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
Spring 2025 Schedule
03/28 Special Panel on the legacy of Michael Burawoy
04/18 Randol Contreras, The Marvelous Ones, in conversation with Ranita Ray
05/09 Special Panel on Gendered Risks in the Field
See the events here!
Friday, March 28, 2025 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET
THE BURAWOY ETHNOGRAPHIC LOVEFEST
Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952
Password: 1234
THE BURAWOY ETHNOGRAPHIC LOVEFEST is a special session of the Ethnographic Café aiming to celebrate the work and person of ethnographer extraordinaire Michael Burawoy, who passed away tragically on February 3, 2025.
Four former students of Michael's from diverse sociological walks and generations (Emine Fidan Elcioglu, Sheba George, Emily Ruppel, Jeffrey Sallaz) will reflect upon learning the craft of fieldwork from Michael for 10 minutes each. The rest of the session will then be devoted to reminiscences, testimonials and sundry contributions from around the globe.
Emine Fidan Elcioglu is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her work examines the relationship between everyday political behavior under conditions of extreme inequality, by drawing on different instances of migration politics. She is the author of Divided by the Wall: Progressive and Conservative Immigration Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of California Press, 2020).
Sheba George is professor in the College of Medicine at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and Adjunct Professor in the Community Health Sciences Deptin the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. She has studied health inequities among vulnerable, under-resourced populations and currently directs a range of health professional training programs for pre-health professional students, community health workers and medical students. She is the author of When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (University of California Press, 2005).
Emily Ruppel is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley and incoming assistant professor at UC Davis (in fall 2026). Michael Burawoy was her dissertation chair and primary mentor throughout graduate school. Her dissertation focuses on job training programs for disabled workers, using historical research to trace the growth of this industry since the 1970s and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate contemporary labor practices. Papers from this project have been published in American Sociological Review, Work and Occupations, Social Science & Medicine, and Critical Sociology.
Jeff Sallaz is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. He is an ethnography of work, labor, and markets. He is author, most recently, of Lives on the Line from Oxford University Press.