SOSANT9010 ¨C Doing Ethnography: Approaches and Methods

Course content

This course will prepare you for PhD fieldwork and guide some of your anthropological reading during the first year of the programme. The course will also help you to make choices about methods, interlocutors and sites while planning the fieldwork. The focus is methodological and practical, yet inevitably also theoretical, since ethnography intertwines empirical and conceptual work. The course will be grounded in our joint reading of ethnographic texts across diverse regional and thematic areas, including several monographs, part of which will be in student-led reading groups to improve reading skills and facilitate informal discussions. Reading will be guided by the question of what different authors did, during fieldwork, to gather the materials and insights that they present and analyse in their texts. We will discuss how empirical observations and encounters informed the authors¡¯ theoretical choices, as well as how their theoretical commitments engendered particular modes of observation and engagement. This methodology-centred reading will be accompanied by lectures and discussions about different methods - from traditional to experimental - and their theoretical implications.

The course will be taught by a group of anthropologists to present a range of methodological-theoretical approaches, including:

• presence and participation in social inter-action

• conversations and interviews with people inhabiting the chosen field(s)

• navigating between in-person encounters and digitally mediated interaction

• examinations of documentary and archival sources, media and news outlets, images and film, the arts, music

• materially focused work, on landscapes and non-human life, infrastructures and technologies, or inanimate objects and matter

• experimental and collaborative methods together with other interested parties or colleagues from other disciplines, including artists or natural scientists

• engaged and activist fieldwork, based on shared commitments and aims

Across diverse ¡®schools¡¯, ¡®turns¡¯ or theoretical and political convictions, ethnographic research shares a commitment to careful, curious and open-ended empirical attention to lives, places and sites, and the complicated, changing relations between them. Attention to such ¡®social life¡¯, broadly conceived, informs the ethnographer¡¯s conceptual, abstract, theoretical reading and thought. Based on our survey of ethnographic possibilities, the course will equip you with skills to develop an extended research proposal, including key methods and questions for your doctoral project research.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

• Familiarity with methodological tools and choices in contemporary ethnographies and their relation to theoretical orientations

• Understanding of different forms of contemporary fieldwork, including diverse methods, sites and interlocutors, and positionalities

• Comprehension of the relationship between research questions and aims, methodology and theoretical interests.

• Overview of the origins and historical transformations of anthropological fieldwork and methods.

Skills

• Ability to critically reflect on other anthropologists¡¯ methods and fieldwork practice, based on their ethnographic texts

• Capacity to choose appropriate methods and fieldwork practices relative to one¡¯s own research questions and aims

• Openness to experiment with innovative and experimental methodologies appropriate to one¡¯s own field sites and interlocutors

• Ability to link ethnographic methods to the ethics and politics of field research.

General competence

• Appreciation of qualitative fieldwork as collaborative knowledge production

• Ability to reflect on one¡¯s position in relation to research aims and questions

• Understanding of ethical and political aspects of qualitative research

• Capacity to develop an independent and realistic research plan.

Admission to the course

This course is mandatory for PhD candidates in Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Other PhD candidates in Anthropology or related disciplines may be considered for admission on a case-by-case basis.

For PhD candidates from the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo: Apply in Studentweb.

Other PhD candidates may apply by a webform. Please contact the PhD administration at the Department of Social Anthropology for access to the form:?Contact us - Faculty of Social Sciences

Application deadline: 1 February

Teaching

3 x 2-day, day-long teaching blocks combining lectures and group discussions moderated by the lecturer. Teaching includes collective reading sessions followed by discussions, focused on methods and fieldwork choices, about the readings.

Candidates are expected to prepare for the course by reading mandatory curriculum in advance.

Examination

Obligatory activities

• Participation in all three teaching blocks is mandatory.

• Participants must during the course submit 3 texts (max. 1000 words), i.e. one before each session. Based on instructions provided by the lecturer, these texts will examine ethnographic texts for their methods and fieldwork practices, positionality and ethics, or critically explore the potential and uses of one ethnographic method across diverse texts, and its relation to contemporary anthropological theory.

Exam

Participants will, after the course, submit an extended research proposal (6000 words +/- 10 %) including:

• Concise research aims and questions

• Description of ethnographic context and relevant regional literature

• Methodologies and relations to one¡¯s chosen theoretical frames

• Ethics and positionality

• Initial tentative fieldwork plans

Language of examination

English or one of the Scandinavian languages.

Grading scale

Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale.

More about examinations at UiO

• Use of sources and citations
• How to use AI as a student
• Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
• Withdrawal from an exam
• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Explanation of grades and appeals
• Resitting an exam
• Cheating/attempted cheating

You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.