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Lived Research Experiences: Ethnography across Disciplines

Online Workshop

 

Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FAH)

University of Southampton

 

Date: 24 May 2021

Time: 11-12.30

THIS EVENT HAS FINISHED

The Debating Ethnography Research Group in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities invites all UoS staff and PG students who use ethnography to the Lived Research Experiences: Ethnography across Disciplines Online Workshop on 24 May 2021.

 

This event aims to provide a forum for discussion about the meaning and value of ethnography in and across disciplines and to encourage networking and future research collaborations.

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RATIONALE

 

Ethnography has become one of the most popular research tools used by academics from across different disciplines. For anthropologists, ethnography remains strongly connected to professional identity and is deeply rooted in cultural and social anthropological theories. However, it is understood and applied in a wide variety of ways, which sometimes challenge what anthropologists recognise as its core elements. However, what adepts of ethnography mostly have in common is an interest in putting people back at the centre of the study of social life. Its methodological promise to produce a ‘bottom-up’ people-based,  context-sensitive understanding of society, culture and politics has made ethnography attractive within recent trends in research that are ‘problem-driven’, ‘impact-generating’ or ‘policy-driven’. These have produced a new flowering of both interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, often associated with the view that analysing ‘real world challenges’ needs more than the tools of one discipline. Ironically, as the appeal of ethnography has grown, the funding and employment pressures that most university-based researchers face, constrain their opportunities for actually doing ethnographic work. 

 

We invite staff and PG students to share their reflections on one or more of the following questions: 

  • Why do we need ethnography?

  • How does my research benefit from ethnography? 

  • Is ethnography simply a ‘method’ or do you associate specific methodological, theoretical, ethical or political values and commitments with ethnography?  

  • Does ethnography enable new interdisciplinary possibilities?          

  • Does ethnography change your discipline or is your discipline changing ethnography?

  • What is the place of a slow immersive method in the fast-paced ‘policy impact’- driven world that is re-shaping the academic habitus? 

  • How does ethnographic work get done in highly pressurised university work environments?                                                                     

  • Can ethnographic approaches be central to a critical social analysis?  

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