What Does It Mean for Ethnographers to Do Policy?

• In Event: 2351 - Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies

Abstract

What does it mean for ethnographers to “do” policy? While links between ethnography and policy are as old as the field itself, there is a lack of consensus as to the answer. Does doing policy involve “applied” ethnographic practice, explicit engagement with policymakers and their problems, or is ethnography’s policy warrant its mere general “policy relevance” (Katz 1999)? These questions remain for generations of ethnographers who study marginalized groups, people-processing institutions, social movements, and phenomena that are directly linked to institutionalized policy areas. Some ethnographers explicitly engage with policy audiences by conducting applied research for organizations, publishing with commercial presses, and by sharing their findings via mainstream media outlets. More often, however, policy engagement occurs on a local level as ethnographers who have negotiated access to a field site through a gatekeeper organization will inevitably be asked “well, what did you find?” and then, “and so what?” or “to what end?” Ethnographers must also provide summary response to these questions in print, concluding discussions of their research by extrapolating their findings to offer general policy discussion, recommendations, and advocacy. In this essay, I discuss doing policy engagement as a methodological concern and propose a framework for ethnographers to develop their research’s policy aspects. Most ethnographers are already and constantly doing policy relevance in their fieldwork and analysis through their consideration of the local aspects of systems, processes, and outcomes. Ethnographers can exploit these dimensions of their fieldwork by empirically grounding their policy analysis and prescription, achieving correspondence between the level of analysis in research and in policy, and strategically extrapolating aspects of research findings to broader public policy debates. To illustrate this approach, I draw on contemporary debates about public sociology and ethnography, and supplement this discussion with insights from my ongoing fieldwork on the eviction in Los Angeles County.

Author

• Kyle Nelson, University of California-Los Angeles