Ethnographic Engagements: Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: Why fighting familiarity matters
	Strategies for fighting familiarity
	The familiarity problem
	Our intellectual standpoints
	The empirical examples
	The structure of the book
Chapter 1: Core themes
	Ethnography
	Key themes
	Two powerful concepts
		The gradient of unfamiliarity
		The epistemology of ignorance
	Strategies for better ethnography
		Revisiting insightful ethnographies from the past
		Studying the empirical topic in other cultures
		Focusing on ‘different’ actors
		Studying the topic in an unfamiliar setting
		Being self-consciously alert for sexism or racism or ageism or heteronormativity in the setting
		Adopting standpoints
		Middle-range concepts
		Permanent recordings
		Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
	Conclusion
Chapter 2: Good questions and good designs
	Not empty but open
	Foreshadowed problems
	Implementing the research questions
	Research ‘questions’ and research ‘design’
	Conclusions
Chapter 3: Access, openings and encounters
	Access
	Initial encounters
	Initial encounters
	Conclusion: Finding one’s feet
Chapter 4: Initial analysis and focusing strategies
	Inductive and deductive reasoning
	Abductive reasoning
	Initial data analysis
	Conclusion
Chapter 5: Revisiting data collection
	Fresh strategies
	Sound
	Looking
	Absences
	Practical activities
	Ignorance(s) and non-knowledge
	Multiple mobilities: Embodiment in the ‘world on the move’
	Moving bodies
	Transfer points and liminal places
	Virtual movements
	Studying moving informants by moving with them
	Imagined and anticipated movements
	Memories of past movements
	The study of places that do and do not move
	Objects that can be followed
	Time-space diaries
	Fieldnotes in the main phase of fieldwork
		Fieldnotes and boundary objects
		Liminality
	Conclusion
Chapter 6: Organising and analysing
	Coding
	Accounts
	Standpoints, positionality and reflective practice
	Conclusion
Chapter 7: Reading and reflecting
	Ethnographic genres
	Fieldwork ‘confessions’
	The academic autobiography or life study
	The autoethnography
	Reading these three genres
	Conclusions
Chapter 8: Writing the unfamiliar
	The doctoral thesis
	Journal articles and book chapters
	The monograph
	New forms of output and of text
	Poems
	A play for three voices
		Fiction
	Conclusion
Chapter 9: Leaving the field
	Those who never had a separate ‘field’
	The study, the re-study and the much-studied ssite
	Leaving
		‘Deciding’ to leave
		The careful review
		Organising and communicating the exit
		Documenting the exit
	Challenging the accumulated familiarity
		Recordings and documents
		Middle-range concepts
		Taking race and ethnicity seriously
		Gender
		Other actors
		Three ‘reading’ strategies
	Conclusion
Chapter 10: Epilogue
Bibliography
Index