Political Ethnography Working Group

Session Submission Type: Business Meeting

Session Description

Now in its second year, the Political Ethnography Working Group has four overlapping aims: (1) to build a network of scholars and researchers whose work employs ethnographic, interpretive, and qualitative research methods to analyze and explain political phenomena, (2) to provide a space for the development of collaborative projects (workshops, special journal issues, edited volumes, and grants) with a shared grounding in political ethnography as a research method, (3) to develop pedagogical strategies and best practices for teaching ethnographic methods in political science programs, and lastly, (4) to discuss the logistical challenges and ethical issues surrounding human-subject based research in political science.

Political ethnography has been defined as being at once an immersive methodology while also cultivating a sensibility (Schatz 2008). As a working group, we seek to ascertain and cultivate new methodological insights into the growing repertoire of scholarship employing diverse ethnographic methods, including participant observations, structured and semi-structured interviews, collaborative ethnography, critical ethnography and decolonial methodologies that come to bear on the political.

Given the widespread applicability of ethnography across established research programs in
political science, we hope to build connections across disparate areas of scholarship, including but not limited to the fields of migration and citizenship, race and ethnicity, urban politics, gender and sexuality, public policy, law and courts, religion and politics, and international security. To this end, the political ethnography working group is interested in the “how” of qualitative political science research, to encourage a more reflexive, self aware and therefore more insightful discipline.

Sub Unit

• APSA Panels and All Meetings and Receptions

Chair

• Osman Balkan Swarthmore College