Critical Ethnographic Research Seminar

17-18-19 September 2018: Critical Ethnography and Feminist Epistemology

This interdisciplinary intensive course provides a post-graduate level introduction to critical ethnography based on a feminist epistemology. The course brings into focus feminist ethnographic perspectives, both in theoretical approaches and practical application. The course will consist of three training days with lectures that introduce theoretical concepts and master classes that focus on how to sync up theory and practice. Key features of ethnographic research are (1) fieldwork over a prolonged period of time, (2) utilizing different methods, (3) within the setting of the participants and (4) involving the researcher in participation and observation (Skeggs 2000). These key features make ethnography an ideal fit with a feminist research ethics and epistemology. Feminist epistemology has done important work to bring to the fore an understanding of knowledge as situated and contextually bound. Underpinned by a critical and/or social-constructivist paradigm, feminist critical ethnography is a theoretical position that assumes the contextualised nature of human actions, is committed to complexity, intersectionality and contradiction and takes a reflexive stance towards the role of researchers.

Three prominent scholars who have extensively written about feminist ethnographic methodology have been invited to address key epistemological and theoretical challenges and opportunities that emerge in ethnographic research. During the master classes, students will have the opportunity to discuss practical problems they encounter in their own research practice. Through presentations and roundtable discussion, instructors and students collectively explore how to translate the theoretical approaches into concrete methods and strategies.

The course is open to students from a variety of disciplines (including anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, criminology, area studies, history, political studies, education, psychology, arts and architecture, social and cultural geography) who use (or consider using) ethnographic research methods in their research.

Programme

DAY ONE (September 17th 2018):

09:00: Coffee and Registration

09:15:   Opening Session:

09:15: Opening word (TBA)

09:30: Keynote 1:

Maria do Mar Pereira (The University of Warwick, UK): When feminist ideals clash with ethnographic realities: The surprises and dilemmas of contemporary feminist ethnography

Many feminist scholars are drawn to ethnography by its promise to offer especially fertile conditions in which to implement key principles of feminist epistemology, particularly a reflexive, ethical, collaborative and accountable approach to knowledge production and to relations with participants. But what happens when these feminist ideals clash with the realities of everyday ethnographic work, in a broader environment of marketisation of university life? In this talk, I will engage with this question by drawing on some of the surprises and dilemmas I have encountered through my own ethnographic research in schools and universities.

Session coordinator: Rozita Dimova (Ghent University)

10:30-11:30: Discussion.

11:30: Lunch break

13:30-16:30: Master Class by Maria do Mar Pereira & Rozita Dimova: Dilemmas in Feminist Ethnography: sorting them out and bringing them in

16:30-17:30: Reception

DAY TWO (September 18th 2018):

09:00: Coffee

09:30-11:30: Morning Session

09:30: Keynote 2:

Elizabeth Ettorre (University of Liverpool): Autoethnography as feminist method: Storying the feminist ‘I’

Session coordinator: Carine Plancke (Ghent University)

This lecture discusses my developing interest in the topic and autoethnography as one way of doing feminism in society. Also, building on earlier feminist concerns, I envisage four ways, although these are not complete nor exhaustive, in which autoethnography is feminist method.  These include: 1) autoethnography creates transitional, intermediate spaces, inhabiting the crossroads or borderlands of embodied emotions; 2) autoethnography is an active demonstration of the ‘personal is political’; 3) autoethnography is feminist critical writing which is performative, that is committed to the future of women and 4) autoethnography helps to raise oppositional consciousness by exposing precarity. For each of these areas, I will provide “autoethnographic” examples. The listener learns that the aim of this lecture is to further a feminist understanding of autoethnography and to help other feminists tell their own stories- storying and sensitizing their own feminist ‘I’s.

10:30-11:30: Discussion.

11:30: Lunch

13:30-16:30: Master Class by Elisabeth Ettorre & Carine Plancke : Autoethnography: methodological and ethical challenges

DAY THREE (September 19th 2018):

09.00: Coffee

09:30-11:30: Morning Session

09:30: Keynote 3:

Don Kulick (Uppsala University, Sweden): Gang rape in a Papua New Guinean village: violence, talk and nonsense 

Session Coordinator: Karel Arnaut (Leuven University)

In Papua New Guinea, sexual violence against women occurs at staggering rates. My talk will present material from a small, isolated Sepik village called Gapun, where I have been conducting fieldwork for the past thirty years. I will play audio recordings of how women tell each other stories about gang rapes of both women and men. I will argue that any attempt to produce a coherent explanation of the sexual violence that occurs in the village risks losing sight of the essential senselessness that in crucial ways structures it. Drawing on philosophical and literary analyses of nonsense, I will suggest that rather than attempt to make sense of the sexual violence that occurs in Gapun, an important anthropological contribution to comprehending it may be to make nonsense of it.

10:30-11:30: Discussion.

11:30: Lunch

13:30-16:30: Master Class by Don Kulick & Karel Arnaut: How to Write.

