Monday, June 3, 2019 - 9:00am to 2:00pm
Monday, June 3, 2019 - 6:00pm to 10:00pm
Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 9:00am to 2:00pm
Description: Come get your hands dirty in the messy world of meeting ethnography! If you do ethnographic research, you will often find yourself in meetings. Meetings are arguably the ultimate contemporary anthropological object: a ubiquitous, taken-for-granted structure of everyday life. They are also powerful data-collection windows, ethnographic fieldwork spaces through which researchers can gain access to data related to power, communication, structure, agency, performativity, identity, discourse, relational culture, and more.
In this workshop, you'll learn how to think about meetings in your field site, how to design your research project with meetings in mind, and some concrete strategies for collecting and analyzing meeting-based data. Through participant observation in a local public Town Council meeting together, students will also engage in hands-on practice in every aspect of meeting ethnography, from research design to data collection and analysis. Graduate students and faculty at any stage of research are welcome to attend; previous ethnographic research experience helpful but not necessary.
Instructor: Jen Sandler, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at UMass Amherst. She has been developing the Meeting Ethnography Project, in collaboration with Renita Thedvall at the Stockholm Center for Organization Research, since 2013. The Meeting Ethnography Project has involved three workshops bringing together over 25 scholars; dozens of papers and several organized sessions at international conferences; and an edited volume published in 2017 titled Meeting Ethnography: Meetings as key technologies of governance, development, and resistance. She studies epistemic activism primarily in the United States, including a wide variety of social change projects from scientific advocacy to reform coalitions to social movements, Jen has also developed a set of workshops for meeting practitioners involved in U.S.-based social justice work.
Questions? For more information about this or any of the ISSR Summer Methodology Workshops, please contact ISSR Methodologist Jessica Pearlman (jpearlman@issr.umass.edu).
Registration for this workshop is now closed.
Five College Students and Faculty
- Five College Undergraduate and Graduate Students…………………………..$150/person
- Five College Faculty………………………………………………………………....$300/person
Non-Five College Students and Faculty
- Non-Five College Undergraduate and Graduate Students…………………………..$300/person
- Non-Five College Faculty………………………………………………………………....$425/person
Registration note: The Five Colleges include: UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College. Registration closes for each workshop 2 full business days prior to the start date. Please note: payment of registration does not guarantee a spot in these space-limited workshops. You will receive an email confirming the names of workshops for which your registration has been accepted. If a workshop you have registered for is over-subscribed, you will be refunded and offered placement on a wait-list.. If paying with departmental funds or personal checks, contact Karen Mason (@email).
Cancellation note: In cases where enrollment is 5 or less, we reserve the right to cancel the workshop. In cases where the registrant cancels prior to the workshop, a full refund will be given with two weeks notice, and 50% refund will be given with one week notice. We will not be able to refund in cases where registrant does not notify us of cancellation at least one week prior to the beginning date of the workshop.