Ethnograpy Methods Workshop Series

Type: Lab

Ethnographic Writing Workshop

September 10, 2019

Megan Moodie, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, followed her talk "Craft as Method: The Creative Labor of Ethnographic Practice" with a writing workshop for the Ethnography Workshop’s Graduate Fellows.

She opened her workshop by situating her writing practice in relation to a tradition of scholars who practice “corporeal writing” (eg. Lidia Yuknavitch, Jennifer Pastiloff). She then asked each of the Fellows to put pen-to-paper and draw a spiral—circling the page, wider and wider and wider, without stopping until directed to do so. For some, the experience was calming, effectively drawing the writer into the page. For others, the experience was anxiety-provoking as it became more and more difficult to keep lines evenly spaced. Either way, the exercise provoked greater attention to writing as an embodied practice. Over the course of the following two hours, fellows workshopped short pieces of writing, discussed animating interview transcripts into engaging dialogue, and experimented with more-corporeal ways of writing.

Grant Writing with Jeff Mantz

September 19, 2019

The Ethnography Workshop hosted Jeff Mantz, the NSF Cultural Anthropology Program Officer, for a grant-writing workshop with doctoral students from cultural anthropology on Thursday, September 19, 2019. During the two-hour workshop, graduate students refined areas specific to their own research projects as well as learned general principles for communicating effectively in the grant genre. Here are a few takeaways:

• Research questions: Don’t close a sense of inquiry! Think ‘process’ rather than ‘findings.’ Being open to the risk that what you expect to find might be turned upside down is part of the process of scientific knowledge production. Expected findings are not yet conclusive.
• Intellectual Merit: Think less ‘literature review’ and more ‘where can my work contribute?’ Privilege substantive anthropological (and interdisciplinary) production—scholars you are actually in conversation with—over theoretical heavy-hitters.
• Research Design: whether qualitative or quantitative, what matters is that your data collection and analysis are systematic. Why these specific research sites? And what is your relationship to them? Keep in mind that ‘methods’ are distinct from ‘modes of analysis.’
• Broader Impacts: At a macro level, why does this research matter? Contributions valued broadly include: scientific knowledge product, mechanisms for broad circulation, collaboration with specific international stakeholders, and expanding the inclusion of historically disenfranchised persons.

First We Must See: Line Drawing as Research Method

October 11, 2019

The Ethnography Workshop hosted anthropologist and artist Andrew Causey for the workshop “Line Drawing as Research Method.” His presentation explored the use of line drawing as a general interpretive process to aid visual perception. Following a brief introduction of the place of drawing in his research in Sumatra, Indonesia, (see Hard Bargaining in Sumatra: Western Travelers and Toba Bataks in the Marketplace of Souvenirs, University of Hawai'i Press, 2003) and a rationale for such work in general, participants practiced the act of seeing through drawing. The focus of the presentation was on training ourselves to better see, not on producing finished drawings.

He laid out three basic ground rules:

• Don’t judge yourself
• Don’t assume anything
• Open yourself to fun

And three goals:

• Increasing your visual awareness
• Cultivating a new interest in perceiving the world around you
• Acknowledging that drawing can be useful as ethnographic method

Participants in the three-hour workshop experimented with various drawing exercises, including: (1) drawing an upside-down image just as we see it, (2) drawing from deep memory, (3) drawing from recent memory, (4) drawing an object from touch, (5) drawing with scribbles, (6) and drawing with our non-dominant hands.

Andrew Causey is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaching courses ranging from “Visual Anthropology” “Ethnographic Films” and “Writing Anthropology.” For more on drawing-as-method, check out his 2016 book “Drawn to See: Drawing as Ethnographic Method” (University of Toronto Press).

Collaborative Art as Method

April 15, 2022

How can art be used to convey a message? What are the opportunities posed by collaborative ethnographic research? In this interactive virtual workshop, Profs. Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye explored these questions and more with undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Participants learned about the creation of Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of Toronto Press, 2017), an ethnographic graphic novel the two scholars co-wrote, and the broader opportunities for multi-modal research and collaborative methodologies the project offered. They led workshop participants in several exercises connected to graphic ethnography to inspire research and representation beyond the written word.

Moderator: Lexi Ligon Holloway (PhD Student, Cultural Anthropology)

Sherine Hamdy is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine. Before that, she was at Brown University, where she worked and taught since 2006. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from New York University Department of Anthropology. Her first book, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California, 2012) is taught widely in courses in medical anthropology, Middle East studies, and cross-cultural bioethics. She also works in visual media, particularly with comics as a new medium for anthropology. She is the co-author, with Coleman Nye, of Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution, which is the debut anthropological graphic novel of the University of Toronto Press' ethnoGRAPHIC series (2017). She is currently the co-editor of the ethnoGRAPHIC series. Her new research is a collaborative project with Professor Soha Bayoumi that critically engages with physicians' roles in the recent political upheavals in the Arab world, and has a future graphic novel that will be released in July 2023, that is a young Egyptian American Muslim girl’s coming of age story.

Coleman Nye is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the co-author of the graphic novel Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Her work has also appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Women and Performance, and Performance Matters. Her current book project, Speculative Science: Gender, Genetics, and the Futures of Life locates race and gender as central to formations of knowledge and power in contemporary cancer genetics.