Ethnographic Edge (E-Journal)
Not a member yet
76 research outputs found
Sort by
The Poetic Generation of Place: Ethnography for a Better World: Ethnography for a better world
No full textIn this article, I employ the ethnographer poetic as a strategic provocation to rethink the foundation of contemporary ethnography. The root of the word poet or poem is the ancient Greek concept of poiesis. Poiesis is defined as making. While in the Greek tradition poiesis foregrounded an analysis of the arts or aesthetics, contemporary usages highlight the making of a social or political dimension. Drawing from the social and political dimensions of poiesis, I argue that the ethnographer does more than simply represent a social context, and, instead, calls the place into existence. The ethnographer poet transforms ethnography from a representational form of inquiry into a generative poetics of place. This allows for a new social mythos to emerge in which the field of ethnography is brought into the service of envisioning and working toward a society that is hopeful, abundant, vibrant, and just
Revetment Running and Econarratological Poetry
No full textIn this article, nonhuman poetry is explored. Departing from an autoethnographic project based on audio recordings made while running on revetments, and which discussed how to give voice to nonhuman actors the possibilities of nonhuman poetry, this text aims at taking it one step further by extracting poetry from the material. Ethnographically, this is discussed in terms of affect, and an 'ethnography to be'. Theoretically, the study has a posthumanist approach, with a specific focus on the econarratology of philosopher Michel Serres. The method and theory are are discussed in tandem in relation to what philospher Peter Sloterdijk has coined 'amphibian anthropology'. By stacking the bracketed words in my transcriptions, four poems emerge in which background sounds, contextual descriptions, corrections and bodily sounds form the content. Each poem is accompanied by a map made from smartphone screenshots. The prose is found to be evocative of the surroundings of the recording, and also resonating with the ideas of human language as derivative of what Serres calls the Great narrative, the story of universe and nature themselves. The proximity to water and rocks discernible in the experiment is seen as a result stemming from practicing the hope-oriented 'ethnography to be'
How Urban Black Girls Write and Learn from Ethnographically-based Poetry to Understand and Heal from Relationship Violence:
Full text linkThis paper explores the engagement of African-American, Caribbean-American, and immigrant West African girls in the critical analysis and writing of poetry to make sense of their multi-dimensional lives. The authors worked with high-school aged girls from Brooklyn, New York who took part in a weekly school-based violence prevention program, and who became both 'participants' in an ethnographic research study with the authors and 'poets' as they creatively analyzed themes from research data. The girls cultivated a practice of reading and writing poetry that further explored dating and relationship violence, themes that emerged from the violence prevention program sessions and the ethnographic interviews. The girls then began to develop 'poetic knowledge' grounded in their lived experiences as urban Black girls. The authors offer that 'participatory narrative analysis' is an active strategy that urban Black girls enlist to foster individual and collective understanding and healing
Bone Poems: Listening and Speaking from the Ground
Full text linkAs a practice-led researcher traversing the multiple worlds that exist between artists, communities and institutions, I turned to poetry to begin to speak the unspeakable; to retrieve the metaphorical bones of a story that were taken out. The bones of this story came through the voices of four women who lived and worked at a site located in Western Sydney. Their stories opened a crack in the findings of the research. Unexpectedly their stories interconnected. In an emergent process rather than a predetermined one, the poetic became a way to bring some of the fragmented 'bones' of this story to light. A multilayered participatory process of hand making relationship maps and poetry as the final layer of this experimental approach to ethnographic inquiry, resulted in the creation of what I call 'bone maps' and 'bone poems'. They have created 'ethnographic places' which allow for deeper inquiry into the human side of the story, interwoven with the complexity of official and often perceived more factual accounts as presented across multiple institutional narratives. I found that ethnographically based poetry, informed by earlier sensory mapping processes could reveal what more linear approaches did not. This paper introduces 'Bone Poems', to reveal how this experimental approach reaches ways of knowing, through metaphor, in ways that other methods do not
Tensions in ethnographic research: Combining critical ethnography and decolonising methods
No full textIn this paper, we reflect on the tensions inhering in a multi-layered ethnographic project, with two researchers, across four school sites. This project is somewhat ambitious as we are combining critical ethnography with participatory and decolonising methods (and theories) across four sites. In so doing, we aim to explore the health-related experiences of diverse young people, at the intersection of gender sexuality, place and class, as well and ethnicity and culture. We focus here on four specific methodological tensions. We employ Michelle Fine's notion of 'working the hyphen' to explore tensions of decolonising-recolonising; collaborating-co-constructing; interactive-participatory approaches; being critical-being a listener in research
The Bricoleur Researcher, Serendipity and Arts-based research.
Full text linkMy work as a critical autoethnographer has been haunted by Elliot Eisner's insistence that arts-based research should find a place of its own and not adhere to the scientific method. I have found that the more I worked as a Bricoleur researcher, using arts-based methods, the more I came to understand that there is no need to find a place, but rather return. I argue here that as arts-based researchers the notion of serendipity and the role of a bricoleur, are useful to make sense of embodied, sensory, and at times messy, research processes