240074 SE The Viability and Changing Conditions of Fieldwork (P1) (2014S)

This short course considers the challenges to constituting the conditions of fieldwork in the contemporary world, on which the production of ethnographic data, analysis, and writing so much depends. In my own work, the evocation of 'multi-sited' fieldwork in the 1990s was an opening for a discussion of the norms of method that have long defined ethnography as a field science. Today, the design of fieldwork has to take into much more substantive methodological account relations of collaboration, responsiveness to publics, and the negotiations of complex and circulating sites of data definition and collection. For me, this challenge of the constitution of the field is the primary arena of methodological innovation and experiment today.