Ethnographic Café
The Ethnographic Café is a place for ethnographers to meet across disciplines, generations, and countries. We gather to talk about all things ethnographic, from history, design, and method to analysis, writing and dissemination.
We meet monthly on Zoom to discuss a recently published ethnography with its author (see our schedule of events). We also convene periodically for special thematic sessions around a salient topic in the practice of ethnography.
We continue the online conversation through short photographic essays picturing the field, video interviews of ethnographers sharing the nitty-gritty of their fieldwork, reading recommendations contributed by the community, and through a directory that will help ethnographers with shared interests to find each other.
We aim to stimulate and support the work of a new generation of ethnographers, especially doctoral students, postdocs, and junior faculty, and we hope you will join us in this endeavor.
The Ethnographic Café Organizing Team:
Ashley Mears, Ekedi Mpondo-Dika, Loïc Wacquant, and Natalie Pasquinelli
Fall 2024 Schedule
09/13 Poulami Roychowdhury with Ashley Mears, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India
10/18 Javier Auyero et al. with Cecilia Menjívar, Portraits of Persistence: Inequality and Hope in Latin America
11/08 Michel Anteby, The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field
See the events here!
Friday, November 8, 2024 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET
Michel Anteby in conversation with Brooke Harrington
The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field
Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952
Password: 1234
*Read excerpts here
Michel Anteby is a Professor of Management & Organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and Sociology at Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences. He also co-leads Boston University’s Precarity Lab. His research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organizations they belong to. He examines more specifically the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. Studied populations have included airport security officers, anesthesiologists, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, ghostwriters, puppeteers, and subway drivers.
Brooke Harrington is Professor of Economic Sociology at Dartmouth College. Since 2007, her research has examined inequality from the top end of the socio-economic spectrum, via the inner workings of the offshore financial system. Her research methods have included two years earning accreditation as an offshore wealth manager and eight years of immersive fieldwork with practicing wealth managers in 18 offshore financial centers. Her most recent book, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (2024), explains how a complex and secretive system used by billionaires affects life for the rest of us: from the degradation of electoral systems and the natural environment, to the rise of financial crises. Her previous book Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (2016) won an ASA “Outstanding Book Award.”