Lectures

Maria do Mar Pereira (The University of Warwick, UK)

Maria do Mar Pereira is a feminist ethnographer with a commitment to interdisciplinary, and socially engaged, research and teaching. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, and the Deputy Director of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Women and Gender. Her first book – Doing Gender in the Playground: the Negotiation of Gender and Sexuality in Schools – was published in 2012 and received the ICQI Award for Best Qualitative Book in Spanish or Portuguese (2010-2014). Her second book – Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: an Ethnography of Academia – was published in 2017 by Routledge and received a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is an editor of the journal Feminist Theory and tries (not always successfully) to juggle all of the above with sanity, parenting and involvement in feminist activism. Her whole career has been devoted to feminist ethnography – she has tried to get away from ethnography and do something else, but she always finds that sooner or later she is sucked back into it. She has now given up trying to resist the powerful pull of ethnography.

Title of Lecture: When feminist ideals clash with ethnographic realities: The surprises and dilemmas of contemporary feminist ethnography

Many feminist scholars are drawn to ethnography by its promise to offer especially fertile conditions in which to implement key principles of feminist epistemology, particularly a reflexive, ethical, collaborative and accountable approach to knowledge production and to relations with participants. But what happens when these feminist ideals clash with the realities of everyday ethnographic work, in a broader environment of marketisation of university life? In this talk, I will engage with this question by drawing on some of the surprises and dilemmas I have encountered through my own ethnographic research in schools and universities.

Elizabeth Ettorre (University of Liverpool, UK)

Elizabeth Ettorre is an internationally known feminist sociologist in the area of substance misuse, genetics, reproduction and autoethnography. She is Emerita Professor of Sociology, University of Liverpool, Honorary Professor, Aarhuus University, Denmark and Docent in Sociology, Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University. Besides publishing in a number of international journals, her scholarly books include: Autoethnography as Feminist Method: sensitizing the feminist ‘I’ (2017); Health, Culture & Society: Conceptual legacies and Contemporary Applications (2017) (with E. Annandale, V.M. Hildebrand, A. Porroche-Escudero & B. Katz Rothman); Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World (2011) (with Nancy Campbell); Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health (2010); Revisioning Women and drug use: gender, power and the body (2007); Making Lesbians visible in the Substance Use Field (2005); Reproductive genetics, gender and the body (2002); Before Birth: Understanding Prenatal Screening (2001); Women and Alcohol: From a private pleasure to a public problem? (1997); Society, the Body and Well-Being (1996)(with K. Suolinna and E Lahelma); The new genetics discourse in Finland: Exploring experts’ views within Surveillance Medicine (1996); Gendered Moods: Psychotropics and Society (1995) (with Elianne Riska); Women and Substance Use (1992); Drug Services in England and the Impact of the Central Funding Initiative (1990) (with S. MacGregor, R. Coomber and A. Crosier), Lesbians, Women and Society (1980).

Title of Lecture: Autoethnography as feminist method: storying the feminist ‘I’

This lecture discusses my developing interest in the topic and autoethnography as one way of doing feminism in society. Also, building on earlier feminist concerns, I envisage four ways, although these are not complete nor exhaustive, in which autoethnography is feminist method.  These include: 1) autoethnography creates transitional, intermediate spaces, inhabiting the crossroads or borderlands of embodied emotions; 2) autoethnography is an active demonstration of the ‘personal is political’; 3) autoethnography is feminist critical writing which is performative, that is committed to the future of women and 4) autoethnography helps to raise oppositional consciousness by exposing precarity. For each of these areas, I will provide “autoethnographic” examples. The listener learns that the aim of this lecture is to further a feminist understanding of autoethnography and to help other feminists tell their own stories- storying and sensitizing their own feminist ‘I’s.

Don Kulick (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Don Kulick is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on topics that range from the lives of transgendered prostitutes in Brazil to the anthropology of fat. He has conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Scandinavia. He is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including an NEH Fellowship, an A. W. Mellon Foundation Guest Professorship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he directs the research program Engaging Vulnerability.

Title of Lecture: Gang rape in a Papua New Guinean village: violence, talk and nonsense 

In Papua New Guinea, sexual violence against women occurs at staggering rates. My talk will present material from a small, isolated Sepik village called Gapun, where I have been conducting fieldwork for the past thirty years. I will play audio recordings of how women tell each other stories about gang rapes of both women and men. I will argue that any attempt to produce a coherent explanation of the sexual violence that occurs in the village risks losing sight of the essential senselessness that in crucial ways structures it. Drawing on philosophical and literary analyses of nonsense, I will suggest that rather than attempt to make sense of the sexual violence that occurs in Gapun, an important anthropological contribution to comprehending it may be to make nonsense of it.

Master Classes

Master classes are open to all PhD students and advanced Master students with an interest in critical ethnographic research.

Registration by sending an email to: eline.huygens@ugent.be (registration is possible until the 30th of June 2018).

