Giving our Work Legs: Walking Back into Research Communities to Enrich People’s Lives

• In Event: Stabilizing Change in Ethnography Inquiry

Abstract

There is a growing body of ethnographic research that is practically aimed at improving communities in which researchers gather their stories or data. This paper explores our ethical responsibility to give back in meaningful ways to the communities we study by highlighting exemplars that use ethnographers’ research understandings to improve social worlds.

One standard for the evaluation of good research is to consider how it gives us ways to reform social practices by illuminating better alternatives for working in and understanding communities. It is important to consider not only how our ethnographic work moves from the field to the page, but also then from the page back to the people who informed our work in the first place. By examining ethnographic work that walks off the pages of our journals directly back into the lives of participants in our research, we can learn how to meet a moral imperative to do work that really makes a sustainable difference.

Author

• Melanie Mills, Eastern Illinois University