Fieldwork in Political Science 1: Ethnography's Home in the Field

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Given the widespread applicability of ethnography across established research programs in political science, this roundtable explores two interrelated questions, 1. How can political ethnography encourage a more reflexive, self-aware and therefore more insightful discipline? And 2. How do political ethnographers situate themselves within their respective fields, both methodologically and through fieldwork? Political ethnography has been defined as being at once an immersive methodology while also cultivating a sensibility (Schatz 2008). This roundtable brings together political ethnographers from multiple stages in their careers to discuss issues around how to conduct research using immersive, interpretive and embedded methodologies to understand political processes and movements. 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.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Interpretive Methodologies & Methods

Cosponsor

• Division 46: Qualitative Methods

Chair

• Nicholas Rush Smith CUNY-City College

Presenters

• Tani H Sebro Humboldt State University

• Osman Balkan Swarthmore College

• Nicole Sunday Grove

• Sarah Marie Wiebe University of Hawai'i, Manoa