auto ethnographies

I really enjoyed these articles, and appreciate the analytical approach to validate their findings. I think this kind of work can make reasearch much more accessible to people outside of academia, which I also see as beneficial. I think it will be a long time though, before the empiricists and funders will give credibility to these methods.

A Visual Ethnogrphy Class/Technique Workshop

I must say that I really enjoyed this week’s readings on auto-ethnography and visual ethnography, especially the article by Pink. I can't wait to read the rest of the book. Having another really good reference about the benefits of using multimedia ethnography methods in our research is wonderful. I wish I had read this before I wrote my most recent paper, in which I ended up citing Harper (1998) and Collier and Collier (1986)’ although they are good references, they are also explained in the Pink chapter.

I, too, agree with Eric that we should have a workshop or some day set aside in the college where everyone (regardless of discipline, background, and research interests) can learn about how to use some of the multimedia equipment, editing programs, etc. I am working with the Teacher Education Program (TEP) right now to help better implement the arts into the TEP program. My specific domain is to better teach the teachers some of the fundamentals of visual documentation and technology, and how to teach elements of visual ethnography in their classes.

Perhaps a larger program could and should be designed for everyone in the college to attend. Perhaps faculty and others with backgrounds in these fields or current PhD and master's students who are working and using these methods could share some tips or tricks of the trade. I really feel something like this would be very beneficial to all graduate students because, unless you already have learned it or are learning it through your research position, there seems to be little place where actual techniques are demonstrated, programs explored, and equipment explained to anyone. While courses explain methods and the theory behind this work, such as this ethnography course or even the Qualitative Methods course, no single course explains how to use a video camera, what is the best format to film in, how to use lights, audio, tripods, video editing software such as iMovie, Quick Time, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, etc.

I believe we all could learn a lot from one another. Is there any way we could try to set something like this up for College of Ed students?

Therese

Visual Analyses/Ethnography Info

Did we ever decide whether our class would have a "how to" day to learn to use audio & video equipment for ethnographic work? I would love to see that happen.

Pink's introduction makes the use of visual media sources for social science research seem so powerful. Pink (2001) points to McQuire's notion that "the ambiguity of the meaning of images not only questions the modern notion of truth, but destabilizes the basic premises of modernity", and McQuire's assersion that there is power in the camera "as an agent of change that overturns the realist paradigm" (p. 13). Whao! I like this argument. I think that I agree with it, because one can write words about any social interaction, and try to be as objective in description as possible, but the words will always be reflections of the information processed through that researchers' subjectivity. A visual representation, whether pictures or video, presents data that are removed, to some degree, from that researcher-originated filtering process, and can therefore be something closer to the subjectivity, or at least the social reality, of the observed participants. Here follow wise warnings to use a disciplined, systematic approach (Becker, in Pink, p. 7) when engaging visual media as ethnographic materials for analysis.

Multi-media seems to be a methodological direction in which much social science research is heading, or that various research methodologies will increasingly adopt. A link to Van Leeuwen's Visual Analysis book. I'd love to see more links to information about the whys and how-tos for involving and adapting multiple media formats for educational research.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8Bdb-L3D1I0C&oi=fnd&pg=PP17&dq=video+analysis+education&ots=mhn7LnunOU&sig=vic0SmzkTODrNpCcBk9YHOldxxs#PPT1,M1

Ellis/Bochner Literature Review

Summary of Main Points and Key Concepts:

