Wk 8- Ethnography/ PO

Question 1

ethnography etymology

Answer 1

Greek:

Ethos = the nation
Graphe = writing. (d of HG: 217-218)

• both the research method AND the product of this method
• “letting others speak”
• typically involves 1 + year in the field and learning another language (d of hg)

Question 2

Ethnography Definition

Answer 2

“Seeking to understand people’s experiences… from a participant’s perspective”

“Frequently entails a year or more ‘in the field’ and may require learning another language” (D of E)

• Ways of humanising geographical research post ‘quantitative research’

Question 3

Ethnographic research has developed out of a concern to…

Answer 3

• Understand the world views and ways of life of actual people from the ‘inside’ in the contexts of their everyday, lived experiences

Question 4

3 Staged Process of PO

Answer 4

1) Gain ACCESS to a particular community
2) LIVES AND/OR WORKS AMONG the people under study in order to take on their world views and ways of life
3) TRAVELS BACK TO THE ACADEMY TO make sense of this through writing up an account of that community’s ‘culture’

Question 5

When using PO approach, researcher must consider …(3)

Answer 5

1. (In)ability to access the kinds of research communities which you might consider studying
   2) The way that you will inevitably have to take on a CERTAIN KIND OF ROLE to gain access
   3) Kinds of data which you can CONSTRUCT and USE through this method
   - However not rigid ‘dos’ and ‘donts’ as much depends on circumstances, some of which within control and others aren’t

Question 6

1) ACCESS

Answer 6

Believing that ‘geography is everywhere’ (Cosgrove, 1989) = nature of PO means that a worthwhile project can be done wherever you may be and whatever you may be doing during the period set aside for your research

• Workplace is popular as an ethnography location as students can also earn cash and ‘pre- existing avenues of access’ (don’t HAVE to do some isolated community agesss away and live there for 1 year)

Question 7

‘What’ of Access

Answer 7

• Many students find that wanting to study a particular community does not easily translate into being able to study it because this access has to be negotiated through various ‘GATEKEEPERS’ who can control this
• Some communities more guarded than others against the presence of certain kinds of people e.g. as long as you have money to pay for your lane, can enter the community of bowling if you want to
• Some places require MORE than money to access- e.g. elite spaces such as gentlemen’s places of rehab places

Question 8

Gaining Access to a Community

Answer 8

• This is where the ‘fieldwork’ begins
• In the process of gaining access to a research community, may have to endure days or weeks of doubt and frustration before becoming suddenly overjoyed when it works out (get email from camp) but obvs V. UNPREDICTABLE with time
• Could literally spend a month gaining access to a gatekeeper and one other- and may still not even be sure if that’s the community in which you wish to conduct research
• Advisable to contact ‘keepers’ of several different ‘gates’ as to avoid dependency if one proves un co- operative or uninformative
• In some places could wing access?!

BE PERSISTENT

Question 9

Roles

Answer 9

Not only WHO you contact during the gatekeeping and subsequent stages of research but also THE WAY THAT YOU PRESENT YOURSELF when doing this

Question 10

Preparing for 1st meeting with 1st ‘gatekeeper’…

Answer 10

• Think about what you should tell him/her about the role that you want to adopt in their community

Often in early access stages of more ‘overt’ research, may simply want to enquire what constitutes a community’s everyday activities

• Later once this is established, a vague idea of what your research might eventually be about or a watered- down version of your research question(s) will often suffice
• Significant difference between what you might tell your advisor about your research (precise methods, theoretical standpoints etc) and what you will tell various ‘gatekeepers in the field’ (more ‘tactical’ version)

Question 11

Ethnography Account

Answer 11

• Each account can be simplification of a larger project, and/or can be the latest version of a project which is changing as you go along, and/or can be a version of a project which you are determined will gain its shape form what the people under the study might want it to be about
• Thus the ways that diss students can negotiate these kinds of ethical, pol, and practical problems can again be v different depending on circumstances

Question 12

2 MOST important things when considering role during ethn..

Answer 12

1) Role overt or covert

2 Degree of ‘participatory’ / observational research

Question 13

Research is always inherently political as-

Answer 13

Always bound up in networks of power and knowledge

• Many writers argue one should not hide but tackle it straight on
• May find one’s roles and responsibilities compromised if find oneself suspended between differently empowered groups

Question 14

In terms of gaining access and establishing a role in research community, not only must significance of position and apparent intentions be considered but..

Answer 14

• Responsibilities over how the people being researched will be represented in any account produced, how this will be circulated, and the impact that this might have on their lives in the future

Question 15

Key Ethical Qus

Answer 15

• Should you expect to foster the development of genuine relationships
• Or should you step back and ask innocent questions and be careful what you read about yourself
• Should you skip between different members or stick to a few
• If you form an opinion about those you are working with, should you present this to them or preserve the perhaps delicate nature of the relationship by keeping quiet?

