ERM notities powerpoints
Week 1. Tuesday 4 April 2023
What is ethnography?
Trademark of anthropology
“Ethnography pays attention to people’s feelings and emotions, their experiences and
their free choices, but also to the wider constraints and opportunities that frame their
agency”
- Method of hearing, reflecting
How to find a research topic?
- what can we research: people, emotions, rituals, contexts, attitudes, experiences…
- But also non-human actors: rivers, corporations, supply chain, forests and
mushrooms
How ethnography is different from journalism?
- Ethnography is YOU (the researcher): engagement with people, their lives, emotions,
practices, pains
- Not about finding and checking facts
- Ethnography is a relationship
- You do not look for the objective, but you try to understand how subject you are
working with is socially and politically positioned
Moving from theme to the research design
Sampling and mapping
- what? Where? How?
- What is known on this? What is not known?
- Why me? (How are you positioned)
- What is your field? How do you define your field?
Sampling: selection of units for observation
How do we enter the field? (Rolls)
- Guarantors
- Gatekeepers
- Brokers
Ethics
From> minimizing risks for you and participants
To< political and social responsibility and ethical relationships (of all actors involved:
anthropologists, institutions, collaborator, brokers, funders, organizations
governments)
What does decolonizing ethics of fieldwork can mean?
- decenter knowledge
- Unlearn in order to learn
- Include a multiplicity of voices/styles of research and writing
- Self-reflect on how we position ourselves
- Not only imagining or critiquing but doing science differently
Colonization: It is a way of thinking
, Checklist and principles
- honesty and scrupulousness
- Realiability
- Verifiability
- Impartiality
- Independence
- Responsibility
How to practice caring, reflective, de colonial, collaborative ethnography?
- co-design, co-publish, co-write
- Support those who needed
- If you have space and platform, share it
- Reflect and listen, don’t assume
- Speak up
- Question practices, approaches, theories
Week 2. Friday 14 April 2023
Interviews as part of ethnography (Rubin and Rubin):
- Participant observation focuses more on listening, observing, letting be
- interviews focus more on asking questions and structuring
- Focus on language/ soundscapes
- Part of triangulation (Skinner)
- Begin before the conversation and end long after
Qualitative interviews, what’s the use?
- find out what people do, think, feel (triangulation)
- Discover what lays beyond the surface and requires explanations
- Understand experiences
- Reconstruct events
What can you do with it?
- describe the particular and the personal
- Describe social and political events/change (the why and how)
- Make one group more understandable to another
- Fill in blanks or blind spots (historical, political, social, legal)
- Examine multiple sides of an issue
- Influence praxis, politics, policy
A qualitative interview (rubin & rubin) is
- a conversation in which a researcher gently guides a conversational partner in an
extended discussion
- Naturalistic, interpretative philosophy
- Extensions of ordinary conversations
- Interviewees are partners not subjects to be tested or examined
- The vary in style, depths and structure
During qualitative interviews
- researchers listen to each answer and determine the next question based on what
was said
Week 1. Tuesday 4 April 2023
What is ethnography?
Trademark of anthropology
“Ethnography pays attention to people’s feelings and emotions, their experiences and
their free choices, but also to the wider constraints and opportunities that frame their
agency”
- Method of hearing, reflecting
How to find a research topic?
- what can we research: people, emotions, rituals, contexts, attitudes, experiences…
- But also non-human actors: rivers, corporations, supply chain, forests and
mushrooms
How ethnography is different from journalism?
- Ethnography is YOU (the researcher): engagement with people, their lives, emotions,
practices, pains
- Not about finding and checking facts
- Ethnography is a relationship
- You do not look for the objective, but you try to understand how subject you are
working with is socially and politically positioned
Moving from theme to the research design
Sampling and mapping
- what? Where? How?
- What is known on this? What is not known?
- Why me? (How are you positioned)
- What is your field? How do you define your field?
Sampling: selection of units for observation
How do we enter the field? (Rolls)
- Guarantors
- Gatekeepers
- Brokers
Ethics
From> minimizing risks for you and participants
To< political and social responsibility and ethical relationships (of all actors involved:
anthropologists, institutions, collaborator, brokers, funders, organizations
governments)
What does decolonizing ethics of fieldwork can mean?
- decenter knowledge
- Unlearn in order to learn
- Include a multiplicity of voices/styles of research and writing
- Self-reflect on how we position ourselves
- Not only imagining or critiquing but doing science differently
Colonization: It is a way of thinking
, Checklist and principles
- honesty and scrupulousness
- Realiability
- Verifiability
- Impartiality
- Independence
- Responsibility
How to practice caring, reflective, de colonial, collaborative ethnography?
- co-design, co-publish, co-write
- Support those who needed
- If you have space and platform, share it
- Reflect and listen, don’t assume
- Speak up
- Question practices, approaches, theories
Week 2. Friday 14 April 2023
Interviews as part of ethnography (Rubin and Rubin):
- Participant observation focuses more on listening, observing, letting be
- interviews focus more on asking questions and structuring
- Focus on language/ soundscapes
- Part of triangulation (Skinner)
- Begin before the conversation and end long after
Qualitative interviews, what’s the use?
- find out what people do, think, feel (triangulation)
- Discover what lays beyond the surface and requires explanations
- Understand experiences
- Reconstruct events
What can you do with it?
- describe the particular and the personal
- Describe social and political events/change (the why and how)
- Make one group more understandable to another
- Fill in blanks or blind spots (historical, political, social, legal)
- Examine multiple sides of an issue
- Influence praxis, politics, policy
A qualitative interview (rubin & rubin) is
- a conversation in which a researcher gently guides a conversational partner in an
extended discussion
- Naturalistic, interpretative philosophy
- Extensions of ordinary conversations
- Interviewees are partners not subjects to be tested or examined
- The vary in style, depths and structure
During qualitative interviews
- researchers listen to each answer and determine the next question based on what
was said
