Ethnographic Engagements

In Ethnographic Engagements: Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange Delamont and Atkinson, each with over 40 years of experience as ethnographers, present strategies for designing, conducting and publishing research that contributes original insights. Ethnography is a core qualitative research method, widely used across the social sciences. However, producing good, interesting and thought-provoking ethnography is never easy. This book provides effective research strategies for combatting familiarity in the context of empirical fieldwork. The authors rehearse ways that challenge the ethnographer to avoid taken-for-granted ideas, and to make the familiar strange. The book covers the cycle of research from research questions to publication and leaving the field and brings together the central themes of their life’s work in one clearly written volume. This book is aimed at researchers at postgraduate level and beyond, their supervisors and principal investigators, and at experienced investigators who want to improve their thinking. Any ethnographer will find ideas and proposals to help them reflect self-critically and creatively about their research practice.

This volume draws together three core concerns for the social sciences: the senses and embodiment, emotions, and space and place. In so doing, these collected essays consider the ways in which these core concerns are mutually constitutive. This includes how spaces evoke, constrain or are composed by the senses and emotions; the ways in which emotions are generated or transformed in certain spaces and through sensual engagement; and the processes by which embodied senses create spaces and emotions.

Standards. We apply them, uphold them, or fail to meet them. But how do they get made? The Social Life of Standards reveals how these political and technical tools for organizing society are developed, subverted, contested, and reassembled by local communities interacting with standards created by others. Using ethnographic approaches, contributors investigate biomedical, agricultural, and other contexts that reveal the mismatch between the inconsistent implementation of standards in the real world and the non-negotiable criteria presupposed by external forces. These cases support a reflexive process that involves local engagement at every stage in the production and application of standards.

In Ethnographic Explorations: Surrender and Resistance, Whitaker and Atkinson, two experienced ethnographers, explore the complexities of fieldwork, analysis and writing from new perspectives. It takes the opportunity to reflect on Ethnography not just as a methodological perspective, but at a fundamental level. In general terms, Ethnography is seen not just in terms of a set of data-collection methods, but as a more profoundly transformational perspective. The book explores a series of tensions and differences in the conceptualisation and conduct of ethnography, among them: Surrender and Catch; Strangeness and Familiarity; Intimacy and Distance; amd Romanticism and Modernism. It emphasises disruptions and interruptions rather than an idealised model of smoothly untroubled research. The book covers a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, illustrated with research in many social settings. The book is intended for researchers at postgraduate and postdoctoral levels and at experienced researchers who want to read a different, sometimes challenging, take on ethnographic research and its outcomes.

Asia is changing. Socio-political shifts in the world economy, technological advances of monumental scales, movements of people and ideas, alongside ongoing post-colonization projects across the region have created an emerging Asia – one confident and assertive of its place in the contemporary geopolitical sphere. As political and economic powers reassert Asian sovereignty in opposition to perceived Northern dominance, and dramatic and rapid development in the region shift the relationship between the centre and the periphery, new renderings and imaginations of hierarchies of identity and power come to the fore. This changing environment leads to emerging challenges for anthropologists working in the region: both those who have been working there for years, and new scholars entering the field. This volume considers these changes, and the implications of this on our practice. By focusing on Asia as a site of enquiry, the contributors to this book discuss tensions and opportunities arising in their ethnographic fieldwork in light of a changing Asia. Drawing on personal reflections on Asia’s global positioning in this contemporary moment, the contributors consider how fieldwork is being negotiated within the changing dynamics of anthropology in the region. This book then, is a discussion on the shifting landscape of field sites and the resultant emerging research methodologies, and is aimed at those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork as well as those who are seeking ways to undertake it.

A unique and innovative resource for conducting ethnographic research in health care settings, Ethnographic Research in Maternal and Child Health provides a combination of ethnographic theory and an international selection of empirical case studies. The book begins with an overview of the origins and development of ethnography as a methodology, discussing underpinning theoretical perspectives, key methods and challenges related to conducting this type of research. The following substantive chapters present and reflect on ethnographic studies conducted in the fields of maternal and child health, neonatal nursing, midwifery and reproductive health. Designed for academics, postgraduate students and health practitioners within maternal and child health, family health, medical sociology, medical anthropology, medicine, midwifery, neonatal care, paediatrics, social anthropology and public health, the book will also illuminate issues that can help health practitioners to improve service delivery.

Being Ethnographic is a fundamental introductory guidebook to process and utilization of doing fieldwork within real-world settings. It explores our understanding of identities, the future of ethnography and the advancing role of technology in a global, networked society. The third edition of Being Ethnographic highlights the challenges introduced by the ethnographers′ own interests, biases and ideologies and demonstrates the importance of methodological reflexivity. This fully updated third edition includes: Discussions on technology and multimodality as hands-on tools for the field Helpful insights into making thoughtful choices around a research design Aid in engaging ethically and effectively within the field Lasting tips for finalising and conducting research Raymond Madden provides invaluable guidance for applying fundamental ethnographic principles within the field and gives students and researchers everything they need to walk a mile in someone else′s shoes.

This book provides an inventory of modes of inquiry for ethnographic research and presents fieldwork as an act of relational invention. It advances contemporary debates in ethnography by arguing that the empirical practice of anthropology is and has always been an inventive activity. Bringing together contributions from scholars across the world, the volume offers an expansive vision of the resourcefulness that anthropologists unfold in their empirical investigations by compiling inventive social and material techniques, or field devices, for anthropological inquiry. The chapters seek to inspire both novel and experienced practitioners of ethnography to venture into the many possibilities of fieldwork, to demonstrate the essential creative and inventive practices neglected in traditional accounts of ethnography, and to invite anthropologists to confidently engage in inventive fieldwork practices.