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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
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 Gender Danger in the Field
See the events here!
Ethnographic Café Special Panel: Gender Danger in the Field
May 9, 2025
*Access recommended readings here.
How do gender and sexuality shape the ways we move through the field, the academy, and in the writing process? In this special event, we’ll reflect on harassment, risk, safety and which experiences are centered—or silenced—in the production of ethnographic knowledge.
Panelists have recommended a set of readings to start the conversation (see description below.)
Sneha Annavarapu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, with a joint appointment in the South Asian Studies Programme. In her work, she takes an ethnographic approach to the politics of transportation, infrastructure, class relations, and gender in contemporary Indian cities and, more recently, Singapore. She is currently working on a book project titled On The Move: the politics of driving in urban India.
Rebecca Hanson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. She is currently a visiting fellow Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Her research looks at security policies implemented in Latin America that attempt to reduce crime and violence. She is also passionate about qualitative inquiry and ethnography, with a focus on how power dynamics within academia contribute to experiences with violence as researchers conduct fieldwork. She is co-author of Harassed: Gender, Bodies and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019), co-editor of the Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing During Chavismo (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and author of Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Coercive Power and Venezuela's Security Landscape During Chavismo (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Patricia Richards is Professor of Sociology & Women's and Gender Studies and Director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Georgia. With Sharmila Rudrappa, she is the current co-editor of Gender & Society. She is the author of Pobladoras, Indígenas, and the State: Conflicts over Women’s Rights in Chile (Rutgers, 2004), Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy and Indigenous Rights (Pittsburgh, 2013), and coauthor, with Rebecca Hanson, of Harassed: Gender, Bodies and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019).
Tey Meadow is Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Tey’s research examines a broad range of issues, including the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, the international politics of family diversity, the creation and maintenance of legal classifications, and newer work in the ways social categories structure erotic life. Tey is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, a co-editor of Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology and published widely in academic journals.
Access all recommended readings here.
Sneha Annavarapu recommends:
Günel, G. and Watanabe, C., (2024). Patchwork ethnography. American Ethnologist, 51(1), pp.131-139.
Schneider, L. T. (2020). Sexual violence during research: How the unpredictability of fieldwork and the right to risk collide with academic bureaucracy and expectations. Critique of Anthropology, 40(2), pp. 173-193.
Irwin, K. (2006). Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships. Qualitatuve Sociology, 29, 155–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-006-9011-3
Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards recommend:
Maya Berry et al.'s "Toward a Fugitive Anthropology
Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4: 537–565. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.05.
"We think both the Berry article and our chapter do a good job linking sexual harassment in the field with norms and practices within academia. The Berry article also poignantly highlights the costs of sexual harassment and violence in the field and helps us think through these issues from an intersectional perspective. Our chapter examines the history of ethnographic norms within academia and the risks they create for researchers."
Tey Meadow recommends:
Shamus Khan. 2019. “The Subpoena of Ethnographic Data.” Sociological Forum, 34(1): 253-263.
Tey Meadow. 2023. “Transgender Youth are Under Attack: the Work of Response.” Sociological Forum, 38(4): 1486-1493.
** ETHNOGRAPHERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE, NOT EVEN YOUR FIELD NOTES **
** ETHNOGRAPHERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE, NOT EVEN YOUR FIELD NOTES **
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