Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography

Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography
Author: Thomas Stodulka
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3030208311

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This book illustrates the role of researchers’ affects and emotions in understanding and making sense of the phenomena they study during ethnographic fieldwork. Whatever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however close they get to their informants and no matter how involved or detached they feel, fieldwork pushes them to constantly negotiate and reflect their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities, spaces and phenomena they study. The book highlights the idea that ethnographic fieldwork is based on the attempt of communication, mutual understanding, and perspective-taking on behalf of and together with those studied. With regard to the institutionally silenced, yet informally emphasized necessity of ethnographers’ emotional immersion into the local worlds they research (defined as “emic perspective,” “narrating through the eyes of the Other,” “seeing the world from the informants’ point of view,” etc.), this book pursues the disentanglement of affect-related disciplinary conventions by means of transparent, vivid and systematic case studies and their methodological discussion. The book provides nineteen case studies on the relationship between methodology, intersubjectivity, and emotion in qualitative and ethnographic research, and includes six section introductions to the pivotal issues of role conflict, reciprocity, intimacy and care, illness and dying, failing and attuning, and emotion regimes in fieldwork and ethnography. Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography is a must-have resource for post-graduate students and researchers across the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, critical theory, cultural phenomenology, and cultural sociology.

Emotions in the Field

Emotions in the Field
Author: James Davies
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2010-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804774269

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As emotion is often linked with irrationality, it's no surprise researchers tend to underreport the emotions they experience in the field. However, denying emotion altogether doesn't necessarily lead to better research. Methods cannot function independently from the personalities wielding them, and it's time we questioned the tendency to underplay the scientific, personal, and political consequences of the emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This book explores the idea that emotion is not antithetical to thought or reason, but is instead an untapped source of insight that can complement more traditional methods of anthropological research. With a new, re-humanized methodological framework, this book shows how certain reactions and experiences consistently evoked in fieldwork, when treated with the intellectual rigor empirical work demands, can be translated into meaningful data. Emotions in the Field brings to mainstream anthropological awareness not only the viability and necessity of this neglected realm of research, but also its fresh and thoughtful guiding principles.

Analyzing Affective Societies

Analyzing Affective Societies
Author: Antje Kahl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429754779

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In recent years, research in the social sciences and cultural studies has increasingly paid attention to the generative power of emotions and affects; that is, to the questions of how far they shape social and cultural processes while being simultaneously shaped by them. However, the literature on the methodological implications of researching affects and emotions remains rather limited. As a collective outcome of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin, Analyzing Affective Societies introduces procedures and methodologies applied by researchers of the CRC for investigating societies as affective societies. Presenting scholarly research practices by means of concrete examples and case studies, the book does not contain any conclusive methodological advice, but rather engages in illustrative descriptions of the authors’ research practices. Analyzing Affective Societies unveils different research approaches, procedures and practices of a variety of disciplines from the humanities, arts and social sciences. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Qualitative Research Methods, Emotions, Affect, Cultural Studies and Social Sciences.

Taboo

Taboo
Author: Don Kulick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134880928

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A look at sexuality in anthropological fieldwork. The author looks at how the anthropologists sexual identity in their 'home' society affects the kind of sexuality they are allowed to express in other cultures.

Improvising Theory

Improvising Theory
Author: Allaine Cerwonka
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226100286

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Scholars have long recognized that ethnographic method is bound up with the construction of theory in ways that are difficult to teach. The reason, Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa H. Malkki argue, is that ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisatory in nature, conducted in real time and in necessarily unpredictable social situations. In a unique account of, and critical reflection on, the process of theoretical improvisation in ethnographic research, they demonstrate how both objects of analysis, and our ways of knowing and explaining them, are created and discovered in the give and take of real life, in all its unpredictability and immediacy. Improvising Theory centers on the year-long correspondence between Cerwonka, then a graduate student in political science conducting research in Australia, and her anthropologist mentor, Malkki. Through regular e-mail exchanges, Malkki attempted to teach Cerwonka, then new to the discipline, the basic tools and subtle intuition needed for anthropological fieldwork. The result is a strikingly original dissection of the processual ethics and politics of method in ethnography.

The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World

The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World
Author: Nerina Weiss
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2023-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000812588

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This book focuses on the emotional hazards of conducting fieldwork about or within contexts of violence and provides a forum for field-based researchers to tell their stories. Increasingly novice and seasoned ethnographers alike, whether by choice or chance, are working in situations where multidimensional forms of violence, conflict and war are facets of everyday life. The volume engages with the methodological and ethical issues involved and features a range of expressive writings that reveal personal consequences and dilemmas. The contributors use their emotions, their scars, outrage and sadness alongside their hopes and resilience to give voice to that which is often silenced, to make visible the entanglements of fieldwork and its lingering vulnerabilities. The book brings to the fore the lived experiences of researchers and their interlocutors alike with the hope of fostering communities of care. It will be valuable reading for anthropologists and those from other disciplines who are embarking on ethnographic fieldwork and conducting qualitative empirical research.

Being a Parent in the Field

Being a Parent in the Field
Author: Fabienne Braukmann
Publisher: Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2020-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9783837648317

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How does being a parent in the field influence a researcher's positionality and the production of ethnographic knowledge? Based on regionally and thematically diverse cases, this collection explores methodological, theoretical, and ethical dimensions of accompanied fieldwork. The authors show how multiple familial relations and the presence of their children, partners, or other family members impact the immersion into the field and the construction of its boundaries. Female and male authors from various career stages exemplify different research conditions, financial constraints, and family-career challenges that are decisive for academic success.

Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be

Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be
Author: James D. Faubion
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2011-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801463580

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Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative models for professional training in fieldwork and its intellectual contexts. The work done by contributors to Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be articulates, at the strategic point of career-making research, features of this transformation in progress. Setting aside traditional anxieties about ethnographic authority, the authors revisit fieldwork with fresh initiative. In search of better understandings of the contemporary research process itself, they assess the current terms of the engagement of fieldworkers with their subjects, address the constructive, open-ended forms by which the conclusions of fieldwork might take shape, and offer an accurate and useful description of what it means to become—and to be—an anthropologist today.

Affective Methodologies

Affective Methodologies
Author: Britta Timm Knudsen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137483199

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The collection proposes inventive research strategies for the study of the affective and fluctuating dimensions of cultural life. It presents studies of nightclubs, YouTube memes, political provocations, heritage sites, blogging, education development, and haunting memories.

The Multi-Sided Ethnographer

The Multi-Sided Ethnographer
Author: Tim Burger
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839466776

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As ethnographic fieldwork blurs the boundaries between ›private‹ and ›professional‹ life, ethnographers always appear to be on duty, looking out for valuable encounters and waiting for the next moment of disclosure. Yet what lies in the gaps and pauses of fieldwork? The contributions in this volume dedicated to anthropologist Martin Sökefeld explore methodological and ethical dimensions of multi-sided ethnographic research. Based on diverse cases ranging from hobbies over kinship ties to political activism, the contributors show how personal relationships, passions and commitments drive ethnographers in and beyond research, shaping the knowledge they create together with others.