Question 16

Ideal role for a researcher to adopt

Answer 16

“Intelligent, sympathetic, and non- judgemental listener” to all of its members (Castell, 1988: 95)

• Don’t want to seem arrogant or for them to feel self- conscious that what they do/say will be written down and ‘used against them’
• But don’t want to seem gullible NEUTRAL character and thus unworthy of the subjects’ attention and time (Wade, 1984)

But it’s just v unpredictable and will hardly ever simply blend in - relies heavily on the social skills of the researcher

Question 17

4 Types of roles in PO

Answer 17

1) OVERT OBSERVER
- Someone who DOES tell the members of the community being studied that they are WATCHING them for their research

2) OVERT PARTICIPANT
- Someone who DOES tell the people that they are LIVING AND/OR WORKING WITH them for research purposes

3) COVERT OBSERVER
- Someone who DOES NOT tell the members of the community being studied that they are watching what they do for their research

4) COVERT PARTICIPANT
- Someone who DOES NOT tell the people that they are LIVING AND/OR WORKING WITH them for research purposes

Question 18

Constructing Information

Answer 18

• Field Diary is the most important place to construct data from PO research

Question 19

Factors to be weary of when constructing a diary

Answer 19

1) Power relations
2) How your understandings have been affected by your developing role
3) What you divulge, why and to whom, and how they appear to react to this; how various aspects of the research encounter make you ‘feel’ and how this affects what you do
4) Kinds of contexts in which photos were taken, maps sketched etc
5) Immediate impressions of people and how they changed
6) Kinds of places where certain interactions occurred
7) Who introduced you to whom etc

Question 20

Key extinguisher between you and community is that..

Answer 20

Your role must include a WRITING FUNCTION

• Likely to become a distinctive part of your identity

Question 21

‘Ethnographer’s Bladder’

Answer 21

• Too obvious to constantly take notes in private so some researchers just make sudden and frequent trips to the loo to write things down

Question 22

Writing up an account

Answer 22

• Context specific- some believe it’s best to stick to index cards in the day and then write up as an account of PO experience making a story of what you learned out of the fragments you have at the end of the day
• Some find this account is best written as a stream of consciousness which may better set out and allow them to think about, the developing connections between aspects of their work and relationships
• Some prefer tape- recording thoughts

Either way- BEST TO DO IT WHILST FRESH IN THE MIND

Question 23

Supplementary Methods (2)

Answer 23

1) BRIEF SURVEY of community
- Gleans basic info of composition by age/gender/occupation/education/income etc

2) INTERVIEWS with key members of community

Question 24

Why Adopt and Combo. Supplementary Methods? (5)

Answer 24

1) If they are undertaken early in the work and are limited to fairly innocuous qus = means of introducing yourself and your project to community members in a relatively unthreatening way
2) Generate DESCRIPTIVE STATS which can be used in the write up of the comm

3) IDENTIFY THE COMMUNITY’S KEY GROUPS AND NETWORKS
- within which you’d like to develop contracts

4) If you are keen to develop a research project which will ADDRESS CONCERNS within the community, they may also serve as a means to gauge what, and how widespread, these might be
5) Finally, if you develop close relationships within the community and then undertake a SURVEY/SOME INTERVIEWS, you may be able to make your enquiries more approp to its members’ lives and the info thereby generated to be used to position their/your own understandings of the community as being from one or more perspectives

Question 25

2 Key Questions one must continually ask along the way to take on this method

Answer 25

1) How can I vividly convey what I have learned during my fieldwork on those who will read the final dissertation?
- Markers want to see a flair of creative writing which will allow them to feel they have ‘stepped into your shoes’ and ‘been there’ too
2) How can I integrate this kind of account with the kinds of theoretical, methodological and substantive discussions which are usually required in a dissertation?
- Integration of PO account(s) into the rest of dissertation should, as with any other method, be preceded by a discussion of this as a ‘scientific’ method which can be done badly or well: like other methods, PO research does have general principles and problems which can be discussed
- As well as theoretical and substantive concerns and how they will feed into and out of the fieldwork I did

Question 26

Field Noting

Answer 26

“Ongoing sense- making process”

• Process of creative writing based on first- hand experience
• Involves attempts to tie together minutia of theoretical and empirical details gleaned in and between the different locales of project’s expanded field”

Question 27

Degree of Participation

Answer 27

Working, demonstrating, Observing

Question 28

Visual analysis

Answer 28

• Traditional focus on texts and landscapes
• But diversity of visual imagery is all around us:
  (TV, films, magazines, posters etc)

Question 29

• Existing Images

- New Images

Answer 29

• Moving and static images both refract and create contempt society
• We can analyse existing images, paying attention to their’;

Literal and symbolic dimensions
Embedded relations
Naturalising functions

• We can also generate/obtain and analyse NEW images
• key area for innovation for contemp human geog!

