Walking Seminar on Ethnographic methods and guiding questions

The next walking seminar will be on October 16^th (from 13:00 o’clock until early evening, depending on the chosen destination). The theme will be Ethnographic methods and guiding questions.

Here is the tension: if you go into the field without a question your investigations risks to lack direction and you may not get any kind of grasp on what is going on. However, with a question that is too tight or too tightly handled, you may not be open enough to surprises. What are good ways of handling that tension in the practice of doing ethnographic research – that is to say what are good ways in your research?

If you are in the very last stage of a project, this tension has not gone away. For even if you are no longer in the position to gather more stories from the field, you still face the question how to tell those stories: as answers to questions you (ever so astutely) asked or as surprising findings that unexpectedly hit you in the face? (There may be other variants.. discuss!)

For those who would like to orient their thinking beforehand, here is a possibly inspiring text:

Taylor, Janelle S. 2014. “The Demise of the Bumbler and the Crock: From Experience to Accountability in Medical Education and Ethnography.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): n/a – n/a. doi:10.1111/aman.12124.