Ethnographic Practice Research Articles

The Supervisor Effect: A Note on Teaching Field Methods

In this article we reflect on our experiences as supervisors in a field methods course in order to explore how ethnographic research practices can be used as tools in the supervision of students that conduct field research for the first time and as such to provide insights about what constitutes “good supervision.” Our reflections follow the three main stages of fieldwork: preparing and designing research, doing fieldwork, and reporting on research, as the role of the supervisor and their relationship with students transforms accordingly. We describe how we use the parallels between “doing research” and “teaching how to do research” as tools for teaching field methods through learning by doing. We pay specific attention to three central elements of ethnographic practice: building rapport, social interaction (the “supervisor effect”), and reflexivity that we use in our supervision.

Beyond Algorithmic Bias: A Socio-Computational Interrogation of the Google Search by Image Algorithm

We perform a socio-computational interrogation of the google search by image algorithm, a main component of the google search engine. We audit the algorithm by presenting it with more than 40 thousands faces of all ages and more than four races and collecting and analyzing the assigned labels with the appropriate statistical tools. We find that the algorithm reproduces white male patriarchal structures, often simplifying, stereotyping and discriminating females and non-white individuals, while providing more positive descriptions of white men. By drawing from Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, we link these results to the attitudes of the algorithm’s designers, owners, and the dataset the algorithm was trained on. We further underpin the problematic nature of the algorithm by using the ethnographic practice of studying-up: We show how the algorithm places individuals at the top of the tech industry within the socio-cultural reality that they shaped, many times creating biased representations of them. We claim that the use of social-theoretic frameworks such as the above are able to contribute to improved algorithmic accountability, algorithmic impact assessment and provide additional and more critical depth in algorithmic bias and auditing studies. Based on the analysis, we discuss the scientific and design implications and provide suggestions for alternative ways to design just socio-algorithmic systems.

The Guard's Dilemma: Social Roles and Therapeutic Experience for Inpatient‐Guards in Tijuana's Community‐Based Addiction Treatment

AbstractOver the past 30 years, Tijuana has witnessed a proliferation of non‐biomedical, community‐based drug treatment centers. Research on this industry focuses primarily on documenting their spread and describing institutional practices, particularly human rights abuses. However, ethnography attuned to inpatient perspectives shows academic responses (op‐eds, articles, policy briefs, etc.) that generalize compulsory, community‐based addiction treatment as completely unproductive often obscure inpatients’ complicated experiences. I examine daily life and social roles in one all‐female 12 Step center along Mexico's northern border to explore the claim by center administrators that inpatients benefit therapeutically from acting simultaneously as guards (inpatient‐guards). This ethnography of practice complicates academic discussions of compulsory addiction treatment by examining the labor the inpatient‐guards provide and the meanings they ascribe to it, revealing the complexity of therapeutic experience and a path for global mental health to better understand community care.

My face turned red, but it led me … nowhere. Notes on epistemically pointless embarrassment in ethnographic practice

The personal character of ethnography makes it meaningful to pay attention to emotions during fieldwork, not the least of which is awkwardness or embarrassment. To make a fool of oneself or to commit a faux pas in the field belongs to the palette of the ethnographic experience, and is often defined as helpful for obtaining new knowledge about the setting. But whereas many ethnographers emphasize the didactic quality of shameful mistakes, this article takes a closer look at instances which proved to be epistemically pointless. By analysing five different instances of embarrassment during fieldwork, the author argues that not all situations in which ethnographers do the ‘wrong’ thing lead somewhere. Embarrassment may present itself in more prosaic manners, stemming from the ethnographer being relatively uninformed, incompetent or out of place, and they need not enrich field knowledge. Attending to such instances may help us further understand and discuss the conditions of ethnographic practice.

On the ground, but not in the field? The (mis)use and portrayal of ethnography in community development literature

ABSTRACT Ethnography is valuable, but the expressions of ethnography in the community development literature are inadequate. This methodological insufficiency showcases a failure by community development professionals to fully understand the communities they serve and jeopardizes the reputation of the community development field. We call for the development of a standard for the community development field that substantiates ethnographic methodology and production in research and practice. Ethnography requires empirical fieldwork consisting of multiple, well-integrated methods. Moreover, ethnographers should strive for polyvocal field-based study with community members who are both the subjects and co-producers of the resultant written ethnography. We reach and support our findings with an exhaustive review of 112 articles in leading community development journals that claim to utilize ethnographic study. Additionally, we provide a history of ethnography in community development, articulate ethnography in process and application, and suggest how to improve the reporting and practice of ethnography.

