Reflections on meeting ethnography as method in studying "through" international development

• In Event: Educational policy as a research object: the ethnographic possibilities, challenges and limits of studying power

Proposal

For several decades, anthropologists have considered how best to conduct multi-sited ethnography that highlights interrelated spaces of globalized power (see, e.g., Marcus 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Marcus (1995) suggests several methodological tracking strategies in which anthropologists “follow” people, things, metaphors, stories, or conflicts. Nader (1972) calls for anthropologists to “study up” in powerful institutions. More recently, Reinhold (1994) urges researchers to “study through” in order to get at the multivalent nature of power. According to Wright and Reinhold (2011, 87-88): “Reinhold’s concept of ‘studying through’ offers a strategy which enables researchers to follow a process of contestation as it tracks back and forth across different sites in a policy field over time, so as to reveal how a new governing discourse emerges and becomes institutionalized.”
On a practical level, however, there are significant challenges to “studying through.” These include: biases within anthropology about what counts as real fieldwork; difficulties gaining access to funding institutions; and onerous resource requirements for multi-sited research. In the field of international development education, one common response to these difficulties has been to pair discourse analysis of official development materials and limited interview data to represent “the top” with extensive ethnographic research with communities “on the ground” (Kendall and Silver 2017).
“Meeting ethnography” as a method offers a unique opportunity to examine how relations of power and authority are produced through international development discourse, policies, and practices, and the consequences of these relations on a range of key actors in development (Kendall and Silver 2017; Sandler and Thedvall 2017). In this paper, I explore some strengths and weaknesses in engaging meeting ethnography as method in the context of “development.” I reflect on a year fieldwork that I undertook for my dissertation, Sex, Schooling, and Redemption in Malawi. The dissertation is an ethnography of how diverse actors engaged with the issue of student pregnancy, and with each other, in the process of reforming a national policy related to girls. It focuses specifically on Malawi’s Readmission Policy, which was originally created in 1993 to ban the permanent expulsion of pregnant girls from school. Despite its symbolic significance, however, the policy has largely failed to get girls back to school. In 2016, Malawi’s Ministry of Science, Education, and Technology spearheaded a formal review process to create a new version of the policy.
Over the course of a year, I watched the official review process of Readmission Policy unfold and stall, attending key meetings, including Ministry-level policy review sessions, a National Stakeholders’ meeting, and policy dissemination workshops. I show how attention to policy meetings as ethnographic objects can reveal some of the subtler strategies that government officials deployed to contest and rework government/NGO/funder relations. I argue that meeting ethnography can be extremely productive if paired with other, more traditional methodological practices, including extended participant observation and interviews. Finally, I reflect on some of the challenges that I faced conducting fieldwork in official meetings.

Author

• Rachel Silver, University of Wisconsin-Madison