Ethnographic Sensibility Research Articles

Taking Ethnography to Court: Pedagogical Reflections on a Collective Field Study

Ethnography is an exceptionally difficult subject to teach and learn in a classroom setting. This article, written by an ethnography professor and five graduate ethnography students, reflects on how a short-term and collectively executed fieldwork study can help alleviate this problem. Within three months, we logged over 100 hours of observations on district court proceedings in greater Boston. Our field notes, memos, and seminar discussions brought to life three key topics in ethnography: theorization, positionality, and intervention. While not without its challenges, we ultimately found this exercise to be an effective and efficient way to sharpen our ethnographic sensibilities. We close with a general defense of collective fieldwork as a practical method for teaching and learning ethnography.

Reading ethnography in the classroom

Abstract As the popularity of ethnographic research methods grows across and beyond the social sciences, it is of paramount importance that practitioners reflect on how to best teach participant observation to increasingly diverse and interdisciplinary audiences. While available literature stresses the importance of learning-by-doing to develop students’ ethnographic sensibility, I argue that these techniques neglect the development of students’ ethnographic imagination, which is necessary to prepare first-time fieldworkers to face the unpredictability of research. To remedy this training shortcoming, I then propose that we turn to reading ethnographies in the classroom as a collective, critical and participative practice that can help students picture ‘what really happens’ during fieldwork, inspire their research design, and prepare them for the unpredictability of participant observation.

Situating realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory within the methodological turn in political theory

Contextualist and empirical analyses have recently become important tools in political theory due to a growing ‘methodological turn’ in the discipline. In this article I argue that realism, the ethnographic sensibility in political theory, and comparative political theory should be considered as part of this methodological turn. I show that they share its diagnosis of a gap between political theory and politics and its two principal motivations in closing it. However, I argue that the distinct contribution of realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory is that they highlight a challenge for the methodological turn in that attention to context may widen the distance between political theory and politics. I conclude by suggesting that this is not an insurmountable obstacle and that it in fact bolsters the evaluative function of methodological political theory, keeping it distinct from political science.

Mocking while working with problematic representations: The irony of ethnographic sensibility in Indonesia

SummaryIn this essay, I contemplate the value of ethnography by reflecting on my experience and that of other anthropology‐trained individuals who engage with public socio‐ecological issues in Indonesia. While these issues are portrayed as urgent and are packaged with established representations of people and communities, ethnographic engagement produces representations that are at odds with them. Nevertheless, anthropology‐trained individuals in Indonesia have no way to address these issues other than to work with institutions that produce the problematic representations, and in doing so, inadvertently contribute to their reproduction. Furthermore, the academic anthropology ecosystem does not support the exhaustive exploration of these issues. Eventually, the sensibility generated by the practice of ethnography becomes more of a latent sensibility, which is critical of the predominant representations. It evokes internal conflict and a sense of irony, which most of the time cannot be expressed or practically addressed.

Attending Pain, Ethnographically.

What might ethnography-as both practice and text-offer for thinking about and with non-narrative forms of pain representation? Ethnography operates as an inherently fragmentary, episodic form of knowledge-making: the central acts of observing and writing social life rest upon moments plucked and crafted from the unruly, relentless rush of intersubjective experience. Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to bear on clinical encounters around pain thus attunes us to both the partiality and the sociality of representation. Drawing from ongoing research into how clinicians encounter patients' pain, here I hold together two ethnographic moments, reading across them to explore the consequential forms of attention and of representation at work in the ephemeral utterances and exchanges of everyday work in clinical settings.

Operationalizing distribution as a key concept for public sphere theory. A call for ethnographic sensibility of different social worlds

AbstractThis article takes issue with public sphere theories’ lack of focus on the consequences of social inequality. Citizens divide the work of following politics between them, and we need a cohesive conceptualization of such divisions, through and beyond today’s intrusive media and with attention to social inequalities. Instead of ideals of fully informed individual citizens, I propose we take the empirical fact of distribution of citizens’ public connection as a starting point and anchor our theoretical ideals in the social world with an “ethnographic sensibility.” Doing so facilitates an operationalized concept of distribution of citizens’ public connection into four elements: issues, arenas, and communicative modes, which citizens variously rely on over time. With such an operationalization, we can assess when and for whom the distribution of public connection goes too far and disfavors certain citizens. This helps bring public sphere theory beyond the conundrum of our societies’ paradoxically uninformed citizens.

