Full Description
The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook offers emerging and trained ethnographers exercises to spark creativity and increase the impact and beauty of ethnographic study.
With contributions by emerging scholars and leading creative ethnographers working in various social science fields (e.g., anthropologists, educators, ethnomusicologists, political scientists, geographers, and others), this volume offers readers a variety of creative prompts that ethnographers have used in their own work and university classrooms to deepen their ethnographic and artistic practice. The contributions foreground different approaches in creative practice, broadening the tools of multimodal ethnography as one designs a study, works with collaborators and landscapes, and renders ethnographic findings through a variety of media. Instructors will find dozens of creative prompts to use in a wide variety of classroom settings, including early beginners to experienced ethnographers and artists. In the eBook+ version of this book, there are numerous pop-up definitions to key ethnographic terms, links to creative ethnographic examples, possibilities for extending prompts for more advanced anthropologists, and helpful tips across all phases of inquiry projects.
This resource can be used by instructors of anthropology and other social sciences to teach students how to experiment with creative approaches, as well as how to do better public and engaged anthropology. Artists and arts faculty will also benefit from using this book to inspire culturally attuned art making that engages in research, as well as research-based art. Readers will learn how creative ethnography draws on aspects of the literary, visual, sonic, and/or performing arts. Information is provided about how scholars and artists, or scholartists, document culture in ways that serve more diverse public and academic audiences.
Contents
1. Chapter 1: Introduction to Creative Ethnography as a Field 2. Chapter 2: Creative Engagements with Social Theory: Writing through the Abstract to Arrive at the Concrete 3. Chapter 3: Reading Ethnographies with Creative Attention to the Senses 4. Chapter 4: Creative Approaches to What Matters & Paying Attention to What Makes You Curious 5. Chapter 5: Designing Ways to Make Data Sing 6. Chapter 6: Entering the Field Site: Space and the Non-Human: Seeing the Field, Landscape, and Non-Human Life in Places of Inquiry 7. Chapter 7: Language: We Are What We Speak 8. Chapter 8: Our Bodies, Our Selves: Interrogating the Ethnographic Body, Kinship and Food during Fieldwork 9. Chapter 9: People, Places, and Performance: Ritual, Religion, and Visualities 10. Chapter 10: Creative Approaches to Social Science Data 11. Chapter 11: Writing it Up: Multimodality, Genre, and How to Translate Creative Activity for Academic Audiences 12. Chapter 12: Creative Ethnographic Fieldstarters 13. Chapter 13: Looking Back and Moving Forward
