Tag Archives: Methodology

Keeping it open (fieldwork, abstraction, and unexpected surprises)

In case you haven’t heard, one of the ideas/concepts that I have been exploring is value.  Check out this post here on SM for a little background.  The concept itself is either really, really interesting, or, as one of my friends put it: little more than a big weasel word.

So which is it?  Both, I think.

Reading books and articles by Keith Hart, David Graeber, and Julia Elyachar, among others, has convinced my both of the fact that value is interesting and somewhat maddening.  It’s incredibly rich, and terribly vague at the same time.  I mean, how do we determine the value of particular things, ideas, and places–and how are different value regimes or systems comparable (e.g. is there a really useful way to compare or juxtapose moral value systems with those based upon money and markets)?

Going into fieldwork I decided to put the whole value question to the side a bit, and let things go where they may for a while.  Sometimes it’s a good idea to let certain pet ideas and theories take a back seat for a while to open up room for a range of possibilities. You know, let the empirical stuff run amok for a bit and keep a notebook on hand just in case.  Besides, I was getting to a point where the whole value thing was starting to seem a bit too abstract.  So I gave it a rest. Continue reading →

Being there, in the field, with and without internet

Another update from the trenches of fieldwork.  This one is brought to you by the sweet, streaming, wireless connection of an internet cafe that’s about 45 minutes from my fieldsite.  It’s the bloggers version of an oasis to find these sorts of places, especially when there’s a breakfast special that includes coffee with the juevos rancheros.

First of all, I’ll admit that I was pretty spoiled during the first few months of fieldwork because I had WIRELESS INTERNET access anytime I wanted.  That’s right, a wireless connection right in my room.  Madness, I know.  This was definitely not the case when I was here in 2009 and 2010 doing prelim work for my dissertation.  I had no problems with my fantastic and luxurious internet situation…until it evaporated like spilled gasoline.

Gone. Continue reading →

A “Writing Culture” Moment for Psychology?

Psyche: #lfmf bro!

Ha! Just kidding.

The 30 March 2012 issue of the journal Science includes a news piece “Psychology’s Bold Initiative” on a possible moment of introspection for the discipline. Spurred on by some recent high profile academic fraud cases a cohort of scholars are leading a movement aimed at scrutinizing their field.

According to Science, many psychologists now feel that their field has a credibility problem. To my ear this underscores some of the differences between our disciplines and simultaneously calls to mind the critiques of Clifford and Marcus, et al.

The greater concern arises from several recent studies that have broadly critiqued psychological research practices, highlighting lax data collection, analysis, and reporting, and decrying a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results. Some psychology researchers argue that this has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals – but are nonetheless false.

Continue reading →

Mediating the Real I

Whenever I mention that one of my primary areas of anthropological research is media, the question I come across on a recurring basis is the following: How will you be able to pursue that through ethnographic fieldwork of everyday activities? My sense is that such a response comes from the view that media are disembodied and deterritorialized objects or processes, or that they operate at a pace that is difficult to engage through participant-observation. In response to such concerns much work in anthropology has sought to “ground” media by focusing on production or reception practices, or occasionally both. However, I consider this kind of question crucial to think through during my exploratory fieldwork and research design phase.

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways. Continue reading →

Sideways: from who and what to how

[This is a guest post by Garrison Doreck. He is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.]

I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss below. Initially, I read laterality and sideways discussions to be the equivalent of the keystone anthropological activity of cutting across social spheres. It is only after hearing about the Sideways conference this past Fall at UC-Irvine that I decided to take a second look and try to think it through a bit more. And, this is a wonderful venue to hopefully hear back from many of you who have been thinking about this issue in more depth and at greater length than I have at this point.

