Friday 4th November 2016
Ethnography is an inclusive term that embraces a broad set of methodological practices followed by researchers from several academic disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. The Centre for Ethnographic Research (CER) aims to promote innovation in ethnographic practice, encourage research synergies, and create an interdisciplinary intellectual community that contributes to the making of ethnography in the 21st century.
This half-day conference provided a forum for showcasing innovative forms of ethnographic practice, the diversity and scope of different ethnographic fields, and challenges and opportunities for contemporary ethnographers. The conference also inaugurated CER, extending an invitation to ethnographers located at Kent, and beyond the University, to join in an academic conversation about ethnographic practice.
Programme of the event:
14:30 Welcome and Introduction – Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (SAC, University of Kent) & Dawn Lyon (SSPSSR, University of Kent)
14:40 Keynote: Thomas Yarrow (University of Durham) – Ethnographic experiments with Architecture: two vignettes and an argument for description (Discussant: Julia Twigg (SSPSSR))
15:30 Keynote: Rachel Hurdley (University of Cardiff)- It’s all ethnography: Penelope’s bed, Nefertiti’s head and Janice’s chair (Discussant: Ellie Jupp (SSPSSR))
16:20 Tea break
16:40 Roundtable: Richard Lightman (SMFA), Dawn Lyon (SSPSSR), Jonathan Mair (SAC), Raj Puri (SAC) – Ethnographic practices across the disciplines. Four Kent ethnographers reflect upon ethnographic challenges.
17:45 Keynote: Les Back (Goldsmiths, University of London) – Ethnography’s Renaissance: New Directions and Opportunities
19:00 Drinks and nibbles
Abstracts for each are available below.
Tom Yarrow – Ethnographic experiments with Architecture: two vignettes and an argument for the description
Having read an early draft of my monograph on architectural practice, one of the architects remarked that it was as though I had constructed a building and left the scaffolding on. He was critical of the ‘distracting’ references, and my explicit engagements with other theorists. This remark provided the impetus for an experiment in ethnographic form: what might a description look like if the conceptual and theoretical engagements were treated as ‘scaffolding’, by no means unimportant in the construction of a description whose effectiveness might ultimately depend on their removal? The paper presents two examples of the results along with a paradoxical argument: that various forms of research audit are associated with a kind of theoretical ‘shoutiness’, an explicitness about novelty, that has often reduced description to exemplification of truths of a more singular kind.
Rachel Hurdley – It’s all ethnography: Penelope’s bed, Nefertiti’s head and Janice’s chair
Have you ever watched a collie dog enter a field? He stops, scans the horizon, checks the sky, then sniffs the nearest clump of grass. Unless there is the sight, sound or smell of something strange, in which case he focuses almost completely on finding and examining whatever that is. Only ‘almost’, because he always keeps some of his attention on everything else that is happening. An ear keeps track of a human hand rustling the treat bag, the hooves in the distance: he smells the fox poo for rolling in later and notices the old crisp packet, the smell of thunder and the sheep wool caught in the fence. But right now, he is going to chase that squirrel out of that tree.
The relics show him what has been passing through the field: the horses and the coming storm will change the field again. A slight movement of leaves, a nutshell falling on grass at the edge of what is, for now, his field, alerts him to what is – to collie dogs – an abomination.
For Mary Douglas, wellies in a downstairs loo made explicit the cultural character of boundary-making practices. Anomalies and abominations clarify meaning-making patterns. But what of the background rustlings, trivial clutter and taken-for-granted stuff of everyday life? Epiphanies can happen at the most unexpected times: I saw my mantelpiece display as if for the first time during an advert break, while an ethical impossibility opened up the power of corridors. Sometimes, years of scanning skylines and smelling stale ash on scarred bin tops shapes new meanings into long-known places. Or, as in my current project, the world shifts when I try – and fail – to imagine entering an unfamiliar room and finding a comfy chair, if I were a person with dementia.
Although we lack the fine noses, ears and eyes of collie dogs, we can exercise our senses and practise ethnographic imaginations to examine the significance of mundane backgrounds and minor materialities.
Richard Lightman – Mediating Culture in Music Production
My ethnographic research examines the evolution of the South Asian diaspora-based Bhangra music brought to the UK, and its ultimate hybridity and appropriation by diverse cultures seeking new identities. I draw from my experience as a Bhangra record producer in the early 1990s, my encounter with the negotiation and translation of musical form and cultural expectations, and the mediation between South Asian and Western sensibilities. Bhangra, being originally a celebratory harvest music that accompanied dance, provided the non-sectarian space for the translation of ethnic music into a new diverse British music incorporating influences from Rock, Pop, Reggae, Socca, Bollywood and the technological advances made in synthesizer technology driven by Western popular mainstream genres and musicians. It is this discourse of multicultural mediation and key questions that derive from the research that are outlined and evaluated.
Dawn Lyon – The difficulty of grasping what’s going on in ethnographic research
In a research practice that relies on seeing and sensing, how ethnographers apprehend social worlds deserves careful attention. This contribution reflects on how we handle the sensory excess of being in the field. I consider different processes of looking at and looking/sensing alongside the people, practices and things we study and modes of observing with and without devices such as the camera and audio-recorder. I go on to discuss the means by which we then render our accounts to others and how different forms (textual, visual, and sensory) do different kinds of work in telling and showing the social.
Jonathan Mair – Why ethnographic research is indispensable for understanding religious life (and everything else)
Social scientists have historically seen religious traditions as embodiments of a philosophy or ethos first conceived by a charismatic founder, preserved in religious texts, interpreted and disseminated by a cadre of clerics. My research on Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, Northern China and Taiwan, like other ethnographic research on religious traditions, shows the limitations of this view. The relationship of members of living religious traditions to the ideas contained in their holy books or, in some cases, the lack of relationship, can only be discovered ethnographically.
Raj Puri – Ethnographic methods for changing human-environment relationships
My recent research in southern India has focused on the everyday responses of forest-dependent people to climate change-induced biodiversity change. Climate change impacts occur in the context of many other forces, drivers and processes of change enveloping communities. It is only through careful observation of the everyday events that nature-dependent people enact that one can begin to understand the subtle ways that change is occurring and how people are responding to it. One of the great strengths of such fine-grain ethnography is that we are witnesses to contingency!
Les Back – Ethnography’s Renaissance: New Directions and Opportunities
For fifty years, the qualitative research imagination was held hostage by the tape recorder. To do qualitative research meant to conduct interviews, transcribe them and present the idiomatic voices of our participants in anonymous block quotations. In the digital age this has all changed. We are encountering unprecedented opportunities to work differently and communicate and circulate the fruits of our work in new ways. Old modes of representations like fieldwork-drawing, or even note-taking, become new again. In this talk I will review some of these opportunities drawing on examples of contemporary ethnography. It will focus on what constitutes ethnographic data in a digital age. It will also examine some of the challenges produced by the new informational environment with regard to issues of ethical practice, shared authorship, and the political dimensions of social research in an era where the worth of social research requires the demonstration of relevance and ‘impact’. Finally, I argue that we are on the cusp of a renaissance in ethnographic research, but these new possibilities are being constrained by the institutional structures for measuring value and hierarchies of evidence in an increasingly commercialized competitive university environment. I end by arguing that in order to embrace the opportunities that lie before us, we need to be bold and licence experimentation with the new modes and methods that are now available.