• We must open our eyes and ears to the necessity of exposing how the complex contingencies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity are woven into the fabric of concrete, personal lived experiences, championing the cause of reflexive, experimental, autobiographical, and vulnerable texts.
• One of the goals of autoethnography is to enter and document the moment-to-moment, concrete details of a life, as well as to use that life experience to generalize back to a larger group or culture.
• There are several things that hinder good autoethnographies, especially from social scientists:
• They don’t write well enough to carry it off
• They’re not sufficiently introspective about their feelings or motives
• They don’t understand the contradictions they experience
• They have a difficult time with self-questioning
• They have a difficult time confronting things about themselves that are less than flattering
• They can’t be vulnerable
• The original use of the term autoethnography was limited to referring to cultural-level studies by anthropologists of their “own people,” in which the researcher is a full insider by virtue of being “native,” acquiring an intimate familiarity with the group, or achieving full membership in the group being studied.  The term has now evolved in a manner that makes precise definition and application difficult.
• Autoethnographers vary in their emphasis on the research process (graphy), on culture (ethnos), and on self (auto).  Different exemplars of autoethnography fall at different places along the continuum or each of these three axes.
• Narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present.  Stories show us that the meanings and significance of the past are incomplete, tentative, and revisable according to contingencies of our present life circumstances, the present from which we narrate.
• Stories run the risk of distorting the past.  They rearrange, redescribe, invent, omit, and revise.  But that’s okay because a story is not a neutral attempt to mirror the facts of one’s life; it does not seek to recover already constituted meanings.  We should be more concerned with what consequences the story produces rather than historical accuracy

Ideas and Terminology Used:

• Autoethnography: an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural.  Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through An ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations.

•  “Crisis of Confidence” in Social Science:  work in the 1970’s and 1980’s that changed the modernist conception of “author.”  The interpretive space available to the reader was broadened, encouraging multiple perspectives, unsettled meanings, plural voices, and local and illegitimate knowledges that transgress against the claims of a unitary body of theory.
• Systematic Sociological Introspection:  paying attention to ones personal life, physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions.  Using emotional recall to try to understand an experience.  Exploring a particular life to understand a way of life.
• Reflexive Ethnographies:  the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study.  Reflexive ethnographies primarily focus on a culture or subculture, and authors use their own experiences in the culture reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions.
• Native Ethnographies:  researchers who are natives of cultures that have been marginalized or exoticized by others write about and interpret their own cultures for others.
• Complete-Member Researchers:  researchers who explore groups of which they already are members or in which, during the research process, became full members with complete identification and acceptance.
• Radical Empiricism:  the process that includes the ethnographer’s experiences and interaction with other participants as vital parts of what is being studied.
• Narrative Truth:  narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present through stories.

 

Linkages to other class readings:

The Vulnerable Observer touches on a lot of the same points that this article does.  The main point, and most poignant in my opinion, is that the intellectual mission of ethnography is deeply paradoxical: get the “native point of view,” without actually “going native.” The term we like to use is “participant observation” which is an oxymoron in itself.

 

The other point that I find especially intriguing is the idea of getting involved in the observation in an emotional and/or physical way.  When the subject of the research is autoethnography the researcher is naturally involved, but must figure out how to limit or increase his or her involvement in the story.  As The Vulnerable Observer points out, even a researcher who is not doing his or her own story still can become emotionally and/or physically involved if the safety or emotional well-being of the subjects comes into question.

 

Possible class discussion questions or topics:

• Do you have a particular experience in your life that you think would lend itself to autoethnography?  What is this experience, and how would you look at it from both a personal view and an ethnographic view?
• How do you protect against your own biases if you are doing an autoethnography?  Or is it even necessary to worry about such biases?

 

Response

I enjoyed reading this article because I felt like it addressed questions that had come up to me throughout this quarter.  One of my major questions all along was whether an ethnographer needs to be somewhat involved in the culture he or she is researching, or if a member of a culture can give a true view of what is being researched.  The answer is yes, and it may in fact be more profound and more useful to the community (not necessarily the academic community, but to the researcher’s cultural community) as a whole.

I am glad there is a branch of ethnography that acknowledges personal experience and personal insights into a culture as a legitimate resource.  This is the direction I want to go for my final paper.