Last year Julian discussed projects of studying up or sideways as hinging on how “ethnographers relate to their interlocutors, as well as different degrees of “identity overlap” between ethnographer and subject.” In another post, Dorien Zandbergen took issue with such “identity overlap,” by claiming that the sideways concept “suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs.” It is thus by paying careful attention to similarities that Dorien was able to identify issues where “such similarities appeared only superficial,” as differences emerged. However, Julian addressed the issue, as well, by looking at how such research is “differentiated on several axes: of political sympathy, of shared knowledge, of power relations, of informants’ reflexivity, and of socio-cultural belonging, to name a few.” Within these posts the matter of studying sideways, or up, involved drawing a connection between self/other (i.e. who) and similarity/difference (i.e. what). Continue reading →

The sound & the fury (plus questions)

The sound: It was late afternoon.  I was in the middle of conducting an interview, recording the conversation with a small digital voice recorder.  Rain falling outside, in droves.  I could hear water rushing down the street.  The sound of water pouring from the roof.  Water dripping from here and there.  Clinking and clattering on the tin roof above.  Inside, one light in the corner of the room fought back the cold of the rain outside.  I was talking with a mother and her son amidst the incessant deluge.  The sound of the rainfall wasn’t exactly overwhelming, just constant.  In the moment, it all sounded pretty nice.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating. Continue reading →

Reading Fast, Reading Slow (Tools We Use)

Over the course of a single day I engage in a number of different activities for which the word “reading” doesn’t seem to do justice: I scan my social networks, I check my email, I review student work, I browse articles and books related to my research, and I engage in deep sustained examination of a single text. Each of these tasks require a different frame of mind and, increasingly, different technologies. To simplify matters, I will talk about only three types of reading, each of which encompasses several of these reading-related activities: scanning, browsing and devouring.

Scanning

I spend too much time doing this. The dopamine hit one gets from finding something new is immediate and gratifying. I have my email, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. each of which is sending me a steady stream of new links. (Follow our SavageMinds Twitter feed or Facebook account for the results of this time-wasting activity.) I check all of them throughout the day. Especially Twitter.

One of my favorite ways to browse all this in one place (excluding Google+ for now, but I’m sure that will change) is Flipboard for iOS. Google tried to buy Flipboard and when they failed made their own app called Currents. Currently Flipboard is still way ahead of the Google, as well as other competitors like Pulse, Zite, etc. (Here is a post from Lifehacker reviewing several of the options.)

To make the best use of Flipboard, you want to group your favorite Twitter sources into “lists” so that each list can have it’s own magazine on Flipboard. I haven’t been doing a great job of updating my various lists, but you can see mine here (or post your own in the comments.) You can do the same thing with Google Reader folders and Facebook “Friends Lists.”

Continue reading →

Ethnocharette: The Post-It Note as technology

EthnocharetteJust received news of this experiment at UC Irvine: Ethnocharette. Keith Murphy and George Marcus have documented a process of exploring a text (Robert DesJarlais’ Shelter Blues) through a studio-style design process. The website details the process and the results.  It’s always a bit hard to understand exactly how this kind of process works for people or how it’s different from a seminar discussion, for instance, or the creation of “reading responses,” but given the smiling people in the photographs, it looks like it worked. Having spent my fair share of time struggling with new media technologies from wikis to blogs to collaborative editing, there is something nice about exploring the limits of a very simple tool: post-it notes. I’ll try this out in my classes this year I think…

Information Imperialism?

By the end of the year the US State department will spend $70 million on stealth communications technologies to enable activists to communicate beyond the reach of dictators according to a recent NYT article. Prototypes include a suitcase capable of quickly blanketing a region with a free wifi network, bluetooth devices that can silently share data, software that protects the anonymity of Chinese users, independent cellphone networks in Afghanistan, and underground buried cell phones on the border of North Korea for desperate phone calls to “freedom.” These are political tools deployed to promote the agenda of one nation over that of another. How should we address information imperialism? The use of networked communications tools to subvert so-called regimes exposes a proclivity for digital intervention that likely also includes digital literacy projects to provoke revolutionary actions, propaganda campaigns to make celebrities out of bloggers, and covert code warfare. Let’s review the spectrum of information interventions to ascertain the ways and hows of information imperialism. Continue reading →

Photographic Methods

Most anthropologists take cameras into the field, whether they consider them a part of their formal methods or not. They may take iPhones, point and shoots, “prosumer” SLRs, or maybe even some amazing old Nikon from the 1960s that can be used for picture-taking and hammering nails (if you have ever owned an old Nikkormat, you know what I am talking about here). What I am interested in here is how different people actually use cameras during fieldwork. For this post I really hope to hear from some of you about how you put cameras to work during your research, whether you’re formal about it or not. To start this off, I’ll talk about some of the ways that I use cameras—and how I am thinking about using them in my upcoming dissertation fieldwork. So here goes: Continue reading →

Academic Research in the Age of Facebook

Two articles prompted this post. Jonah Lehrer’s WSJ article on how easy it is for a “wise crowd” to turn into a “dumb herd,” and a NY Times piece about Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. How might this kind of filtering, networking, and pre-digesting of data affect academic research?