Please include your name, affilation, and a brief description of your research and research methods, and why you would want to join the programme. The organizing committee will select those students who they think would receive the most benefit from participating in the programme. Students who register for the full programme will be given priority.

The readings will be provided to the participants by email.

Master Class Maria do Mar Pereira & Rozita Dimova: Dilemmas in Feminist Ethnography: sorting them out and bringing them in

17 September 2018, 13:30-16:30, Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Room 100.024

This masterclass will be dedicated to thinking – both epistemologically and practically – about the dilemmas we encounter in feminist ethnography. We will spend some time discussing the epistemic, theoretical and political status of ethnographic dilemmas, and trying to situate such dilemmas within ongoing academic debates and the broader political economy of contemporary academic labour. We will then work together to problematise participants’ own concrete research dilemmas, exploring ways not just of sorting those dilemmas out, but also of bringing those dilemmas into the very core of the knowledge production process.

Readings:

Pereira, Maria do Mar (2013), “On Being Invisible and Dangerous: The Challenges of Conducting Ethnographies in/of Academia” in S. Strid and L. Husu (eds.), Gender Paradoxes in Changing Academic and Scientific Organisation(s) (GEXcel Reports, Volume XVII), Örebro: University of Örebro, 191 – 212.

Pereira, Maria do Mar (forthcoming), “Too Tired to Think: On (Not) Producing Feminist Knowledge in the Hyper-Productive University”, ex aequo

Assigment:

Prepare a short (300 word) description of a dilemma you are facing (more detailed instructions will follow).

Master Class Elizabeth Ettorre & Carine Plancke: Autoethnography. Methodological and Ethical Challenges

18 September 2018, 13:30-16:30, Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Room 100.024

Readings: Please read two of the four following texts:

– Ettorre, Elizabeth (2017), ‘Feminist Autoethnography, Gender, and Drug Use: “Feeling About” Empathy While “Storying the I”, Contemporary Drug Problems, 1-19.

– Ettorre, Elizabeth (2013), “Chapter 9. Drug User Researchers as Autoethnographers: “Doing Reflexivity” With Women Drug Users”, Substance Use & Misuse, 48:1377–1385.

– Ettorre, Elizabeth (2010), “Nuns, Dykes, Drugs and Gendered Bodies: An Autoethnography of a Lesbian Feminist’s Journey Through ‘Good Time’ Sociology”, Sexualities, Vol 13(3): 295–315.

– Ettorre, Elizabeth (2005), “Gender, older female bodies and autoethnography: Finding my feminist voice by telling my illness story”, Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005) 535–546.

Assignment:

Prepare questions (about the texts and/or in relation to the practical, epistemological, or ethical issues that you encounter in your ethnographic research). Be prepared to briefly talk about your own work.

Master Class Don Kulick & Karel Arnaut: How to Write

19 September 2018, 13:30-16:30, Campus Boekentoren, Building Blandijn, Room 100.024

This class will discuss how to write an ethnography. The issues to be discussed range from everything from how to start writing, how to decide how to structure a thesis or book chapter, how to think about audience, and how to publish.

The assignments to be completed to prepare for class is as follows:

(a) read the attached excerpts from my forthcoming book The End: Adventures with a Dying Language (please take special note that you must not circulate this text in any form to anyone outside this class);

(b) choose a monograph written by an anthropologist that you admire and would like to have written yourself. The monograph can be from any time, it can be a classic or it can be a newer ethnography. You must choose one book, please do not come and say that you can’t choose one. If you don’t have a monograph that you admire and would like to have written yourself, then spend the summer reading and finding one.

Prepare a short one-page statement about why you find the book so appealing. Don’t just say you like it, tell us exactly why you like it, and do a quick analysis of the kinds of textual strategies the author uses that make the book so appealing to you. For example, if you think the book brings people to life, analyze the text and identify the kinds of textual strategies the author deploys to achieve that effect. Does the author use a lot of adjectives? What kinds, to what effect, and where exactly do they appear in the various chapters? What about quotes? Are the quotes in block form separated from the main text, or are they woven into the text like a novel? What different effects do the different forms produce? Where does theory appear in the different chapters? Where does the author appear in the text? Etc.

Bring the book to class.

Organizing Committee

Coordination

Dr. Katrien De Graeve & Eline Huygens, Centre for Research on Culture and Gender, Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University

Organizing Committee

Dr. Katrien De Graeve, Eline Huygens, Amal Miri, Dr. Carine Plancke, Dr. Ladan Rahbari & Maaike Goethals, Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University

Scientific Committee

  • Dr. Katrien De Graeve, Prof. Dr. Rozita Dimova, Prof. Dr. Chia Longman, Department of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University
  • Prof. Dr. Karel Arnaut, Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, Faculty of Social Science, Leuven University
  • Dr. Sophie Withaeckx, Prof. Dr. Gily Coene, Drs. Dirk Lafaut, RHEA, Onderzoekscentrum Gender, Diversiteit en Intersectionaliteit, VUB