Spring 2025 Sociomedical Sciences P8786 section 001

Ethnographic Methods in Health Research

ETHNOGRAPHIC MTHDS/HLTH R

Call Number 16247
Day & Time
Location
R 8:30am-11:20am
To be announced
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Kim J Hopper
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description Among the more durable axioms of public health is this: context matters. For ethnography, this is not only an article of faith, but its raison d’etre: ethnography was invented to take context’s measure in order to understand what we’re observing. For our purposes, ethnography refers to both a method – that recursive process of participating, observing, writing/recording and reflecting, in (usually) unfamiliar spaces – and the product of that method – the often lengthy, discursive book- or feature-length documentary that results. Ethnography is distinctive among qualitative research methods in part because of its time commitment, its insistence upon extended experience felt and witnessed, rather than elicited and recounted. It is also experience examined, cross-examined, renewed and re-examined. To navigate as an ethnographer requires negotiated access (sometimes negotiated repeatedly), shifting measures of immersion and reflection, mastery of a mixed toolkit of inquiry, and an acquired ease with uncertainty. If ethnographers commonly find themselves nagged by an aching sense of inadequacy at what they’ve learned, they are nonetheless bent on wresting from it some provisional reconstructions and analyses. Setting aside such signature anxieties, we can also say that ethnography is documentary infused with theory and argument; it is gesture caught, phrased and interpreted. If capturing culture (that staged and enacted document) is its objective, then a certain “talent for the makeshift” (Auden) is essential. Although writing (really: rewriting) remains its preferred medium, it is one rapidly being joined by visual technologies as well, although that variation will not be explored here). This, then, is an intensive seminar in the nuts and bolts of reading and doing such work – and of the reflexivity required to do it well.

This fall our substantive focus will be ethnographies of madness and its treatment, with special attention to emerging work by service users and/or people with direct experience with psychosis – primarily in North America, but touching on experience elsewhere as well.
Web Site Vergil
Department Sociomedical Sciences
Enrollment 7 students (16 max) as of 4:05PM Saturday, December 21, 2024
Subject Sociomedical Sciences
Number P8786
Section 001
Division School of Public Health
Open To GSAS, Public Health
Note Priorities: SMS MS, PhD, MPH; PHRM Certificate
Section key 20251SOSC8786P001