Writing Ethnography

The Teaching Writing series publishes user-friendly writing guides penned by authors with publishing records in their subject matter. While ethnographers inevitably write up their findings from the field, many ethnography textbooks focus more on the ‘ethno’ portion of our craft, and less on developing our ‘graph’ skills. Gullion fills that gap, helping ethnographers write compelling, authentic stories about their fieldwork. From putting the first few words on the page, to developing a plot line, to publishing, Writing Ethnography offers guidance for all stages of the writing process. Writing prompts throughout the book encourage the development of manuscripts from start to finish. Appropriate for both new and emerging scholars, Writing Ethnography is a useful text for qualitative methods, research methods courses across disciplines. “This is a must read for anyone who is learning about ethnography and is unsure about how to start writing.” – Kakali Bhattacharya, PhD, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, Kansas State University “I love this writer because she does her homework, cares about her readers, and writes a damn good story. Buy this book immediately.” – Anne Harris, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Education, Monash University and author of Critical Plays: Embodied Research for Social Change and The Creative Turn: Toward a New Aesthetic Imaginary “In this foundational text, Gullion accomplishes the herculean task of talking about the overlooked process of ethnographic writing with an intimate tone. It is like we are seated at her desk writing along with her. This text will be required reading in my research methods courses and for my graduate students because of the meticulous breakdown of writing practice that creates a text that is both useful and engaging.” – Sandra Faulkner, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication, Bowling Green State University and author of Family Stories, Poetry, and Women’s Work and Poetry as Method: Reporting Research Through Verse Jessica Smartt Gullion, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Affiliate Faculty of Women’s Studies at Texas Woman’s University. She has published more than thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, the International Review of Qualitative Research, and the Journal of Applied Social Science. She has also written two additional books, Fracking the Neighborhood: Reluctant Activists and Natural Gas Drilling with the MIT Press and October Birds: A Novel about Pandemic Influenza, Infection Control, and First Responders, which is part of the award-winning Social Fictions Series with Sense Publishers.

Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science. Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well. From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off. Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.

Once upon a time ethnographers returning from the field simply sat down, shuffled their note cards, and wrote up their descriptions of the exotic and quaint customs they had observed. Today scholars in all disciplines are realizing how their research is presented is at least as important as what is presented. Questions of voice, style, and audience--the classic issues of rhetoric--have come to the forefront in academic circles. John Van Maanen, an experienced ethnographer of modern organizational structures, is one who believes that the real work begins when he returns to his office with cartons of notes and tapes. In Tales of the Field he offers readers a survey of the narrative conventions associated with writing about culture and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various styles. He introduces first the matter-of-fact, realistic report of classical ethnography, then the self-absorbed confessional tale of the participant-observer, and finally the dramatic vignette of the new impressionistic style. He also considers, more briefly, literary tales, jointly told tales, and the theoretically focused formal and critical tales. Van Maanen illustrates his discussion of each style with excerpts from his own work on the police. Tales of the Field offers an informal, readable, and lighthearted treatment of the rhetorical devices used to present the results of fieldwork. Though Van Maanen argues ultimately for the validity of revealing the self while representing a culture, he is sensitive to the differing methods and aims of sociology and anthropology. His goal is not to establish one true way to write ethnography, but rather to make ethnographers of all varieties examine their assumptions about what constitutes a truthful cultural portrait and select consciously and carefully the voice most appropriate for their tales. Written with grace and humor, Tales of the Field will be an invaluable introduction to novices just learning the fieldwork trade and provocative stimulant to veteran ethnographers. "Engaging and well written."--H. Ottenheimer, Choice

Writing the New Ethnography provides a foundational understanding of the writing processes associated with composing new forms of qualitative writing in the social sciences. Goodall's distinctive style will engage and energize students, offering them provocative advice and exercises for turning qualitative data and field notes into compelling representations of social life.