Quotes to Ponder:

• “Well, that’s clever.  Although you started with the ‘I,’ you quickly fell into using the handbook genre to argue against writing in the handbook genre….Reminds me of how so many of our texts argue in postmodern abstract jargon for greater accessibility and experimental forms.”
• “What good would my research be if it doesn’t help others who are going through this experience, especially my subjects?”

disability discussion from 2 weeks ago

Hey, a short discussion we had 2 weeks ago is still churning around in my mind. The chapter in Jessor that used the example of the deaf community to make an argument for demonstrating that disability can be seen as socially defined didn't seem, in my mind, to preclude application to more severe disabilities. The three models summarized to one word are deficit, difference, and culture. It was suggested in class essentially that the culture model would break down in the cases of severe disability. My personal take is that any disability can still be seen as culturally defined. It seems like the culture model must also recognize “difference.” If there is no “difference” then it seems that disability is an illusion.

The value of the cultural model is that differences understood in cultural terms (through ethnographic research, of course) can more clearly define the lived experience of individuals with disabilities.

If I were to make my own models based on some of these ideas, there would be two, not three. The first would be difference as deficit; the second would be difference as defined by culture. It seems to me that difference is a given, otherwise it reminds me of the old “colorblind” push which tried to pretend that race is an illusion.

I’d love comments on this, but I know the end of the quarter is on us!!!

Cheers,

-Kyle

Creating Educational Field Stations: A Remedy And A Model For Diversity And Access In Higher Education

Hi everyone: Here's the paper / project I was referring to in class yesterday: Creating Educational Field Stations: A Remedy And A Model For Diversity And Access In Higher Education. It is work that is part of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) at UCSD directed by Bud Mehan.

The Wire

Hey everyone... as I was talking in class today about The Wire. I thought I would send a link of an overview about the show. The show is in it's fifth season right now but season four especially examines the life and times of several boys attending an inner city Baltimore middle school.

Its a fascinating and very creative and character driven show... check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series)

According to the The Wire website on HBO:
"The first season of 'The Wire' (2002) concentrated on the often-futile efforts of police to infiltrate a West Baltimore drug ring headed by Avon Barksdale and his lieutenant, Stringer Bell. In Seasons Two and Three, as the Barksdale investigation escalated, new storylines involving pressures on the working class and the city's political leadership were introduced. Season Four focused on the stories of several young boys in the public school system, struggling with problems at home and the lure of the corner - set against the rise of a new drug empire in West Baltimore and a new Mayor in City Hall...the fifth and final season of 'The Wire' centers on the media's role in addressing - or failing to address - the fundamental political, economic and social realities depicted over the course of the series, while also resolving storylines of the numerous characters woven throughout the narrative arc of the show."

http://www.hbo.com/thewire/

Seasons 1-4 are available on DVD at most any video store!

What the F**%

Got your attention!

As I read the Katz article I am struck by the stresses he puts on Warranting what we do as ethnographers. I wonder if it is sometimes that our view that something is warranted may not be that way by others or even more telling by the group? Who would you use to guide your warrants to research something? 

John

Burton Reading Question

- How would you develop a research model that would adress some of the issues that this chapter raises

- Given what we know and how long we have know it why does the problem persist?

- Does this and other ethnographies (Macleod, Sullivan) work give us a problem but leaves the social change to the "system" that perpetuates the problem?

- How do we use Ethnographic research to force change? 

Thoughts on Reading for Week 8

I realized I never finished my thoughts/posting from last week's readings, so here are some of my ideas about the articles "Ethnographic Insights on Social Contect and Adolescent Development among Inner-City African-American Teens" (Linda Burton et al) and "For Whom? Qualitative Reserach, Representations, and Social Responsibilities" (Michelle Fine et al):

1. I really appreciated Burton's discussion of the inadequacies of a "normative development" framework ... in much of the social science research I've come across, there does seem to be a "right" way and a "wrong" way to develop as human beings; this article has helped me clarify (and give vioce to) some of the discomfort I've had in the past with analyzing individuals within a "normative framework" -

2. I also thought it interesting, however, that Burton et al seemed to define inner city African American development in relation to "normative development - for example, suggesting that because many inner city teens seem to have "adult" experiences early (ie: pregnancy and parenting), they may be skipping adolescence and moving right into adulthood... however, I'm wondering if, eventhough thay are not having a "normative" adolescence, they are still going through some undefined stages of development that preface full-fledged adulthood (I'm thinking in particular of a group of teenage African American inner city teens with whom I worked - I was often struck by the juxtaposition of their ability to responsibly care for their children and their habit of sucking their own thumbs when they got stuck on a math problem....)


