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 2024 Schedule
04/19 Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles
05/24 Ana Villarreal, The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis
See the events here!
Friday, May 24, 12-1.30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET
Ana Villarreal in conversation with Ieva Jusionyte
The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis
Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952
Password: 1234
*Read excerpts here
Ana Villarreal is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University specializing in the sociology of violence, emotions, and urban life. Her first book The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis (2024) draws on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a major turf war in Monterrey, Mexico to bring two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus—its ability to both isolate and concentrate people and resources, deepening inequality. The book puts forth a new approach to the study of emotion and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear and violence worsen inequality beyond Mexico and the "war on drugs."
Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist who studies borders and violence, she is the author of three books, including award-winning ethnography, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018) and, most recently, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (April 2024). Jusionyte is the editor of the California Series in Public Anthropology and a member of the Advisory Committee of Global Action on Gun Violence.