400009 SE Ethnographic methods (2021W)

This course focuses on ethnographic methods and is aimed - though not exclusively - to doctoral students who have not carried out their fieldwork yet. The seminar delves into long-standing issues such as the politics of the ethnographic encounter, multi-sited and digital/in-person research modalities, and collaborative approaches. Against this backdrop, the seminar will help students identifying alternative avenues of investigation for projects that have been or will be disrupted by the ongoing pandemic. Regarding this, the seminar will begin with an analysis of the most relevant interventions on the methodological challenges that have emerged over the past two years in order to map the landscape of the novel situations that doctoral students may face in their research. These interventions feature both continuities and new problematics, modalities and questions that the pandemic has generated across countless areas of research, and will help re-think and re-situate ‘classic’ approaches to ethnography and vice versa. At the beginning of the seminar, students will also have the possibility to suggest specific areas or contexts of research that are most helpful to their projects so that specific sessions can be organised on them and additional readings may be added to the existing ones.