3. Lastly, I thought reading Burton et al's article with Fine at al's article was very powerful - although I realize that the authors of "Development among Inner-City Teens..." were trying to make particular points with their descriptions of individuals and choices of interviews to include, I thought these often sounded like 'sound-bites" from a news report...(ie: "....teens who are struggling to survive in challenging environments” (Buton et al, p.405)...in just discussing the extremes in teens' lives, are the authors recognizing all the parts that - according to Fine at al - "constitute much of life in poverty" ?

“…these mundane rituals of daily living – obviously made much more difficult in the presence of poverty and discrimintion, but mundane nonetheless – are typically left out of ethnographic descriptions of life in poverty. They don't make very good reading, and yet they are the stuff of daily life. We recognize how careful we need to be so that we do not construct life narratives spiked only with hot spots" (Fine et al, p.118)." (Fine at al, p.118)

Looking forward to our discussion of these pieces this afternoon.

-Sasha

What is the purpose of ethnography – Are we guessing what people do?

I think I’ve mentioned this a few times in the class, but I’m often afraid that my understanding of American culture (including race, ethnicity, gender, class, etc., since those are very different from Japanese ones). After I read Becker’s article, I started thinking, “what if I’m merely guessing what American culture is, and what if I’m guessing wrong?”

As Becker says, some “descriptions of drug use are pure fantasy on the part of the researchers who publish them” (p. 59). Another example he mentions in his article was that college students looked at letter carriers from a “stratification point of view” (p.63) which is far from what the letter carriers opinion about their preference for towns they work. Considering these two examples, do you think we tend to fantasize what we want to see as researchers?

I have been reading about the Naturalistic Inquiry, which I already mentioned it in the previous blog post. I had a chance to read more about it last week and I would like to share how the Naturalistic inquirers see qualitative research methodology and how they ensure the credibility of such research outcomes. Researchers, Lincoln & Guba (1985) and Wolf & Tymitz (1979) talk about the trustworthiness/dependability of qualitative methods in their articles. Especially, Lincoln and Guba (1985) use four categories: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability.

Here are the descriptions of the categories:

• Credibility: The credibility standard requires a naturalistic study to be believable to critical and to be approved by the persons who provided the information gathered during the study. The credibility of the NI can be tested by prolonged engagement, persistent observation, triangulation, peer debriefing, negative case analysis, progressive subjectivity checks, and member checking (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

• Transferability: This criterion refers to the applicability of findings in one context to other contexts or settings. The target context must be compared to the research context to identify similarities. The transferability analysis is facilitated by clear descriptions of the time and context in which working hypotheses are developed by the naturalistic inquirer (e.g. Thick description by C. Geertz).

• Dependability: A researcher looks to see if the researcher has been careless or made mistakes in conceptualizations the study, collecting the data, interpreting the finding and reporting results. A major technique for assessing dependability is the dependability audit in which an independent auditor reviews the activities of the researcher (as recorded in an audit trail in fieldnotes, archives, and reports) to see how well the techniques for meeting the credibility and transferability standards have been followed.

• Confirmability: It refers to the quality of the results produced by an inquiry in terms of how well they are supported by informants who are involved in the study and by events that are independent of the inquirer. Reference to literature and findings by other authors can strengthen confirmability of the study as well as information and interpretation by people other than inquirer from the research site itself. The comfirmability audit is a way to as if the data and interpretations made by the inquirer are supported by material in the audit trail, are internally coherent, and represent more than “figments of the inquirer’s imagination” (Lincoln & Guba, 1989).

