Ethnography and Experience

(3 Credits)

How do we understand social life in an unfamiliar city - and what happens when that city turns out to be more familiar than we expected? This course takes students to Florence for an immersive experience in ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnography emphasizes firsthand observation to interpret social life by standing in others’ shoes - but it also asks us to examine where we stand ourselves. Students will practice observation, interviewing, and note-taking in diverse settings: markets, piazzas, cafés, luxury shopping streets, and immigrant communities. Florence offers rich possibilities: a Renaissance heritage city shaped by global tourism and contemporary migration, where students may find themselves observing spaces where their own communities gather. We will grapple with core concepts - reflexivity, variation, the ethnographic fallacy, standpoint theory - and pay special attention to the ethics of representing others in writing. Through fieldwork and a final paper, students will connect observations to larger forces: labor markets, migration, citizenship, the performance of status, and tourism’s transformation of urban space.