The stakes of abyssal geography. Response to commentaries on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

The stakes of abyssal geography. Response to commentaries on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

Thick Description and Embodied Analysis of Digital Visual Artefacts: The Visual Repertoire of #SisterIDoBelieveYou

In this work, we explore the relationship between affect and the use of aesthetics by feminist digital activists to communicate their ideas and protest against sexual violence. Our focus, therefore, lies on the visual culture of digital protest. We consider visual artefacts a visual repertoire of protest (Jenzen et al., 2020, p. 420) that can both be articulated in a specific local context whilst simultaneously echoing global sentiments. In this paper, we analyse the visual repertoire of protest of Spanish feminist digital activism against sexual violence. To do so, we analysed 696 visual artefacts linked to the hashtag #HermanaYoSíTeCreo (#SisterIDoBelieveYou) shared on Twitter between May 1, 2018, and August 31, 2020. Our methodological framework incorporates a collaborative triangled analysis based on social semiotics (Ledin & Machin, 2018; Van Leeuwen, 2005), socio-hermeneutic analysis (Knoblauch & Schnettler, 2012; Serrano Pascual & Zurdo Alaguero, 2010), hashtag ethnography (Bonilla & Rose, 2015), and interpretative thick description (Geertz, 1973, pp. 3–30). Additionally, we also developed an ethnographic sensibility towards the corpus, which engaged us in a constant dialogue to overcome the positivist trend of data-driven visual digital analysis. Our work here addresses the understanding of how visual discourses can create the affective unification of social media users (Stage, 2013) as a key feature of feminist politics and online activism (Keller et al., 2018). We analysed the use of visual artefacts by the "virtual" community of sisterhood and concluded that these processes served as a basis for (a) establishing distinctive while versatile visual branding; (b) weaving an affective community; (c) articulating the desire to connect and to gather through love, hope, outrage and disgust; and (d) linking past and present as well as geographically distant feminist struggles.

Emotional Sensibility: Exploring the Methodological and Ethical Implications of Research Participants’ Emotions

Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions’ larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term “ethnographic sensibility” to conceptualize an “emotional sensibility” that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sensibility sharpens attention to how participants’ emotions are data, influence other data, and affect future data collection. Ethically, it supplements Institutional Review Boards’ rationalist emphasis on information and cognitive capacity with appreciation for how emotions infuse consent, risk, and benefit. It thereby encourages thinking not only about emotional harm but also about emotions apart from harm and about emotional harms apart from trauma and vulnerability. I operationalize emotional sensibility by tracking four dimensions of research that affect participants’ emotions: the content of research, the context in which research occurs, researchers’ positionality, and researchers’ conduct.

Quick immersions and the study of Middle East politics

This study uses “quick immersions” in Middle East politics to investigate the role that a short, yet immersive fieldwork stay can play in generating social scientific and pedagogic insights. Using three “quick immersions” in Middle East politics, this article argues that although having an extended amount of time in the field is ideal, especially when committed to obtaining “an ethnographic sensibility,” a quick immersion is better than no immersion. A quick immersion is not a substitute for an extended field stay. Its primary advantage is making fieldwork possible when time, finances, logistics, and other contextual, professional, or personal constraints prohibit a longer stay. A quick immersion is an adaptation to the constraints that might lead scholars to forego fieldwork otherwise. This study aims to dispel disparaging notions that short fieldwork trips equate with mere academic tourism, by considering the outcomes of three short immersive fieldwork trips to the Middle East: six months in UAE (2013), two months in Qatar (2013), and one month in Lebanon (2017). Although the immersion in UAE was three times longer than the immersion in Qatar, and six times longer than the immersion in Lebanon, the insights yielded from all three case studies were equally meaningful for understanding Middle East politics in ways not possible without fieldwork.

