Lone Ethnographer Research Articles

Applying up: How ethnographers powered public health changes in the United States during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract“Studying up” was Laura Nader's provocation to anthropologists to scrutinize the actions of the powerful few in relation to the ordeals of the powerless many. Engaging this lineage, this article describes CommuniVax, a rapid ethnographic research coalition supporting an equitable COVID‐19 vaccine rollout in the United States. By tapping hyperlocal knowledge as well as that held by public health and governmental authorities at higher reaches, the coalition opened the possibility for a more just pandemic response and stronger democratic institutions. The project also broke with prevailing features in the studying up tradition: It operated as a multidisciplinary collective rather than a lone ethnographer, partnered with elites rather than a priori holding them at arm's length, and emphasized pragmatic solutions over scholastic critiques. These departures embody an “applying up” modality, supporting the idea ethnographers have plural strategies for studying actors who exert strong influence over others’ lives.

Mentoring Undergraduate Research and Centering Collaboration

Abstract In this article, faculty members from three United States colleges and universities reflect upon mentoring undergraduate research in cultural anthropology and consider the educational and practice-based outcomes of student mentorship. Following a multi-year experience jointly mentoring students, we discuss our trajectories, lessons, and challenges in learning to support and advise undergraduate researchers. We reflect upon the impact of the “lone ethnographer” mentality as well as the possibilities of collaborative research, seeing the university as a site for ethnographic research and developing experiential programs. Collectively, we highlight the need to expand not only options for students to engage in primary research design, data collection, and analysis but also for anthropology departments and institutions to support instructors who prioritize student research opportunities and to provide training so that more instructors may do so confidently.

Online virtual worlds as anthropological field sites: Ethnographic methods training via collaborative research of Internet gaming cultures

Since 2008, at Colorado State University, I have been collaboratively researching virtual worlds with my students in experimental methods seminars. My “ethnographic research and teaching laboratory” (ERTL), ambitious in scope, conducts original and even cutting edge research, while teaching students field methods in the process. The research and teaching unfold primarily in Internet‐based games—such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2—persistent online networked social spaces of hundreds and even thousands of players. As a teaching tool, online virtual worlds provide a convenient way to get students quickly into the “field,” with online games being for some students (based on their play experience or lack of it) akin to foreign cultures. In this article, I discuss strengths and also challenges of ERTL, illustrating in the process how my lab's linked research and teaching model illuminates one way forward for empirically minded anthropologists hoping to move beyond the lone ethnographer. [online gaming cultures, ethnographic laboratory, mixed methods]

Community-based Participatory Research: Challenging “Lone Ethnographer” Anthropology in the Community and the Classroom

Despite a rich history of collaborative and engaged scholarship and the recent “participatory turn” in anthropology few anthropology departments train students in the philosophy or methods of collaboration. Graduate training is typically characterized by conventional classroom-based lectures and individualized projects, while participatory research is thought of as something scholars can do later in their careers. The 2013 Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee (HEAT) Ethnographic Field School disrupted this paradigm. The Field School used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework to train graduate students and community stakeholders in applied research methods through participation in an established community/university research partnership, examining race, racism, and health outcomes. The Field School was comprised of a racially, economically, and educationally diverse, intergenerational, multicultural, and multiethnic group of participants. Reflecting on this experience, we challenge the myth of the “lone ethnographer” and argue for a reorientation in anthropological methods training towards transdisciplinary, participatory, and collaborative ethnographic methods.

Book Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Data: Shane the Lone Ethnographer’s Basic Guide to Qualitative Data Analysis

Book Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Data: Shane the Lone Ethnographer’s Basic Guide to Qualitative Data Analysis

Book Review: Good, the Bad, and the Data: Shane the Lone Ethnographer's Basic Guide to Qualitative Data Analysis

Book Review: Good, the Bad, and the Data: Shane the Lone Ethnographer's Basic Guide to Qualitative Data Analysis

Book Review: Shane, the Lone Ethnographer: a Beginner's Guide to Ethnography

Book Review: Shane, the Lone Ethnographer: a Beginner's Guide to Ethnography

Shane, the Lone Ethnographer: A Beginner's Guide to Ethnography. Sally Campbell Galman

<i>Shane, the Lone Ethnographer: A Beginner's Guide to Ethnography</i>. Sally Campbell Galman

Shane, the lone ethnographer: a beginner's guide to ethnography

Shane, the lone ethnographer: a beginner's guide to ethnography

Manufacturing the Global

Surely, 'global ethnography' is an oxymoron? How can the global be ethno graphic? How can ethnography contribute to the understanding of global ization? After all, in anthropology, we stereotypically picture the lone ethnographer settled in his or her village, itself isolated from the world around. In sociology, we think of the ethnographer as the specialist of face to-face relations or of situational analysis, but with the context firmly brack eted. Or perhaps we think of the ethnographer-sociologist studying conflict and cohesion in the urban community; but, as with the anthropologist, it is a community cut off from the world beyond, often by physical barriers such as buildings, parks or railroad tracks. What could be further from global ethnography? After three-quarters of a century of professional anthropology and sociology, global ethnography appears oxymoronic because we have blotted out the prehistory of our professions. Global ethnography is not new at all. As Joan Vincent (1990) has argued, before the First World War anthro pology was swept up in debates between evolutionists and diffusionists who saw the world as their canvas. James Clifford (1997) makes a similar point: with peripatetic missionaries and colonial administrators monopolizing knowledge about 'the native', anthropologists had to seek out their own niche of expertise, which they found in the careful, systematic and prolonged observation of indigenous peoples in a single place. This professionalization of fieldwork led to its circumscription, its concentration on dwelling rather than traveling. In overlooking the vast web of Empire, the multiple and asymmetrical connections between metropolis and colony that made focused field research possible, anthropology bracketed its own global underpinnings.