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This course is designed to introduce students to ethnographic methods with a particular emphasis on the issues at the center of the new graduate concentration, Agency, Transformations and the Politics of Everyday Life. This concentration links attention to everyday life to analyses of larger structural forces that shape life in the contemporary world. The course deals with ethnographic approaches to recording and analyzing social and communicative events and practices. It emphasizes hands-on activities within theoretical frameworks that consider language and other social and cultural practices.
Requirements:
Student-initiated fieldwork in community settings in Los Angeles. Letter grading, weekly assignments, classroom presentations. Students must find a field site by week 2 at the latest.
Class presentations: Because of time constraints, not everyone will be able to present each assignment, but we will rotate who presents each week. All assignments must be emailed to everyone in class and to both instructors by noon on Monday preceding the class for which they are due. Students should print out copies to bring to class.
Required books:
- Emerson, Fretz and Shaw: Writing Fieldnotes.
- Barbash, Ilisa and Lucien Taylor. Cross-cultural filmmaking: A Handbook for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos.
- Course reader available at Course Reader Materials, 1141 Westwood Blvd. phone: 443-3303.
Week 1.
- Introduction: discussion of student research interests and their transformation into research questions. Identification of appropriate field sites in Los Angeles.
- In-class exercise: Inscriptions/epistemology: Observing music
- Assignment I: Observational exercise: students should pair up and choose a brief activity that they both observe. Each student should write independent fieldnotes. Compare fieldnotes and write a brief discussion of the similarities and differences, how you might account for them, and what you learn from putting the two accounts together (250 words). Email in your assignment, which consists of 2 full sets of fieldnotes and a jointly constructed 1 page analysis.
- Reading: Reuben A. Buford May and Mary Pattillo-McCoy 2000 "Do You See What I See? Examining a Collaborative Ethnography." Qualitative Inquiry 6.1: 65-87.
Week 2: Human subjects
- Presentation of observation exercise; Steven Peckman: guest speaker on human subjects
- Assignment 2: Do the online human subjects certification, and download and draft a consent form for your research community and question.
Week 3: Entering Community
- Discussion of consent form exercise; Issues around entry
- Assignment 3: Go to the community in which you want to work and write fieldnotes of what you did to "enter." From your notes write a 500 word account of what you did, saw, what happened.
- Reading: Abu-Lughod: "Guest and Daughter"; Dorine Kondo: "Introduction" to Crafting Selves; Emerson, Fretz, Shaw: 35-107.
Week 4: Entering Community (part 2): Power and Privilege
- Discuss Assignment 3
- Conspicuous exercise: A team project: go somewhere in the area of your field site where you feel conspicuous with someone who [more] is an insider/expert as explained in the handout. Write 500 words explaining how you felt and what produced those feelings.
- Reading: Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege"; Patricia Zavella: "Reflections on Diversity among Chicanas", in Gregory and Sanjek, Race.
Week 5: Introduction to visual documentation
- Presentation of entry and power
- Introduction to maps and using video cameras for ethnography (including transfer from digital tape to VHS)
- Assignment 5: Do a map and take establishing shots of fieldsite: 1. map your fieldsite and put it on an overhead. Take establishing shots of fieldsite as defined in handout. Write 500 words comparing the map and the establishing shots.
- Reading: Barbash, Ilisa and Lucien Taylor 1997: Cross-/cultural filmmaking: A Hbk for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos; chs. 3 (pictures) and 4 (sound).
Week 6: Activity and event analysis
- Presentation of maps and establishing shots
- Introduction to activities and events: Boundaries and transitions.
- Assignment 6: Go back to the community and videotape activity you already observed. Start before the activity starts and end taping after activity ends. Identify beginning and end on tape; cue your tape to point you identify as beginning of the activity.
- Reading: Barbara Meyerhoff "Life Not Death in Venice," and following article, in Meyerhoff, Remembered Lives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1992; Duranti: "Sociocultural Dimensions of Discourse."
Week 7: Organization of Events, Activities
- Student presentation of activity beginning
- Structure of events and their relationship to social organization
- Assignment 7: Examine whole tape and describe structure and organization of event, types of participants (recall your maps and establishing shots) (250 words) Prepare overhead representing the relationship between the organization of event and the roles of the participants. Write 250 words on what you can infer about larger social structures from this.
- Reading: Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology, Ch.9 and TBA
Week 8: Point of View: Videotaped Interview
- Students presentation on event and activities.
- Point of view, "reality," and interviews of participants
- Assignment 8: Develop questions and interview on videotape one participant in the event you filmed (email us the questions before you go) Prepare an overhead summarizing your impressions of the similarities and differences in their and your accounts.
Week 9: Transcribing interview
- Presentation of interview findings
- Transcription and types of interviews while using the video camera
- Assignment 9: Select and transcribe 5 minutes of the video interview you did last week. Use your transcriptions to enhance or revise your original impressions.
Week 10: Presentations (Everyone presents)
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