Immersion in Alien Worlds: Teaching Ethnographic Sensibilities through Dystopian and Science Fiction

The Alien Worlds project teaches ethnographic skills using the societies of dystopian, postapocalyptic, and science fiction texts as imagined field sites and targets for analysis. These exercises and assignments, which illustrate principles of qualitative fieldwork, were developed when COVID-19 precautions made it impossible to assign tasks that involved in-person social interaction. Preliminary findings from use in 2020–2021 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (n = 140) and Science Fiction and Society (n = 10) classes suggest that science fiction may have an ongoing place in beginning and intermediate social science courses, as it provides an entertaining, low-stakes way for students to practice observation and analysis. The original project is designed to span at least six weeks or the course of a semester, but variations for shorter and stand-alone assignments are provided in addition to ways that it can be adapted to suit the needs of different audiences. Though it will not replace all in-person field experience for advanced sociology and anthropology students, it provides a bridge between classroom content and hands-on interaction that encourages a growth mindset in learning.

Cultivating Ethnographic Sensibilities in Ethnographies of Dying People

AbstractEthnographers engaged in fieldwork with people who are dying face particular demands concerning the nature and limits of their relationships. Drawing on case studies of two patients in the United Kingdom affected by ultimately fatal brain cancer and bowel cancer, we elaborate on the concept of ethnographic sensibility. We highlight the continual attunement of capacities that guide our participation in intersubjective encounters that are suffused by an “existential excess” and help make sense of rapid transformations in our relationships with those who are dying. We situate our approach to ethnographic sensibility within phenomenological notions of shared experience and social becoming to discuss some of the features and challenges of producing knowledge forms about the ends of life.

Wound Culture

This review offers new perspectives on the anthropology of injuries and wounds. It maps how theories, methods, and ethnographic sensibilities converge on wounds, on the act of wounding, and on the wounded as instructive objects. The review assesses how anthropologists understand social forces to cause wounds and how they accord wounds the power to generate meaning about sociality. Organized across two themes, “breach” and “repair,” the review tests concepts of embodiment across clinical boundaries, manifestations of harm, and formations of justice. It examines how anthropological thought connects to wound culture and assesses links between embodiment and politics that develop in the domains of critical theory and medical anthropology. Ultimately, it aims to shed light on the connections between body politics and ethnography and to ask what wounds might generate as an anthropological concern.

Lombrosians and lombrosianism in Brazil

Cesare Lombroso and his "positive school" of criminal anthropology were highly influential in the formation of the social sciences and ethnographic sensibility in Brazil. Rather than carefully read or analysed, Lombroso and his school were cited, interpreted and somewhat creolized according to modalities specific to the socio-racial context of Brazil, revealing significant historical entanglements between social scientists in Italy and Latin America (as shown by the sojourns of the Italian scholars Guglielmo Ferrero, Gina Lombroso and Enrico Ferri in 1907-1910). The complex and never passive process of reception and reinterpretation of Lombrosian ideas was characterized by a dynamic of attraction and rejection. This article examines the reception and influence of "Lombrosianism" in Brazil, showing how and why such influence gradually vanished in the 1930s, to disappear after the Second World War.

Deploying an Ethnographic Sensibility to Understand Climate Change Governance: Hanging Out, Around, In, and Back

AbstractWhat can an “ethnographic sensibility” contribute to research on climate change governance? With its emphasis on meaning making and understanding what may lie beneath more obvious interactions and processes, ethnographic methodologies, particularly collaborative event ethnography, are increasingly deployed to address complex questions and achieve conceptual leverage on issues related to climate governance. Drawing on literature in climate anthropology, material geography, and political ethnography, and with examples from our own fieldwork experiences, we devise a heuristic typology underpinned by an ethnographic sensibility to help guide the fieldwork phase of a research project. Building on the well-established practice of hanging out, we introduce hanging around, which attends to spatiality and matter; hanging in, which addresses issues of access and trust; and hanging back to guide the practice of reflexivity. We articulate what fieldwork with an ethnographic sensibility entails and discuss its potential and implications for climate governance research.

Beyond Inclusion: Cultivating a Critical Sense of Belonging through Community-Engaged Research

A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized students’ inclusion and sense of belonging into university contexts. In this paper, we explore how two first-generation students of color articulate a critical sense of belonging through their reflections as student researchers in the Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research or (H)ACER program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). (H)ACER integrates community engagement, ethnographic sensibilities, critical race and decolonial theory, as well as women of color feminisms into a curriculum designed to train critical scholar-researchers. Through themes of feeling isolated on campus and returning ‘home’ in the garden, building comfort with academic theory, and navigating insider/outsider identities in campus/community contexts, we trace how the students developed an awareness of their positionality and made sense of their experiences of ‘belonging’, both within the campus and community contexts. Their narratives spark our deeper exploration into how critical approaches to community-engaged research may offer a pedagogy for supporting student sense of belonging that extends beyond inclusion, a promising vein of further research.

