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Through a series of case studies, this book provides an understanding of the practice of ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of contexts, from everyday settings to formal institutions. Demonstrating that ethnography is best viewed as a series of site-specific challenges, it showcases ethnographic fieldwork as ongoing analytic engagement with concrete social worlds. From engagements with boxing and nightlife to preschooling and migratory encampments, portrayed is a process that is anything but a set of pre-packaged challenges and hurdles of simple-minded procedural tropes such as entrée, rapport, and departure. Instead, ethnography emerges as what it has been from its beginnings: a rough-and-ready analytic matter of seeking understanding in unrecognized and diverse fields of interaction. Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in the practice of participant observation and related questions of research methodology.
List of contents
Introduction: Contours of the Craft PART I: SITES 1. Insider Ethnography in Professional Boxing 2. Getting at the Experience of Confinement in Detention 3. Working Against Social Order in Documenting Imprisonment 4. Site Juxtaposition and Constitutive Comparison in Provisional Encampments PART II: SELVES 5. Is Ethnography Only for Early Career Researchers? 6. Senior Activists and Age Affiliations in Ethnographic Peering 7. Shifting Codes, Continual Vetting and Recurrent Rapport-Building 8. Creating Space for "Foreign Brides" to Talk Back PART III: SOCIAL WORLDS 9. Preschool Social Worlds in Interactional Context 10. Going Concerns of Ethnographic Membership 11. When Fieldwork Comes Home 12. Interpretive Complexity in Language Discordant Fieldwork PART IV: AFTERWORD Elaborating Contours of the Craft
About the author
Amir B. Marvasti is Professor of Sociology at Penn State Altoona, USA. He is the author of Qualitative Research in Sociology and the co-editor of Researching Social Problems, The Sage Handbook of Interview Research and Doing Qualitative Research: A Comprehensive Guide.
Jaber F. Gubrium is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Missouri, USA. He is the co-author of Constructing the Life Course and the co-editor of Postmodern Interviewing, Aging and Everyday Life and Qualitative Research Practice.
Summary
Through a series of case studies, this book provides an understanding of the practice of ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of contexts, from everyday settings to formal institutions.
