropological Rubric for a Community Ecosystem

Eric James Haanstad

doi:10.22582/ta.v9i2.528

Abstract

The ethnographic team of a community-based engineering project in South Bend, Indiana, continues to create modes of anthropological assessment while conducting collaborative research. The Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem (BCe2) is a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to restore and enhance a vital but polluted St. Joseph River tributary by linking the efforts of local community groups, schools, and universities in a revitalizing small city. This paper describes the impetus and creation of an ethnographic rubric for assessing community-based anthropological research towards potential replication in future collaborations. Based on a modification of Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA), used widely in environmental, medical, military, and other research applications, this paper offers an REA modification called Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment (CEA).

Highlights

The ethnographic team inherited several research rubrics listed in the initial grant, but none of them offered the basic ethnographic toolkit that would become vital to our research engagement with the engineering teams and advocacy with the broader community
Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem (BCe2) internship team creating a new rain garden, 2017 While creating project updates and grant reports, because one of the promised deliverables was to provide modified rubrics, it became structurally beneficial to retroactively frame our methodological approach within a pre-existing ethnographic rubric and to describe how we were modifying it through practice
With many parallels to Gretchen Seuss’ recent research (2018), for the purposes of providing working methodological models amid funding-driven outcomes, this paper describes an Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA) modification called Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment (CEA)

Summary

Introduction

From the summer of 2016 to the present summer of 2019, the ethnographic team of a community-based engineering project in South Bend, Indiana, continues to create modes of anthropological assessment while conducting collaborative research. This paper describes the impetus and creation of an ethnographic rubric for assessing community-based anthropological research towards potential replication in future collaborations.

Results

Conclusion