Of Horses and Water: On the Power of the Fragment

Joseph Buttigieg’s seminal 1990 article “Gramsci’s Method” argues that the fragmentary nature of the Prison Notebooks cannot be explained simply by the constraints under which they were written. Rather, the notebooks’ fragmentariness is at the heart of an innovative approach to the understanding of history and the mapping of possibilities for change. Characteristic of Gramsci’s innovative approach is what could be termed an ethnographic sensibility, a determination to seek out, and treat seriously, the narratives others use to make sense of the world. A similar ethnographic sensibility is also central to anthropology’s classic methodology of participant observation, developed and popularized by Bronisław Malinowski, one of the founding fathers of Anglophone anthropology. A comparison between these two apparently dissimilar thinkers underlines the value of Buttigieg’s reading of Gramsci’s notebooks, and suggests how a classic anthropological approach might enrich Marxism.

Black Church Arson in the Museum

Abstract This paper explores the material and representational politics that are catalyzed by Anti-Mass, an installation made by Cornelia Parker from the remains of a burned Black church located in the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, California. Applying an attention to religious materiality (the interpretive circuit between words, bodies, and things), semiotic ideology (an approach that explores competing and ascendant meanings), and an ethnographic sensibility, I argue that three hermeneutic fields coalesced around Anti-Mass in the museum. The first interpretation is a Killmonger hermeneutic that read Anti-Mass as a profaning of Black sacred matter. The second is an Anti- hermeneutic, which sought to preserve representational openness prized by abstract expressionism. The third is a resurrection hermeneutic, which reflected popular notions of US multicultural transcendence and a more melancholic meditation on anti-Black religious violence expressed by adjacent artwork and embodied by the ethnographer herself via a lump corpothetics.

To Stop and See: Contemplative Fieldwork as Thoughtful Observation

Abstract Contemplation, or the practice of sitting still to ‘stop and see’, can expand one’s embodied awareness. This expanded awareness resembles ethnographic sensibility, a disposition practiced by researchers to generate an understanding of the ‘field’. My fieldwork on contemplative activism involves a double thoughtful observation: once as contemplation, and once as ethnographic sensitivity. How do I make sense of data as I cannot distinguish between my own embodied experiences of contemplation and my methodological practices as a fieldworker? How do I engage with ‘data’ that escape words when contemplative activism takes place in silence? Rather than making the familiar strange -as much literature on fieldwork suggests- keeping the ‘strange’ strange might be similarly productive, especially when it concerns esoteric experiences fieldworkers (perhaps) have in the field. Instead of ethnographic sensibility being about seeing differently, ‘learning’ in the field can be about practicing to ‘stop and see’ different things.

‘COVID containers’ in pandemic mediascapes: discursive economies of health, bodies, and race in North America

Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to pandemic mediascapes, this article critically examines three media artifacts that assembled around COVID-19 – as an entity that is viral, social, and political – in the early months of the pandemic in North America. Focusing on the household, the cruise ship, and the body-with-underlying-conditions as ‘COVID containers’, the author argues that material and discursive responses to the pandemic, articulated through imaginaries of containers and containment, uphold notions of risk, order, and health that garner meaning through implied racial intertexts. The article analyzes COVID-19-related data, graphics, talk, and news stories to show how logics of inside/outside, safety/risk, and comfort/fear that animate efforts to contain a viral threat intensify the pathologization, harm, surveillance, and risk of groups long imagined as ‘threats’ to social order. Throughout, The author demonstrates how idioms of containers and containment make ‘the body’ a key locus of health, diverting attention from systems and histories complicit in producing ill-health. A coda reflects on Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s influential essay ‘ The mindful body’, re-reading their articulation of the ‘Western body’ through lenses drawn from scholarship in Black studies, queer studies, and disability studies that are central to understanding COVID-19 as relation(s) – borne from racial capitalism – that differentially distribute risk, health, and care.