Announcing the EPIC Equity Council & Cohort Program

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Ethnographers are powerful change makers in business, organizations, and communities because we understand people within complex social and cultural contexts. In ethnography, “reflexivity” is the rigorous practice of understanding ourselves in the same way. We know that power and inequities shape our work and professional communities, and EPIC members have continually challenged each other and our organization to address them. Last summer, one of our members surprised us with a $10,000 donation offered as a direct investment in equity. Inspired by this gift and many efforts of our members over the years, we created the EPIC Equity Council with the…

Making Tech More Accessible: An Ethnographic Lens on Ability and Disability

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"An ethnographic lens influences us to define ability and disability in a way that is maximally inclusive...many different abilities are present in our world, and each deserves to be taken as its own reality and respected as such." —RICHARD BECKWITH (Research Psychologist, Intelligent Systems Research Lab) & SUSAN FAULKNER, (Research Director, Research and Experience Definition), Intel Corporation EPIC Members Richard Beckwith and Susan Faulkner (Intel) have assembled a panel of luminaries in accessible tech research, design, and engineering for our January 26 event, Seeing Ability: Research and Development for Making Tech More Accessible. In anticipation, we asked them a few questions about their approach to accessibility and key first steps all of us can take to do more inclusive work. How do you define ability and accessibility? How does an ethnographic lens influence your definitions? Ability has to do with what an individual is capable of perceiving or physically doing with their body; accessibility has to do with...

A Collective EPIC Journey into 2023

Happy New Year EPIC People! New years, like all human rituals, are an ethnographic marvel. Amid the constant and disinterested motion of the Earth, people use the power of culture and collectivity to galvanize momentous rites of passage. From a cyclonic output of business metrics to intimate habits of well-being, we participate in reckonings and celebrations, reenacting the old and crafting the new. New years are also moments we’ve created for grappling with the nature of change. In the waning weeks of last year, I was showered with hot takes on the miraculous/apocalyptic ChatGPT. What is this new thing, and…

EPIC2022 Video & Proceedings Now Available on Demand!

EPIC2022 Resilience was the 18th edition of the premier global conference on ethnography in business and organizations. Now you can read the full-length papers and case studies, and watch conference presentations on demand: ➥ EPIC2022 Papers and Case Studies are FREE to read, download, and share. ➥ Video of EPIC2022 presentations & tutorials are available to EPIC Members—along with our entire Video Library of Conferences, Tutorials, and EPIC Talks (join now!). BROWSE EPIC2022 VIDEO & ARTICLES DOWNLOAD PROCEEDINGS (PDF, 348 pp) BROWSE VIDEO LIBRARY ALL CONFERENCES BY YEAR EPIC2022 represents the work and passion of more than 200 people: conference…

Assessing Quality in Qualitative Research

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a book review by SAM LADNER Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco August 2022, 230 pp, University of California Press This book is a must-read for any researcher, even those who specialize in quantitative methods. It aims to be a textbook but achieves much more than that because it focuses on what it takes to be “literate” in qualitative data – the very thing that our stakeholders need to be more sophisticated customers of our work. Qual researchers know all too well that basic qual familiarity is lacking in most contexts, but we don’t always have the language to explain to our stakeholders how to best leverage qual data. This book helps us do that. Imagine being a writer in a world where no one was literate. Imagine the constant struggle to train up, support, and explain your work to people who cannot read, while at the same time being told the reason they cannot understand your writing is because it isn’t good enough....