Seminar Series on New Frontiers of Ethnographic Fieldwork, Michaelmas Term 2024
Convened by: Alpa Shah (Social Anthropology, Oxford) and Mathijs Pelkmans (Social Anthropology, LSE)
Location: All Souls College, Oxford, either the Wharton Room or the Old Library.
Time: 3-4.45pm on Thursdays of Week 1-2, 5, 7-8
In this series of seminars, we explore the radical potential of ethnographic fieldwork in new domains of life. That is, locations and foci of field research that the Polish - British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski – often thought of as pioneering anthropological field research – and his immediate successors, may never have dreamed of centring as field sites. Away from the exotic tropical beach, or the remote mountain village, over the last few decades anthropologists have explored the radical, even revolutionary, potential of ethnography in new frontiers. Whether it is inside prisons, in far-right groups, amidst digital hacker communities, among financial elites, or with animals, anthropologists have been revealing new insights about the world through time-honoured principles of conducting field research.
What are these time-honoured principles of ethnographic fieldwork? What insights have they revealed in these new frontiers that would have been difficult to obtain through the methods of other disciplines? How do we do research in settings that are poorly or entirely inaccessible or that extend into different realities and domains of non-humans? How do we do research among people who are walled off or among those who hold views we find objectionable?
Seminar contributors will seek to answer these questions by reflecting on their ethnographic work and its revelations; thinking about the virtues and limits of old methods in new domains of life; as well as how anthropological methods have to be reimagined and redesigned to address the challenges of unorthodox field sites. Presenters will compare and contrast their contributions with those of scholars from other disciplines working on similar issues. In doing so, the series as a whole, will reveal the uniqueness of anthropological approaches.
At a time when anthropology is under threat – for instance, with departments closing or being seriously undermined across the UK – when the practice of ethnography is getting more and more difficult to protect, with funding bodies questioning the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork and even the necessity of visiting people to hear what they have to say when a phone call is possible, this is a seminar series to celebrate, think through and present the virtues of ethnographic fieldwork and its potential to create new knowledge about the world.
