Anthropology 638 - Writing Ethnography

This graduate seminar takes writing ethnography as its object of analysis and its subject of practice. The seminar provides students a supportive environment to gain perspective on the politics of representation and practice the arts of noticing. We delve into whether we are committed to ethnography as a genre, and if so how and why? In addition to reading ethnographies that address urgent contemporary topics, the seminar explores a range of strategies for representing social life and provides students a space to practice their own ethnographic writing. In both our reading and writing, we engage conventional as well as unconventional forms of representation, including critical ethnography, narrative ethnography, cross-cultural memoir, and blurred genre experiments.