The Ethnographer's Craft

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork and workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, oral history, multi-modal and virtual ethnographic methods; as well as debates over research ethics and regulatory ethics. Students will build skills to design and conduct ethnographic research projects, while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research methods to help them understand and engage with the world.