COMS 7170 - Contemporary and Critical Approaches to Ethnographic Methods

An advanced qualitative methods seminar focusing on critical and contemporary ethnographic research. Students understand the history, meaning, and evolution of ethnographic fieldwork by learning about mainstream, marginalized, de-colonial, indigenous, transnational, and feminist approaches to ethnographic practices. Students explore the crucial relationship between researchers and participants, researcher subjectivity and positionality, cultural translation, the crises of representation, and ethnographic claims to knowledge. Students are exposed to critical writing epistemologies such as experimental and performative writing, ethnopoetics, and autoethnography The course is both conceptual and practical, with theoretical discussions and hands-on training in participant observation, interviewing, analysis, and writing.

Requisites:
Credit Hours: 4
Repeat/Retake Information: May not be retaken.
Lecture/Lab Hours: 4.0 seminar
Eligible Grades: A-F,WP,WF,WN,FN,AU,I