This text provides a foundational understanding of the writing process associated with innovative forms of ethnographic writing. It offers advice, examples, and exercises for every step in the ethnographic writng process, including field observations, notes, narrative development, and editing.

"This book exists, is here for you as a resource because we, the authors/editors of this text (Suzanne Blum Malley and Ames Hawkins), saw very similar, very exciting things happening in our classrooms using ethnographic research methods in our inquiry-based first-year writing classrooms. We have watched our students develop strong voices as writers, while also using critical analytical skills and addressing important ideas of ethics, identity, and representation. In our classrooms, we have seen a greater level of investment in ethnographic projects than we have seen in more traditional rhetorically based assignments. Ethnographic writing, by creating a very authentic role for the researcher and a connection to community, offers a means to address the alienation and/or boredom that many non-traditional writers and first-year college students feel when confronted with the traditional composition curriculum—any curriculum, actually. More importantly, ethnographic research allows students to access what can seem so terribly difficult when framed in other assignments: to pursue a line of inquiry rather than a topic, to research ethically, and to write with authority. Though we initially wrote this text with the first-year writing classroom in mind, we have come to understand that there are many courses that also present students with ethnographic writing assignments. These courses may or may not be designed to spend much time on the question of how to get started with these projects. In addition, instructors might want to supplement the basic methodological approach with their own course content. We are also aware that textbook size and cost has exploded in recent years. We believe in preserving the internet as an open-source space and wish to reinforce our belief with practice. As a result of these realizations, we have reorganized the project in order to 1) Make it relevant and accessible to students in nearly any college classroom who might be assigned an ethnographic writing project; 2) Allow instructors to supplement the core methodology (presented here in Chapters 1–6), as they see fit, using any number of Supplemental Modules that offer additional materials, lenses, and multi-modal examples of and for issues and ideas discussed in the core text. 3) Make it accessible and available, via the internet and other technological platforms, to students and instructors everywhere. A disclaimer: we want to make clear that while we use and invoke methodological principles and practices associated with ethnography, we are not claiming Engaging Communities as a text that teaches ethnography as a research methodology. This book has been designed to help students (most likely undergraduates, perhaps high school, possibly graduates ) envision interesting, hands-on research projects that are eventually converted—translated—into written text. Throughout the text, we often use the word ethnographic in order to describe our methodological presentation and theoretical concerns as this term reflects the pedagogical (teaching) and rhetorical (arguing) concerns of ethnography, rather than the actual disciplinary understanding of the methodology. We choose to use to teach this way because ethnographic writing allows for specific discussion regarding how to involve and interest a reader, in evoking physical and emotional connection with writing, rather than simply becoming informed or persuaded by any specific piece of writing"--Back cover.

In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw present a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice for creating useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, demystifying a process that is often assumed to be intuitive and impossible to teach. Using actual unfinished notes as examples, the authors illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies and show how transforming direct observations into vivid descriptions results not simply from good memory but from learning to envision scenes as written. A good ethnographer, they demonstrate, must learn to remember dialogue and movement like an actor, to see colors and shapes like a painter, and to sense moods and rhythms like a poet. This new edition reflects the extensive feedback the authors have received from students and instructors since the first edition was published in 1995. As a result, they have updated the race, class, and gender section, created new sections on coding programs and revising first drafts, and provided new examples of working notes. An essential tool for budding social scientists, the second edition of Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes will be invaluable for a new generation of researchers entering the field.

Ethnography is a way to tap the deep undercurrents in a community through a process of gathering, analyzing, and sharing data. Fully revised and updated for this second edition, Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice has quickly become the go-to textbook for those in or training for ministry who want to discover how they can use ethnography to help them hear the stories of those to whom they minister. Setting forth the case for ethnography’s ability to galvanize aspirations and heal communal hurt, this book presents the helpful pastoral practice of ethnography in a clear, step-by-step manner and includes many compelling case studies of transformational leadership. Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice invites us to open our eyes, ears and hearts to those in our congregations.