In the Credibility part, Lincoln & Guba mentioned the importance of member checking: data collected during the research are reviewed by the participants and members who provided the data. I’m sure some people do not like to share the data with the participants, but I think this is better than guessing without confidence or guessing wrong. Becker touched on this issued at the end of his article and this is something that we, researchers, need to think about. I think that we should not interpret or infer what we research. Rather, I think that we need to leave our data open-ended and let the readers interpret in their ways.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/katz/

I checked out Jack Katz's webpage, and found he has drafts of some of his work-in-progress posted under journal articles. While I found this intriguing on its own, I found the "Underground Ethnographers" article of potential practical use.

Becker's points about distinguishing between quantitative and qualitative practies seem straightforward, the 2nd being about the quantity of data collected, and the first, and one I think would be useful for us to discuss in more depth in class, the notion of unit of analysis at which research is describing social characteristics and practices. While Becker suggests we shouldn't give up talking about "variables", abstract and discreet characterizations of people and practices, altogether, his desciption of the distinct practice of qualitative work is strong, "fieldwork makes you aware of the constructed character of "variables"" (p. 56).

I helped with the Brain Awareness Week event yesterday, for which a number of hundreds of kids from area schools came to the HUB to learn about the brain and learning. It was so fun to talk with kids, and teachers and parents, about learning and research on learning. Afterward,
one of the neuroscience grad students I was chatting with talked about a learning sciences in education conference where the motto was "Learning Sciences: Keeping Learning Complex". The group, quanitative experimentalists to the core, thought that sounded ridiculous. "Like, confuse kids more than they already are?" Then we talked about the "construction" of learning in schools, in terms of over-simplifying curricula, born largely out of over-simplified assessment mandates, and their notions of making thinking and learning complex seemed better situated in the realities of young learners. They seemed to like the idea of getting, specifically, very strategic about how to make kids' learning more complex, pretty much in the same sorts of "long, wide, and deep" sorts of learning principles that Phil suggested the LIFE Center is working toward. The point, I think, is that these grad students' perspective on learning was pretty narrowly focused in one sort of learning orientation, until they engaged in a discourse about alternative, or ground-level in a sense, epistemologies of research on learning.

