Introduction to research problems and research design techniques. Will involve local field research on the collection, analysis, and presentation of data. This course requires 15 hours of work per week including class time, outside work and preparation. One section meeting per week will be required.

Many research methods courses envision a mechanical process of learning and applying a traditional set of techniques for producing “data.” This course moves in an entirely different direction. It presents a broad range of topics that are commonly used by anthropologists, including informed consent, interviewing, participant observation, and archival research, but also explores more recently-emerging methods as media analysis, digital or remote ethnography, auto-ethnography, and activist, engaged, and community-based participatory research. Rather than a fixed set of “tools,” they will be scrutinized analytically in terms of the presuppositions, subject positions, and power relations they involve. The course challenges each student to build their own critical and creative approach, one reflecting their life experiences and social locations. One focus is an ethnography of an epidemic in an Amazonian rainforest written by the instructor, used as an object of inquiry to let students see behind the curtain, analyzing how the project began, decisions about what to document and how, and collaborations with interlocutors in shaping the ethnography and analysis. The course will also include a collective process in which each student can use the above set of approaches in documenting their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion Sections: Meeting Patterns + Meeting Space To Be Determined

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills