Understanding Ethnography: Slow Data for Fast Times – Paperback

Understanding Ethnography provides a concise and rigorous introduction to the value, methods, and aims of ethnography, written in plain language for students, educators, and non-academic readers alike. It explains the rationale, values and methods of ethnographic research-outlining how and why it is done. It also offers the reader a foundation for understanding the ethnographic works that result from the research-how and why to read them and to understand the data and insights that ethnography provides.

As an introductory guidebook, this book also makes a larger argument for the importance of ethnography both as research method and teaching pedagogy for gaining human insights precisely when digital devices have proliferated and AI has emerged as a unique challenge. Key topics covered include:

• the nature of ethnographic research
• the importance of context in understanding meaning
• the ethnographer as the data collector
• the value of serendipity in research
• what it means to work across difference
• the kind of data ethnographic research produces
• interpreting the results of ethnographic research

In addition to targeting undergraduate and graduate classrooms, this book proposes to reach popular or professional non-academic readers who seek an accessible introduction to this genre of research and writing. It is intended as a guidebook-something to sit on the desk, the shelf, or the syllabus right alongside ethnographic methods texts and full-length ethnographies, offering context, an itinerary, and a set of useful waypoints.