Ethnographic Stories as Generalizations that Intervene

Sweden. Her upcoming dissertation investigates entwinements of knowledge production and cultural expressions in contemporary evidence based biomedicine.

Engaging science, technology, and society, 2024

This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship-matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces-to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods-member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing-make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience. CARRIGAN et al.

Memoriamedia, 2020

Figure 1: Ethnographic narratives are based on personal experiences [book in the photo: Malinowski, 1922] © Eino Heikkilä Ethnography is not just a literary description of a social group or culture, it's also writing about the researcher him/herself. In this article an ethnographer as a storyteller refers to a point of view, where the researcher as the narrator of an ethnography tells an informative, evocative story of his/her fieldwork and the dialogue between him/her and research subjects. Analysing ethnography as a written narrative indicates that researcher's roles as the author and narrator of the text should be taken into account when evaluating ethnographic knowledge in our time.

Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society

In a recent article published in a Colombian Journal, Cristóbal Bonelli invites us to "build on the ontological interest of ANT regarding the 'politics of things' by developing the politics of 'where'" 1 (2016, 24). It involves producing a conceptual space allowing the features of ethnographic materials to establish the conceptual terms used to ethnographically describe them. He draws on Annemarie Mol's invitation to rethink politics, as usual, concerned with who can speak and act. Mol and Bonelli encourage to redirect our attention towards what is enacted in every specific context of practice. Thereby, for Mol, politics is open to things in the process of its emerging existence. Bonelli elaborates this distinction for the case of concepts by avoiding the usual differentiation between meanings and materiality. Concepts, inasmuch as empirical objects of the world, are the outcome of the onto-epistemic practices that produce them. Hence, it is plausible to revisit their politics, not only regarding "who" and "what," but also by reflecting on "where." The article offered by Bonelli speaks, in its own way, to the provocations of several scholars about the need to "provincialize" STS concepts. According to Law and Lin (2015), it is necessary to exert a "postcolonial symmetry" given that STS is a "critter gestated in Euro America" to an important extent. There, at the very center of our disciplines, several entities emerge apparently without a place. Some of those entities include "boundary objects," "multiple realities," "sociomaterial networks," "coproductions," or "nature-culture hybrids." Whenever we use our STS lens, we often overlook how things, including concepts, emerge somewhere, and how every new location transforms those curious entities. The question about what a concept can make is importantly related to the location of its production and circulation. Consequently, its location should be included in our consideration of any concept at the core of our research from our own locations. Bonelli puts forward a reflection that echoes the famous quote: "it matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what knowledges know knowledges; it matters what relations relate relations; it matters what worlds world worlds" (Haraway 2016). "It matters" then, not only in the sense of what but also where. Indeed, we might argue that the ideas, knowledge and relations that we often use are also the outcomes of their localities of production. Such localities are most of the times overlooked precisely

Duke University Press eBooks, 2014

We issued a call for articles on the question of "Why ethnography?" based on our belief that everyone associated with ethnography's various forms ought to have something to say. This could include the communication scholar in the thick of fieldwork, the sociologist who chose ethnography as a method for her thesis, the philosopher investigating the relationship between ethnography and aesthetics, the artist who, using digital techniques, is searching for a novel ethnographic narrative, or an anthropology preparing to give a lecture on ethnography. We now present the Moment Journal under the theme of "ethnography", with range of voices as wide as we predicted in our call for papers.

2014

Context holds a significant place mediating the conceptual and the empirical in ethnography. This modality of knowledge has also become a significant part of science and technology studies since the rise of laboratory studies. However, conventional modes of contextualization that locate the object of study within a whole—such as within a society or culture—have become a target of suspicion and criticism since the 1980s. This led to the radical alteration of the contextualizing strategies of actor–network theory (ANT) and multisited ethnography. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern is also responding to this crisis by renovating the practice of ethnography in a way significantly different from both strategies. Since contextualization occupies a significant place in the formation of ethnography as a representation of a larger ‘‘out there’’ reality, her alternative contextualization requires a new characterization of ethnography other than representation. This article tries to expound the complicated, and often perplexing, ethnography of Strathern by making an analogy with objects familiar to most science, technology, and society scholars, namely, machines. By doing so, this article argues that Strathern is opening up a new way of dealing with context that is radically different both from ANT and from multisited ethnography.