Anthropology at the Ends of the Lines

Anthropology at the Ends of the Lines

Experiencing Theory, Theorizing Methodology: Teaching Anthropology through Short-Time Ethnographic Fieldwork Projects in Multi-Disciplinary Academic Contexts

Often enough, Anthropology seems as an ‘abstract’ discipline, especially when students of other social sciences or humanities try to get acquainted with its theory, methodology or the main anthropological discussion in general. Under these specific conditions, ‘teaching Anthropology’ becomes a task of high difficulty without a simultaneous ethnographic practice in the ‘field’. It is this specific ‘rite de passage’ which makes students under training in Anthropology seek theoretical schemas and methodological tools in order to ‘experience’ theory and ‘theorize’ methodology. In this paper we present ethnographic material collected from various teaching contexts where Anthropology is neither the main academic background nor the stated educational outcome for students taking the courses. In these courses, anthropological knowledge comes to the surface through an empirical engagement with ethnographic practice as an applied theory in a research project. This connection between theory and practice brings Anthropology to the foreground, since it engages students with both - the procedure of “doing field work” (something substantial for Anthropology) and their own social experience within this process. The ethnographic material for this reflective approach derives from various academic contexts where we have experienced the emergence of this type of learning. This includes ethnographic and anthropological courses (undergraduate or postgraduate) at the Department of History and Ethnology in Democritus University of Thrace Greece, and field trips including ethnographic exercise for the students and the Konitsa Summer School for Anthropology, Ethnography and Comparative Folklore of the Balkans, organized by the Border Crossings Network in collaboration with the University of Ioannina and the Municipality of Konitsa, Greece, at the Greek-Albanian border.

Computational ethnography: A view from sociology

This commentary elaborates on the ideas and projects outlined in this special issue, from a specifically sociological perspective. Much recent work in sociology proposes ‘methods mashups’ of ethnography and digital data/computational tools in different and diverse ways. However, typically, these have taken the form of applying (with or without tweaks) the principles of ethnography to new domains and data types, as if ethnography itself is stable and immutable; that it has a universal set of methodological principles that unify ethnographic practice. Returning to anthropology (whence, arguably, ethnography originally came) is, therefore, a useful way to extend our methodological thinking to (re)consider what ethnography is and how it operates, and from there think more clearly about how it may be effectively combined with digital data/computational tools in an emerging ‘Computational Anthropology’.

Ethnographic Theology: Integrating the Social Sciences and Theological Reflection

Theologians are widely embracing ethnographic research to accomplish their theological work. However, since most theologians are not substantively trained in social scientific methods, their sophistication with this methodology is limited, leading to distortions in recorded observations and proffered interpretations. This essay seeks to address this lack of depth by articulating some of the most essential sensitivities that are crucial to the best practices associated with exemplary scholarship emerging at the intersection of ethnography and theology. Among the most important distinctions that theologians must recognize is a simple, heuristic distinction between “found theologies” and “imposed theologies”. Ethnographers know that reporting our findings always requires a careful examination of the assumptions that may unwittingly constrain what we recognize, let alone “see.” The distinction offered between “found theologies” and “imposed theologies” serves to remind theologically concerned field workers that unexamined ideals and prejudices as well as deeply held values and convictions can radically direct our attention and creatively reshape our perceptions. It also allows insightful focus on the dynamics of power as well as inclusion of marginalized peoples. My modest goal, therefore, is to further equip theologically-oriented scholars to produce original, social-scientifically conscientious, yet substantively rich and responsible works that further innovate the use of social science methodology among theologians. Ultimately, by further substantiating the ethics of ethnographic practice among theologians, students and scholars will accentuate the integrity of findings and produce streams of scholarship that will foster the unexpected and urgently needed theologies of the future.

Some Methodological Insights from a Reflexive “Insider” Ethnography of Shiatsu Practice

Presented as a collaborative reflexive account, this article has evolved through a series of discussions between the first author—who carried out an “insider” ethnography of Shiatsu practice—and her two supervisors. We highlight the challenges that she faced as an ethnographer in a field already familiar to the researcher and demonstrate how it was possible to use this tension to advantage in crafting an enhanced methodological approach. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1996, 24) notion of “forgetfulness of self,” we explore how the first author was able to harness and hone her key abilities, disposition, and innate knowledge as an experienced Shiatsu practitioner in order to forge a blended approach. Finally, the article suggests that this approach, based on sensitive skills involving “listening,” intuition, and touch—the essence of Shiatsu—can enhance ethnographic practice in general.

Ethnography, Tactical Responsivity and Political Utility.