Fine, Weis, Weseen, & Wong

Holly Kenan
Feb. 26, 2008
EDPSY582
Fine, Weis, Weseen, & Wong
Response
In general I agree with these authors, but was a little uncomfortable with the strong language about Right Wing white men, and the strong emphasis on conservative politics using research data against the people it was meant to help. Though I personally tend to be fairly liberal, the sweeping generalizations that cause problems for the very people they are researching are being utilized. This feels like a double standard to me, though I’m sure their experience has justified their fears on this topic.
I am also very excited about the use of social construction as a model to look at oppression. I find it a useful way to frame social injustice, as it allows for problems to be identified outside of the oppressed, and then leaves them available for improvement.
Main Points
Summarizes the book “The Unknown City”, which is an ethnography of urban poor and working class people, who make up a group of people who are unknown, unheard, and blamed for the ills of society.
Purpose of research was to examine commonalities among Americans and the fractured nature of US society, focusing on low-income people, and placing their voices at the center of national debates about social policy rather than at the margin.
Class-based story is still delineated through lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Very different stories coming from people in the same working class but different race, ethnicity, and gender. This complicates defining a specific community.
Trying to define someone to fit into a certain category is very complex, and the lines move. The roots of the idea of race are inherently racist. Though race is a social construction, it is so deeply confounded with racism that it bears enormous power in people’s lives and communities.
Though many argued that race shouldn’t make a difference, the narratives of the people in the study were given in such a way that it would be obvious to the reader, which racial group the informant identified with. In addition, in looking for a sample of “equally poor” or “equally working class” people among different racial groups the spread and depth of poverty among white people was nowhere near as severe in as the African American sample.
Informed consent form, though a procedural requirement, was just a form the respondents would sign without reading in order to move on with the interview. It also highlighted the differences between the researchers and the respondents. Everything that comprises the live of an individual represents just another data set to the researcher. However, informants also took advantage of the situation, knowing the researchers had access to policy makers and the public in ways they did not. “We traded on class and race privilege to get a couternarrative out.”
Ethical considerations: To ignore information about drug use and other illegal activities is to den the effects of poverty, racism, and abuse. But to report these stories is to risk their more likely misuse, all the while not studying the tax evasion, drug use, and neglect of children perpetrated by elites. Researchers are compared to voyeurs.
There are many challenges associated with presenting data in a way that is not taken for granted, that doesn’t romanticize the situation of the respondents, and is not taken advantage of in a way that further compromises the quality of the lives of the people involved in the study. This research left out some data on the premise that it would reinforce oppressive beliefs and attitudes that are already so strongly entrenched in our society.
Researchers also need to make sure not to just highlight that which is dramatic. Even though day to day getting by does not necessarily make for exciting reading, it is still an important component of life that should be included in a representation of someone’s life.
Different methodologies are likely to illuminate different versions of people’s understanding of various aspects of their lives. Using multiple methods for “triangulation” in qualitative data analysis serves the function of seeing the same scenario from different angles and increasing the depth of understanding. In quantitative research, the purpose is to ensure validity.
There was a trend in the research to contextualize voices differently, based on who was talking. For example, working class white women were presented on their own terms, while traditional (probably middle to upper middle class) white men were framed very negatively. Is this a double standard that should be remedied or is it just a way to create space to hear from those who have had very little voice?
The role of critical ethnographers is important in identifying who they are and what biases they may bring to their research. This blends into a sense of responsibility in improving the situation for the populations represented in their research through involvement in policy reform and work in the local communities. A distinct movement from science to advocacy.
There is debate on characterizing oppressed people as victimized and damaged, compared to resilient and strong. Must it be one or the other?

Questions to ask yourself as a researcher:
· Have I connected the voices and stories of individuals back to the setting in which they are situated?
· Have I developed multiple methods?
· Have I described the mundane?
· Have some of the informants reviewed my materials and been given a chance to dissent or challenge it?
· How far do I want to go on theorizing the words of informants?
· Have I considered how my data may be used to benefit repressive policies?
· Where is my authority behind narrations of the informants?
· Am I afraid of anyone seeing these analyses?
· Am I over or underplaying any important factors?
· To what degree has my analyses offered an alternative to the dominant discourse, and what challenges might be presented?
Final words recommending writing across genres when possible, even though this may be challenging in light of requirements by research institutions.
Key Concepts & Terminology
Reflexivity: “. . . the tendency for the self-absorbed Self to lose sight altogether of the culturally different Other.”

Race: “. . . both a floating unstable fiction and a fundamental unerasable aspect of biography and social experience.”

“Great Stories”: Allegories that shed light on both the level and content and the implications of that content.
Linkages to Other Readings
With the multiple references to policy and use of data for various agendas, this article reminds me most of another article for this week from McDermott. It’s the parallel with the social construction model that I see so strongly, both having such a huge influence on maintaining oppressive circumstances for people who are devalued in our society.
Discussion Questions
How do we address issues with race in the context of a race-bound audience?
How do we use a category in a generalized manner, and also address the complexities involved?
Can we use a generalized category like race, without (re)inscribing its fixed, essentialist positionality?
How do you ethically deal with information about “bad stories” (i.e. mothers willing to get beaten by the fathers of their children if it means they can get some money for child support)?
What are the best ways to present data so that it is not misused in ways to create more problems?
What are the specific experiences of people that keep them from being able to break out of cycles of generational poverty?
Is it ethical to intentionally leave out important parts of the data based on the researcher’s opinions about links with oppression? Is it possible to do a thorough analysis if all of the information is not presented?
Additional Readings
Constructions of Disabilit,y by Claire Tregaskis. This is the book I’m reviewing next week, and is an ethnography that goes into great detail about the social construction model, though it is focused on disabilities rather than racism. The same theories apply, and there is also a parallel concern by the researcher of research data being used for someone else’s purposes

Definitions?

