Ethics and Ethnography

3 units

This course sets out to explore the ethical questions raised during ethnographic research. Ethnographic research requires the student of culture to form deep relationships with the people whose culture they hope to study. How are the goals of the ethnographer in balance with the needs of those they study? How can histories of oppression affect the ethnographic relationship? Following Ella Shohat, we will ask, who is mobilizing what in the articulation of the past, deploying what identities, identifications and representations, and in the name of what political vision and goals? Ethnographies will form our primary texts for the course, supplemented with ethnographical theory. While we take a theoretical approach to the subject, students are encouraged to think in terms of their own work and projects, with the ultimate goal of producing an ethics statement of their own. This course fulfills the Humanities or Social Science distribution requirements for the AMCS MA program. The course may also count towards the Undergraduate Major or Minor.