In this article, we address issues of attribution, utility, and accountability in ethnographic research. We examine the two main analytical approaches that have structured the debate on data collection and theorization in ethnography over the last five decades: an inductivist approach, with grounded theory as its main analytic strategy; and a deductivist stance, which uses field sites to explore empirical anomalies that enable an ethnographer to test and build upon pre-existing theories. We engage recent reformulations of this classical debate, with a specific focus on abductive and reflexive approaches in ethnography, and then weigh into these debates, ourselves. drawing on our own experiences producing and using research in non-academic settings. In so doing, we highlight the importance of strategy and accountability in one’s ethnographic practices and accounts, advocating for an approach to ethnographic research that is reflexive and overtly responsive to the knowledge needs and change goals articulated by non-academic collaborators. Ultimately, we argue for a research stance that we describe as tactical responsivity, whereby researchers work with key collaborators and stakeholders to identify the strategic aims and audiences for their research, and develop ethnographic, analytic, and communicative practices that enable them to generate and mobilize the knowledge required to actualize their shared aims.

Between Aisthēsis and Colere: Sensoria, Everyday Improvisation and Ethnographic Reality

The individual experience of everyday city life is essentially an everyday improvisation among other people. It is in urban settings where socially structured formations of daily life meet purely individual situated experience in myriads of spontaneously created and shaped assemblages of everyday life. The visual perception of space, sonic orientation in a given place and olfactory plus tactile experience of the environment are the basic aesthetic performances in cultivating a common urban reality. The author discusses specificities of anthropological knowledge derived from first-hand experience of the life of other people in the field. To cope with the complexity of everyday urban improvisation, the author employs two ancient Greek terms to define the space of human interaction: aisthēsis, i.e., sensory perception, and the complex meaning of the Latin verb colere, from which the term culture is derived. The triangulation of everyday improvisation through the sensorial essence of everyday life complements the employment of two other ancient Greek terms, praxis and poiesis. The basic empirical materials used to discuss everyday improvisation in an urban environment are collected narrations of sensory perception and individual lives from sensobiographic walks in Ljubljana, Turku and Brighton. Historically, in the West, the dominance of the senses has shifted from sound, touch and smell, orienting people in orally designed cultural domains, to sight. Smelling is specific embeddedness in place. Its paradoxical position of sensing outside air deeply inside, integrated in breathing, but not always sensing anything special. At the crossroads of distant and close, inner and outer, olfactory experience is simultaneously existentially idiosyncratic and collectively shaped. The paper’s main point is that there are no clear limits between the experienced past and the present. However, both are aesthetically and culturally inscribed in specific registers of individual, social, cultural and embodied memories. The same stands for an ethnographic practice. Everyday life is a continuum of living, weaved together from many discontinuous contingencies. It consists of incongruent, incomplete and chaotic shifts. Repetitive social activities bring order into this everyday mess: rituals and work. For this reason, repetitive music is inevitable for establishing a common ground of the everyday. If ethnography ever touches reality, it is a continuous improvisation in everyday life, shared, collective, and peculiar individual improvisation.

Everyday Ritual and Ethnographic Practice: Two Cases Showing the Importance of Embodiment and Reflexivity

Moments of ritual reveal symbolic meanings, reinforce boundaries of the social group, and tie actors to one another. Because rituals are so important to social life, ethnographers must be attuned to both institutionalized and everyday rituals of their sites. However, methodological literature rarely discusses how everyday rituals should be treated during data collection, analysis, or presentation. We use data from two ethnographic sites—a yoga studio and training for health care volunteers—to illustrate the challenges of observing others during rituals and making sense of our own experiences of rituals, especially given varying levels of participation and resistance to rituals. We argue that greater reflexivity, especially of embodied experiences, is needed when studying everyday rituals and provide methodological recommendations for improving ethnographic study.

Case Studies: Anticipating Civic Needs and Skills

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 15-15 Case Studies: Anticipating Civic Needs and SkillsToken Access Case Studies: Anticipating Civic Needs and Skills First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12052AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 15-15 RelatedInformation

PechaKucha: Decentering the Human

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 338-338 PechaKucha: Decentering the HumanFree to Read PechaKucha: Decentering the Human First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12087AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 338-338 RelatedInformation

PechaKucha: Framing Devices

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 334-334 PechaKucha: Framing DevicesFree to Read PechaKucha: Framing Devices First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12083AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 334-334 RelatedInformation

Papers: Power and Publics

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 303-303 Papers: Power and Publics Papers: Power and Publics First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12076AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 303-303 RelatedInformation

Papers: Communities

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 258-258 Papers: Communities Papers: Communities First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12073AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 258-258 RelatedInformation

PechaKucha: Alternative Methods

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 329-329 PechaKucha: Alternative MethodsFree to Read PechaKucha: Alternative Methods First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12079AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 329-329 RelatedInformation

PechaKucha: Imagining Futures/Restrospective Futures

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ProceedingsVolume 2021, Issue 1 p. 345-345 PechaKucha: Imagining Futures/Retrospective Futures PechaKucha: Imagining Futures/Restrospective Futures First published: 24 December 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12092AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume2021, Issue1November 2021Pages 345-345 RelatedInformation