Eli Pariser tells us, not too surprisingly, that Google adapts to our needs, showing us stuff it thinks we are more likely to be interested in.

If you’re a foodie, says Jake Hubert, a Google spokesman, “over time, you’ll see more results for apple the fruit not for Apple the computer, and that’s based on your Web history.”

Which is fine, except that

in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

“People tend to get into this echo chamber where more and more of what they see conforms to the idea of who some software thinks they are — like a Nascar dad who likes samurai swords,” Mr. Lanier says. “You start to become more and more like the image of you because that is what you are seeing.”

Continue reading →

Photographs and anonymity: keeping faces hidden, or not

Since I am in the middle of working on grants in preparation for upcoming fieldwork, I have a lot of methodological issues on my mind.  I am going to use photography as a primary part of my research plan, and there are some critical questions that keep cropping up: when should research participants remain anonymous?  When does it make sense to show participants’ faces in photographs–and attach names/biographies to those faces?  Many of the ethnographies that I read keep subjects anonymous–in text and in images–almost axiomatically.  This is pretty standard practice for many ethnographers, and considering the ethics and politics of ethnography, I understand why.  However, I am wondering if there are times when it makes more sense (or when it’s the best ethical choice) to actually show faces and attach names/identities to photographs.  More importantly, whose responsibility–or right–is it to make these decisions?

Continue reading →

Photographs, fieldnotes, and subjectivity

Anthropologists, and ethnographers specifically, use photographs all the time.  Whether on the covers of ethnographies, or interspersed throughout the pages of texts, photographs are a pretty common element of many anthropological publications.  Like the ubiquitous locational maps and statistical figures, images of places or ethnographic participants are pretty standard fare.  What tends to be absent, however, are overt discussions of the actual use of photography as an anthropological/ethnographic method.  This isn’t the case with all ethnographies, mind you, since there are indeed some that engage with photography in a very direct manner (Righteous Dopefiend is one recent example that comes to mind).  But in many ethnographies that I see, photographs seem to just exist, floating in a sea of words.  While many ethnographers spend a decent amount of time writing and thinking how and why they employ key methods such as participant observation, interviews, and even writing fieldnotes, the use of photography gets the silent treatment.  Why?

Margaret Mead once said that anthropology is a “discipline of words” (Mead 2003), and I think in many ways this is still true today.  Sure, American Anthropologist now has a section devoted to visual anthropology, and there are other great journals like Visual Anthropology Review that focus specifically on the use of still photography and other visual methods.  However, when it comes to the main canon of ethnographic methods, discussions of photography are conspicuously absent.  The methods courses that I have taken, and the standard methodological textbooks and articles that I have been exposed to, generally do not mention much about photography or other visual methods*.  They talk about writing proposals, designing research plans, sampling strategies, interview methods, participant observation, and so on.  Rarely are cameras mentioned, yet, ironically, photographs continue to crop up in ethnography after ethnography.  Clearly, most anthropologists bring cameras of some sort to the field, but for some reason they don’t talk much about them. Continue reading →

Dead Wrong Scholars or Future Collaborators?

We’ve all been there. You’ve read a book or article closely aligned to your own research. In your opinion your peer has made one or two mistakes, one factual, malum in se, or dead wrong, and another, malum prohibitum, or theoretically suspect. What to do?

You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.

But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? Continue reading →

Ethnography is like fishing…(h/t Marcel Mauss and James Ferguson)

I have gotten a couple of comments regarding methods, access, etc. (thanks for the comments!); I will get to those issues later this week. Today I thought I would give a description of the early portion of ethnographic research that Bloomberg’s New York is based on–a narrative of what actually happened, rather than the packaged, fabricated narrative that we as academic professionals spend so much time self-consciously producing.

