The Role of Ethnography in University-Community Partnerships

UC Links 2020

Panel Presentation

Helping Undergrads Learn and Apply Ethnographic Methods:

A Crash Course in Hands-On Ethnography

• In-Class Preparation
• Ethnographic methods

(Shane the Lone Ethnographer)

• Field notes
• Data analysis
• Hands-On Learning
• Mentored field work in groups

How do we help students succeed in the field with limited time to teach them ethnographic methods?

Ethnography: A Student Perspective

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How are undergraduates impacted by getting a hands-on experience?

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How does learning about/doing ethnography affect students who aren’t in fields that traditionally engage with ethnography?

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Jenna Groesbeck - Sociology

Ryn Stroud - Physics

Olivia Ford - Exercise and Wellness

Quinn Christiansen - Anthropology

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Ethnography as a Response to the Problem of Condescension (i.e., the Problem of Charity)

Greg Thompson

Department of Anthropology

BYU

The Problem: “Charity”

• Marcel Mauss: “The poison of the gift.”
• Mary Douglas: NO FREE GIFT (i.e., charity) b.c. charity breaks ties.
• “Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue, we know it wounds”
• “What is wrong with the so-called free gift [charity] is the donor’s intention to be exempt from the return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, [charity] entails no further claims from the recipient.”
• “A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.” It is not a gift.
• An unrequited gift heightens the honor of the giver (hence “philanthropy”).

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What to do about:

The poison of the gift

The problem of charity and

The potential for condescension?

Suggestion 1: Undoing “charity”

• Acknowledge/Enable recipient reciprocity
• Acknowledge and regularly emphasize to all that community members are gift givers. They give gifts of time and access to their communities and their lives.
• “Pay it forward” approaches - The gift is returned to others (e.g., HfH).
• More importantly, be realistic about the (minimal) value of the charitable act
• Recognize and regularly emphasize to students that the good they will be able to accomplish is very small (even in a semester program). [this can further provoke the question in them: How can I actually be helpful?]
• Focus on understanding rather than charity (“ethnography” not “service learning”). (see next)

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Suggestion 2: Focus on INTERPRETATION and understanding

• Jane Addams response to the U of C’s idea to start a settlement house:

• “[a settlement isn’t] a thing but a way of living – hence [it] has the same aims as life itself.”
• “Miss Addams hoped that the settlement wasn’t being started… from the desire to do good. Philanthropy had been identified with helping instead of with interpretation.” For Addams, what was needed was more and better interpretation/understanding. Her greatest concern was middle and upper class people’s total misunderstanding of the lives of the poor.
• Ethnography is/as INTERPRETATION: Focusing students on interpretation & understanding, i.e., “the desire to do good research” can mitigate the problems that arise with “the desire to do good”.

Suggestion 3: Ethnography and Kinship

• Since charity is not a problem among kin (do you ask your family to pay you back for meals you provide?), one approach is to build kin-like relations between college students and community members.
• Some kin-building ideas from anthropological literature:
• Eating together
• Working (hard) together on a common project
• Living together
• [Note that issues of race and ethnicity are highly relevant since, in dominant imaginaries, racial and ethnic differences can limit kinship (while also potentially heightening the problem of condescension/charity). This need not necessarily be so, but it is a structural reality to consider].

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Ethnographic strategies for capturing and (re)presenting participant voices

John Cano & Diana Arya

UCSB

EMIC approach — important considerations for our ethnographic research practices.

Being able to engage with participants as cultural-guides:

• Conversation-interviews
• Opportunity to exchange ideas, listen, and understand their perspectives
• member-checking
• Space to share and check with participants the way their voices were (re)presented

Conversational interviews

• Interview guide (could be oriented by research questions or lenses that will be used for the analysis)
• Should allow an open dialogue
• Should allow to get an understanding of their role/participation in the culture/context they are a part of (and how they make meaning in it).

Member checking

• Being true and accurate (as possible) to participants’ voices and how they are (re)presented.
• Some strategies:
• Sharing ethnographer’s representation of their voices
• Sharing how the representation was done (e.g. sharing/explaining lenses used to allow a better member-checking and “add-ons”—If needed)
• Follow-up “sharing and checking moment” with participant

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Member checking (One-pager)

Member checking (One-pager)

Making the Familiar Strange

Betsy Brenner, UCSB

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The challenges of subjectivity:

Making the strange familiar

Making the familiar strange

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Brenner

Techniques for Teaching 1

•Reveal and Challenge their assumptions: Video practice in class

Kamehameha class

Whole Brain teaching

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Brenner

Techniques for teaching 2

•Explain Goal: To learn to observe and record behaviors—avoid inferences and judgments

Fieldnotes have 3 components

Overview: Setting

Narrative: Behaviors

Reflection

First viewing: No specific instructions, write narrative sentences

Second viewing: Choose a focus: Avoiding generalities

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Peer Review

-After the first viewing: table groups, large group discussion

-After the second viewing: table groups, large group discussion

-Posted in forums by site

-Comparison of fieldnote assignments

-Final paper: Using the fieldnotes of others

Reflection

Components

–Personal reactions/acknowledge subjectivity

–Analytical: Possible inferences supported by behavioral or verbal evidence

–Connect to concepts, reading

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Discussion Questions

What preconceptions do your undergraduates bring to their site work?

How does this impact their work with the youth?

Young Children’s Representations of their Multilingual Worlds

Janelle Franco

• Ethnographic case study
• Informed by child-centered modes of inquiry
• Fieldnotes, video/audio recordings, photographs, ethnographic interviews & visual methods, and children’s artifacts

Franco

Franco

Negotiating Decisions About When and How to Use Representations

• Drawing from translingual resources to coordinate and negotiate efforts in creating representations
• Making choices about when and how to collaborate
• Shifting and/or combining languages and modes of representation based on purpose and audience �
• Using spatial understanding and translanguaging to position themselves in their representations
• Discussions surrounding mathematical perspective and awareness of audience

Franco

Discussion/Q&A

How do we mitigate against the problem of condescension? (Greg)

How do children's perspectives and ideas influence the way we approach our research? (Janelle)

How do we help students succeed in the field with limited time to teach them ethnographic methods? (Katie)

What preconceptions do our undergraduates bring to their site work? (Betsy)

How does this impact their work with the youth? (Betsy)

How are undergraduates impacted by getting a hands-on experience? (Quinn, Jenna, Ryn, Olivia)

How does learning about/doing ethnography affect students who aren’t in fields that traditionally engage with ethnography? (Quinn, Jenna, Ryn, Olivia)