Anthropology 215B
Offered Winter Quarter (rotating with Professor Valerie Olson)
This course is the second of three in a required year-long methods, design, and grant writing sequence for second year anthropology students. The objective is to provide students with the tools to design a “framework of ethnographic inquiry.” It especially aims to provide training and immersion in multiscalar ethnographic research design. The emphasis is on the meaning(s) of scale and how to conceptualize the project itself: how does one scale theory, sites, literature, and methods? What is the assumed consonance between theoretical frameworks, research topics, and objects and sites of study? How do we imagine our way in to a research problem and what is the significance of that problem?
Students learn how to:
1) develop a research topic and an object of study: know the difference and relationship between both;
2) design an inquiry-driven data collection plan that is connected to overarching analysis and significance;
3) practice working with scale in multiple directions and dimensions as it pertains to concept work and theory-making;
4) understand and develop overarching research questions (macro), data collecting questions (meso), and interview questions (micro); learn to distinguish all three and their scalar possibilities;
5) create a plan for engaging and organizing sometimes non-intuitive sets of literature(s); understand how to align literatures to conceptualization, methods, and theory.
6) work with existing fieldnotes and transcribed interviews (preliminary data) to incorporate into the project concept and design;
7) develop project management techniques;
8) help develop all the nuts and bolts needed to write a dissertation proposal, which will take place the following quarter;
9) establish a timeline and list of all you need to do to complete your dissertation research; and
10) develop a solid IRB draft.
The learning process is the actual hands-on work, prior to and within class as well as class discussions, which will carry students into their most creative ethnographic imaginaries.
The intellectual, organizational, and ethical problems that motivate the course are: How will you investigate your object of study and answer your research questions? How do you design and coordinate the elements of a research project? How can you become an effective, innovative, responsible, and socially-engaged researcher? What is your emerging long term “research program” that is emanating from your dissertation project?