First a brief backstory: from 1998-2000, I attended urban planning graduate school. Halfway through, I realized I was far more interested in analyzing cities than planning them, especially because (at that point anyway) in NYC “planning” often meant little more than manufacturing windfall profits for developers. So I headed off to the CUNY Graduate Center to work with their flock of urbanists.

Flashing forward to 2003: my dissertation research begins. The idea is for me to investigate the process by which the “business agenda” comes to be. Basically, what I am trying to do here is use ethnography to explore what happens in the gap between the functional requirements of capitalist urbanization (as laid out by Harvey, Castells, Molotch and Logan, etc. etc.) and the construction of an actual elite agenda in a specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. My focus is on the public spaces of development policy formation, such as conferences and other professional meetings, city council hearings, etc., but also on more informal mechanisms. For the latter, I draw on the network of contacts I began developing in graduate school, and I soon find out that the development policy world in NYC is pretty small and interlinked (I had an excel spreadsheet with just a couple of hundred names on it). I begin talking to people, attending those conferences, interviewing, and so on.

As I do so, I quickly realize three things. First, the Bloomberg administration is up to something different than I expect, given the standard shape of neoliberal urban governance in NYC or elsewhere. The administration is engaging in citywide urban planning, moving away from the use of indiscriminate tax subsidies, and perhaps most interestingly pulling a lot of new people into City Hall. Not surprisingly, given the new Mayor’s background in business, this includes several people from finance and other private sector industries. Less expected is the hiring of a number of very well-respected planning and policy professionals to staff the top levels of the Bloomberg administration’s development and planning agencies. Such people had largely been excluded from previous administration in favor of folks drawn from the real estate industry or from the murky world of NYC’s public-private development agencies (which basically amounts to the same thing). Bloomberg’s City Hall is becoming a hotbed corporate and professional technocracy.

Second, the Mayor’s business background (along with that of the other private sector people he was bringing into government) actually seems to matter in substantive ways. Economic development officials are telling the city council about the thorough rebranding campaign underway; city officials are referring to companies as “clients”; City Hall was being physically remodeled along the lines the Mayor had used in his private company, Bloomberg LLP; and perhaps most remarkably, the Mayor is referring to NYC as a “luxury product.” Importing private-sector logic into government is nothing new, in NYC or elsewhere, but now it is being done by people who can (and do!) credibly claim to be running the city like a private company.

Third, everybody in the development and policy world is focused on the far west side of Manhattan. Everybody. Nobody wants to talk about the business agenda formation; they want to talk about the Hudson Yards (the plan proposed for the area). The Bloomberg administration is joining NYC2012 (the city’s private Olympic bid organization), the Group of 35 (an elite commission charged with stimulating office development in NYC), the New York Jets, and a number of other planning and development groups in targeting the area to the west of Times Square and Penn Station for redevelopment. And as it turned out, graduate school classmates of mine are involved in the growing conflict over far west side redevelopment in a number of ways–some working for city agencies, others working for community organizations that oppose the plan as currently formulated.

This was a key point in my research; suddenly focusing on the process of business agenda formulation seemed a bit boring, especially since I had a full-scale development battle emerging in front of me! I also had this interesting phenomenon of the ex-CEO mayor actually running the city as a business (rather than just for business), which seemed to have some unpredictable consequences (like a willingness to raise taxes and hire egghead professors and policy professionals and respect their expertise). Finally, I had all these professionals–city planners, professors, public health experts, markets, educational experts, former management consultants, etc.–talking about the new spirit of professionalism and competence in City Hall, and the new excitement about public service that they and their peers were feeling.

Realizing all this, I began to split my research onto two tracks. First, I began investigating the early years of the Bloomberg administration, i.e. late 2001 to mid-2003, using interviews with officials, government documents, transcripts of administration testimony to the city council, and various secondary sources. Second, I threw myself into the conflict over the far west side of Manhattan, attending every community meeting, rally, city council hearing, conference, and official planning meeting I could find, and redirecting my interviewing towards those engaged in the conflict. I’ll write a bit more about the second, more ethnographic of these two tracks next time.