The Site Study: Ethnography from Start to Finish

Speaker: Elijah Anderson, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology, Yale University

This session focuses on how to “make sense” of one’s field work experience and then to represent it as an ethnographic document. While engaging in field work, the ethnographer collects data, makes observations, and writes a series of field notes and conceptual memos. The field worker then works to produce an account–a meaningful description of the “local knowledge” and “shared understandings” of the people of the social setting, including what they say and what they do together there–that ultimately contributes to the existing literature, or to “what is known.”