Reading Response – Blog Post Week 9

As I was about to write up my reading response for this week’s readings, I read Melissa's post and realized I was about to write the very same thing.

So, I decided to do something a bit different. I tried a small, very unscientific experiment with Google to see what comes up first when you look up ethnography, visual ethnography, and critical ethnography. I am interested because there is so much information and interpretation out there, I am curious what are the top sites people are visiting to learn about these ideas and definitions, and how the content of those sites might relate or not relate to what we've been reading in class thus far.

Ethnography - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography
The first link here leads us to the wikipedia entry. "Ethnography (ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline."

Needless to say, this would not be my definition, although when I try to come up with a definition I struggle to create one that I like. What are some of your definitions? Is ethnography definable or is its constantly changing and evolving due to its use in contexts that make it too hard to define?

Visual Ethnography - http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Visual-Ethnography-Representation-Research/dp/0761960546
The first link leads us to a book available on Amazon.com about how to do visual ethnography. The editorial review states, "Doing Visual Ethnography explores the use and potential of photography, video, and hypermedia in ethnographic and social research. It offers a reflexive approach to theoretical, methodological, practical and ethical issues of using these media `in the field' and `in the academy'. The book follows the research process from project design planning and implementing and practicing fieldwork to analysis and representation suggesting how visual images and technologies can be combined to form an integrated process throughout the different stages of research."

Interesting, but there was hardly a definition to be found unless you search a bit. But this book seems like something we might want to check out.

Critical Ethnography -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Ethnography Critical Ethnography: “According to Thomas (2003), critical ethnography is not a theory but a perspective through which a qualitative researcher can frame questions and promote action. Its purpose is emancipation of cultural members from ideologies that are not to their benefit and not of their creation--an important concept in critical theory. Because critical ethnography is borne out of the theoretical underpinnings of critical theory, it is premised upon the assumption that cultural institutions can produce a false consciousness in which power and oppression become taken-for-granted ‘realities’ or ideologies. In this way, critical ethnography goes beyond a description of the culture to action for change, by challenging the false consciousness and ideologies exposed through the research.”

What does everyone think about this definition? I think this fits more closely with what I think than the ethnography definition above, but again this definition still seems limiting. How would you define critical ethnography? How does the ability for anyone to define something on sites like Wikipedia make you feel, given what we have read and given than a lot of the definitions we have found do not seem to fit?

Therese

Balancing researcher's inference and member's meanings

Earlier in the quarter we spent a week or two on the idea of pursuing member's meanings and recently we've read a bit about the idea of using ethnographic writing as a way of expressing ideas in participant's own voices. This week our readings addressed an issue that I'm dealing with in my own research -- how much (or little) can a researcher infer about member's meanings?

In particular, Katz's article "From how to why ..." struck a chord with me because it made explicit a feature of ethnographic writing that has been puzzling me for years. Generally we hear about ethnography as being descriptive -- telling us what people are doing and saying and maybe telling us how some aspect of social activity progresses. Rarely do ethnography methods texts delve into the idea of ethnographic research offering explanations -- telling why people are doing/saying whatever it is that they are doing/saying. However, when I read book-length ethnographies I see numerous ways in which the author is making the transition from description to explanation.

This week Becker warns us not to do too much inferring and challenges us to try to stick with what participants are really saying and doing, but at the same time Katz tells us that ethnographers do, in fact, make inferences from their data and those inferences are often attempts to craft explanations. My puzzle at this point is how to find a balance between two things that seem paradoxical to me. How do I craft explanations based on inferences without overstepping myself, and how do I make sure that I am representing member's meanings when, as Katz points out, the members themselves may not be able to fully explain their own words or actions?

~~Melissa