an
interdisciplinary
campus center
Current Events for 2008-09
Calendar 08-09
Native Claims:
Indigeneity and Indigenous Studies Today
Red Cents & Indian Country:
Native Claims to Things
November 24-25, 2008
(2 day workshop)
For further details, please visit
www.anthro.uci.edu/nativeclaims
Past Events
2007-2008
Ethnography is perhaps the most important and most widely used qualitative mode of inquiry into social and cultural conditions, not only in the academic social sciences, but also increasingly in organizations and activities outside the university as well, from PARC to the Federal Reserve. There is no single definition of ethnography or uniform practice of ethnographic method, nor should there be: ethnographic practice responds and adapts to the field situation. As Marilyn Strathern has written, ethnography, through participant-observation, interviewing, and other qualitative techniques, is a "deliberate attempt to generate more data than the researcher is aware of at the time of collection," and is thus eminently suited to the study of unpredictable outcomes, complex emerging social formations, and technological and market change.
Established in 2006, the Center for Ethnography will work to develop at the University of California, Irvine a series of sustained theoretical and methodological conversations about ethnographic research practices across the disciplines that will have a broadly transformative effect on ethnographic research methodologies and theoretical developments. The Center will support innovative collaborative ethnographic research as well as research on the theoretical and methodological refunctioning of ethnography for contemporary cultural, social and technological transformations. One aim of the Center is to foster methodological innovation in ethnography across the campus. More broadly, however, its goal is to situate the University of California Irvine at the center of such innovations internationally.
CONTINUING THEMES FOR CENTER EVENTS THAT DEFINE MULTI-EVENT OR EVEN MULTI-YEAR PROJECTS
CRITIQUE IS OUT THERE: THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF REFLEXIVE KNOWLEDGE
ETHNOGRAPHY OF/AS COLLABORATION
THE CENTER AS PARA-SITE IN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH PROJECTS
RETHINKING ETHNOGRAPHY AS A DESIGN PROCESS