The Ethnographer's Craft

Undergraduate catalogue

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnography and workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, oral history, multi-modal and virtual ethnographic methods; as well as debates over research ethics and regulatory ethics. Students will build skills to design and conduct ethnographic research, while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research to help them understand and engage with the world.