SOCI 655: Ethnography

SOCI 655-001: Ethnography
(Fall 2022)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M

Horizon Hall 4001

Section Information for Fall 2022

The premise of this seminar is that ethnography is more than collecting data and “writing it up.” Ethnography is also a form, style, and genre of writing. Further, how ethnographies are written is central to the arguments being relayed and the audiences being engaged. This course will enable students to see (or perhaps taste) the “secret sauce” of how ethnographies are made, by reading and analyzing classic and contemporary works, and by learning to write ethnographically themselves. What is distinctive about the epistemologies of ethnography? What can its ways of producing knowledge teach us about the politics and poetics of writing alongside issues of power, place, and point of view? Central to the ethnographic endeavor is the writing itself, and so we will also consider issues of form and style, as well as narrative and theory. How do ethnographers bring people and places to life through the writing? How does one write with a multisensorial perspective? What does ethnography share with long-form journalism, creative non-fiction and even fiction, and how does it differ from those genres? This course aims to give students the tools, practice, and insight into this process in a course that is part seminar, part workshop. Our study of ethnographic writing will alternate between reading ethnographies and practicing our own writing. We will also evaluate how the general move toward more public facing scholarship in a range of disciplines is connected to how and why we write. Cross-listed with ANTH 560.

Course Information from the University Catalog