Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: sociality

The Cackle of Communities and the Managed Muteness of Market

The Cackle of Communities and the Managed Muteness of Market

Researchers at EPIC face something of a trap. Situated in an ethos of twenty first century consumer capitalism, our professional duties overemphasize individual consumers, and the products of our research always diverge towards our respective corporations’ interests. As a result we have little...

Contact Lists and Youth

Contact Lists and Youth

  This paper explores the nature of networked contact lists in an emerging new media ecology as they relate to a population of 10 American pre-teens and teens (9-15). Mobile, gaming, and Web 2.0 services are contributing to a shift in the role of the contact list from a static visualization...

Putting the ‘Social’ Back in ‘Social Science’ Research

Putting the ‘Social’ Back in ‘Social Science’ Research

Remember the days when a main challenge of the EPIC community was convincing executives that humans weren’t just rational actors all the time? Back when arguing for the value of ethnographic research, thick data, and so forth, started with getting executives to realize that there was more to...

Craft, Value, and The Fetishism of Method

Craft, Value, and The Fetishism of Method

In order to set the scene for the panel on methods, I will be drawing on C Wright Mills’ injunction to avoid the fetishism of method. Mills urges us to think about our methods in terms of a process of craft production. I want to explore what key elements of this craft might be, beyond the usual...

Attaining Humanity

Attaining Humanity

Thank you very much, indeed. I’m really delighted to be here and to meet this community. I hope that this will be the start of an engagement. As I think it’s sort of clear, I am a pretty academic anthropologist. That makes me a bit anxious, because I do remember going to something a bit like this...

Using Photographic Data to Build a Large-scale Global Comparative Visual Ethnography of Domestic Spaces: Can a Limited Data Set Capture the Complexities of ‘Sociality’?

Using Photographic Data to Build a Large-scale Global Comparative Visual Ethnography of Domestic Spaces: Can a Limited Data Set Capture the Complexities of ‘Sociality’?

This paper describes an innovative attempt to construct a large-scale, global comparative visual ethnography of domestic spaces, and uses the notion of ‘sociality’ to interrogate the ability of such a broad but relatively thin data set to do justice to ethnography’s potential to capture and...