Black Ethnographers

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? We will use books, articles, podcasts, documentaries, music, dance, and poetry for an in-depth study of the various ways that Black intellectuals in the social sciences have used ethnography to make sense of and theorize our and their everyday social worlds. We will pay special attention to questions of sexism, anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and colonialism, as these become relevant to the scholars' work, relationships to their disciplinary homes, and lived experiences. This course will also create space for students to think critically about their own positionality and subject positions, as we consider the ways that scholars take these into account when conducting research and presenting their scholarship. This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines, though focused in Anthropology, to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this social science research method. But ethnography implies a duality, as it can exist as process and as product. The term can refer to the action of conducting fieldwork and spending immersive time with a particular population in a particular place, as well as to the tangible product that the anthropologist produces after organizing and managing data collected from their fieldwork. Therefore, over the course of the semester, students will learn different ways that this theory, method, and practice is central to Anthropology and then will integrate this knowledge into their own ethnographically based final project. This project can result in a creative analytic text, like a podcast or autoethnography or curated playlist, but this product must be based in empirical information gathered and analyzed over the course of a student's own fieldwork, after they have identified a key question they would like to answer ethnographically.