The Ethnographic Choice: Why Ethnographers Do Ethnography

How do we reconcile the complex and subjective dimensions of ethnographic research as they pertain to ethnographers themselves? What is to be made of the compelling draw the ethnographic process tends to have on its researchers? This article uses hermeneutic phenomenology to examine how ethnographers’ lifeworlds make possible the doing of ethnographic research. I draw on moments from past research to argue for an inexorable link between lifeworlds and ethnography, which results in ethnographers being definitively, yet uniquely and contingently, “chosen” to live as ethnographers. This multilayered snapshot of ethnographic subjectivity seeks to embolden the reflective space necessary for promoting a fuller sense of accountability by ethnographers, a fuller understanding and awareness of the complexities inherent to ours and others’ ethnographic stories

Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation: Experience ↔ Subjectivity ↔ Research

This essay examines Joan W. Scott’s (1991) essay “The Evidence of Experience” in light of cultural studies scholarship that uses personal, experiential evidence, and/or innovative/critical methodologies. The authors argue that the situated, (inter)subjective, and complex nature of this inquiry conscientiously has brought to life Scott’s call for historicizing experience, rather than blindly using it as foundational, and enthusiastically continues doing so to date. In this way, these critical methods already seek to problematize and complicate experience, even as it is used to talk toward and/ or against cultural norms