484 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. The Ethnographic Problematic: Race and Ethnicity in 21st Century Ethnography

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

From its ethnocentric origins to its modern day “jungle book” tropes, the methods of ethnography have a problematic relationship with matters of race and ethnicity. When they are at their best, these modes of inquiry help advance fresh ideas among a disciplined body of research. At their worst, however, they reaffirm pejorative stereotypes, invert value as fact, and lend scientific affirmation to broader structures of white racial dominance. Recent articles in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other outlets have called into question, responding to the acclaimed and critiqued book On the Run by Alice Goffman, the utility of ethnography as a viable method of social science. Its critics have called into question whether ethnographic studies have enough “objectivity,” “rigor,” and “systematic analysis” to be considered “good” science. Other criticisms are akin to Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man,” pointing out the racial politics of whose work gets acknowledged, and perhaps more importantly, the work that is refused to be seen. In the proposed session, we hope to bring together a coherent, unified discussion that prompts a timely discussion regarding concerns of ontology, epistemology, and knowledge production inherent within the practices of ethnography – particularly those that have implications for the maintenance of racial and ethnic inequality, with the hope of setting an agenda for a more race critical sociological ethnographic project for the future.

Sub Unit

• Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities / The Ethnographic Problematic: Race and Ethnicity in 21st Century Ethnography

Session Organizer

• Kasey Henricks, University of Tennessee

Presider

• Kasey Henricks, University of Tennessee

Individual Presentations

• A Black/Nigerian-American Studying Black–White Couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro - Chinyere Osuji, Rutgers University at Camden

• Empathetic Ethnography of Mosque Communities: The Everyday Sociological Study of Highly Politicized Populations - Elisabeth Becker

• Negotiating Ambiguous Standpoints: Transnational Research and Conducting Reflexive Feminist Ethnography in Socio-Legal Studies - Sohoon Lee, University of Sydney

• Resistance and Self-discipline: Responses by Muslim Americans to Their Surveillance - Saher Farooq Selod, Simmons College

Discussant

• Victor E. Ray, The University of Tennessee--Knoxville