Anthropology 30B
Offered Fall or Winter Quarter
This course introduces undergraduates to the making of anthropological knowledge: ethnography. Students get hands-on training to do ethnographic research. Throughout the quarter, students conceptualize a research project, gather original ethnographic data, and write an analytical paper on research findings. Specifically, they learn how to: choose a research topic, evaluate ethical considerations, construct overarching research questions, identify ethnographic sites, identify data sets to be collected, conduct interviews and participant observation, appropriately choose other or nontraditional methods, conduct oneself with field interlocutors, code and analyze data, identify literatures, conduct library research, develop conceptual tools to analyze multiple moving parts of the project, and conceptualize and write an anthropology paper that connects data to theory and argument. The intent is to also deepen practices of time management, organization, documentation, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills – all necessary for executing an ethnographic research project as well as for any career. Because ethnography can be applied to a range of fields (journalism, business, non-profit research, development projects, and community organization to name a few), students will learn how to represent their newly acquired skills on a resume and present them to future employers. This is an excellent preparation course for the UCI Anthropology Honors Program.