I am very honoured to be appointed professor in these two topics: Techno anthropology - a new education -- and in STS -- a fairly young research field. But this is also a fairly challenging appointment, since both techno anthropology and STS are relatively unknown and rather incomprehensible to the general public. In fact, a consultant from the Danish Federation of Industries recently declared that their member companies would almost certainly not want candidates with new strange combinations such as techno anthropology. The companies, she claimed, would prefer well--established educations such as lawyers, engineers and economists.

Springer Nature Singapore. 2019 C. Matus (ed.), Ethnography and Education Policy, Education Policy & Social Inequality 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8445-5_2, 2019

The critical self-description of the researcher’s position is key to understanding how knowledge is constructed from the field to fuel fieldwork and knowledge communications. We specifically discuss the production conditions of ethnographic writing, focusing on theways in which images of the field that the researchers elaborate by means of notes, descriptions, pictures, videos, and narratives, are generated and transformed in the context of the folding and unfolding of the fieldwork, and particularly through the intertwinement of writing and reading. Drawing on the comparison with cinematographic composition of moving images, we argue that the position of the researcher is not reduced to the abstract point of view entailed by any image, a particular view, or selective angle of the field, but is part of a technical assemblage of operations, such as framing, cutting fieldwork into fragments, juxtaposition of these fragments, and projection of a continuous movement of the field. From the disposition involved in ethnographic field notes, to the composition of an ethnography, we stress how the place of the researcher is crossed by the technical and the aesthetical. We discuss methodological and epistemological implications concerning the role that reading ethnographic texts plays across the assemblage of ethnographic writing. We argue that the critical account of this intermediate place of the researchers has the potential to displace and suspend the problems of both the representation of reality and the authorship and authority of ethnographic knowledge, thus projecting the fieldwork to increasingly wider and open distancing positions that enable analysis, criticism, and thinking.

Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 2014

In this autobiographical essay, I remember choosing to become an anthropologist because I wanted to explore "other worlds". I discuss what the notion of "other worlds" means to various disciplines , and why I came to the conclusion that the best way to explore such worlds was through ethno-graphic fieldwork. I address some of the criticisms of fieldwork, recount my experiences of "other worlds" while conducting fieldwork in India over several decades, and conclude with a few reflections about how all of this might relate to current discussions about the "ontological turn" in anthropology.

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

The theme for this special issue, which examines the transdisciplinary travels of ethnography at the intersections of anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, performance studies, sport and physical culture studies, as well as theology, emerged from a roundtable panel co-convened by -Champaign. This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies offers a unique opportunity to enter into a cross-disciplinary dialogue by opening this discussion to an international community of qualitative researchers whose work engages with ethnography. In recent years, the transdisciplinary romance with ethnography has become an urgent topic of concern vehemently debated among social sciences and humanities scholars in informal conversations and graduate seminars. Responses to this romance have varied, ranging from an outright scepticism and criticism to initiating conversations and ethnographic collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. Notwithstanding, thus far no special issues or edited volumes have taken up the question of what is at stake for researchers employing ethnography within, as well as across, disciplinary formations sanctioned by the neoliberal university. This issue addresses this publication gap by asking: What is lost and gained when ethnography "travels" across disciplines? How can ethnography's transdisciplinary travels contribute to how we might conceptualize, reimagine, and practice ethnography today and in the 2 years to come? What does it mean for ethnography to "travel" within a competitive and profitdriven neoliberal academia, where the pursuit of knowledge is no longer seen as a public good and an end in and of itself? While many anthropologists and ethnographers in cognate disciplines have been critical of the pursuit of knowledge detached from real-life concerns and social problems, and have, instead, practiced socially engaged and interventionist research that benefits the people with whom they work, the utilitarian notions of knowledge under the neoliberal academic regime represent something quite different entirely. As Kazubowski-Houston (see this special issue, p…) asserts, the language of social justice and activism has been coopted by the neoliberal academia to disparage the notions of knowledge for knowledge's sake in order to advance its entrepreneurial goals and agendas. Also, as prominent anthropologist Paul Stoller notes in his recent Huffington Post blog, ethnography has come under attack from other scholars, most frequently from legal and quantitative researchers. Its plausibility, accuracy, and honesty are questioned and contrasted with the rigour and verifiability of "scientific" methods (Stoller, 2019, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stoller/in-defense-of-ethnography_b_8028542.html).