Question 30

Making your Own Images (4)

Answer 30

• Often via Photography
• Why frame, photograph and select particular images?
• In what ways do they TYPIFY a place? (e.g. city)
• What criteria are used when particular examples are selected?
• What OTHER examples might be selected
• what didn’t you photograph?

Question 31

Identification

Answer 31

• How does the reader RELATE to an image

Question 32

Reading

Answer 32

• Process of DECODING the image
• Different kinds of images may demand different types of KNOWLEDGE
  e. g. religious art

Question 33

3 Types of reading

Answer 33

Morgan (2003)

1) Dominant or Hegemonic Reading
- Intended by author or reinforces a prevailing ideology

2) Oppositional
- Contests dominant reading

3) Divergent
- Doesn’t confront dominant directly
(Might ‘miss the point’)

Question 34

SIGN=…

Answer 34

SIGN = SIGNIFER (sound, written word or image) + SIGNIFIED is a ‘baby’

Question 35

Signifier

Answer 35

Something to which meaning attaches (‘meta- physical’)

• May be VISUAL CODES or TEXTUAL CODES
• What is used to stand for something else (What is being signified?)
• This distinction helps us to understand by STRUCTURE OF ADVERTS: They work by trying to transfer visual and textual signifiers onto their own product (Rose, 2012: 83)

Question 36

Subject Position

1) General
- Foucault

Answer 36

1) The identity invoked in a particular image
- Figure may or may not be present: may be invoked by the text or another image…

2) Foucault reads the painting in terms of “representation” and “subject” - paintings tell us how representation and the subject work
- The meaning of the picture is produced, Foucault argues, through this complex inter-play between presence (what you see, the visible) and absence (what you can’t see, what has displaced it within the frame).

For the painting to work, the spectator. . . must subject him/herself to the painting’s discourse and, in this way, become the painting’s ideal viewer.Identities are, as it were, the positions which the subject is obliged to take up while always ‘knowing’ (the language of consciousness here betray us) that they are representations, that representation is always constructed across a ‘lack’, across a division, from the place of the Other, and thus can never be adequate -identical- to the subject processes which are invested in them

Question 37

When analysing image, must consider (3)

Answer 37

• Intended AUDIENCE
  (Age, gender, country/region)
• SIGNIFIERS
  (Visual and textual codes)
• SUBJECT POSITION(S)

Question 38

Participant Observation and Ethical Issues (2)

Answer 38

• Covert vs Overt

- Informed Consent

Question 39

Images

Answer 39

• Often created as though they are a “transparent window on the world” and the fact that these images are always selected and ‘framed’ is often ignored

Question 40

Vision vs Visuality

Answer 40

Vision = What the human eye is physiologically capable of seeing

Visuality = The way in which vision is constructed in various ways

Question 41

Notion that ‘our ways of seeing’ are…

Answer 41

socially and culturally constructed has become increasingly important in the social sciences as it has been influenced by ‘cultural turn’

• Cultural geographers in particular have studied visual images

Question 42

Gillian Rose (2001) Suggests Visual Images should be studied in 3 ways:

Answer 42

1) Questions to be asked about the PRODUCTION of the image

2) Questions to ask about the IMAGE ITSELF
e. g. what is being show? What are the components? What us is made of colour? Is it image and words? (Connotative vs Denotative)

3) There are questions about the AUDIENCE for the image
e. g. Who consumes it? Do they consume it alone or with others? What do they make of it?
- -> It’s useful to bear these qus in mind when you read the following examples

Question 43

Land Rover Advert

Answer 43

Two levels: Roland Barthes described these 2 levels as ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’

2) DENOTATIVE- Literal, descriptive meaning (i.e. man washing debris of his recent ravels out of his car)
2) CONNOTATIVE- Relies on the cultural and historical context of the image and its viewers lived knowledge and experience
- Thus the advert connotes the idea that merely to own a car and travel is NOT ENOUGH- the REALLY important thing is where you go

By focusing on specific elements we can see that;
1) There are a no. of things that seem to be linked with notions of DOMESTICITY e.g. carefully manicured lawn and the well- tended flowerbeds are symbolic of an idea of sub- urban life as is the act of washing one’s car at the weekend

2) Scorpion and desert soil seem ‘out of place’ in this normal domestic scene: they stand for the EXOTIC

Question 44

Roland Barthes

Example

Answer 44

• Developed the idea of the ‘sign’ which composed of the ‘signifier’, a sound, written word or image, and the ‘signified’ which is a concept evoked by that image

Example: Land Rover Advert
- One interpretation is that the scorpion (the signifier) stands for ‘adventure’ and ‘excitement’ (the signified) and that its association with the Land Rover means that the LR comes to stand for the idea of ADVENTURE, EXCITEMENT and TRAVEL

Similar to the Citroen scorpion advert

Question 45

Why does the advert work?

Answer 45

• Reader of the advert has to be able to interpret the visual codes - the advert ‘works’ because it plays on the reader’s understanding of the cultural codes that represent the relationship between people and nature

Question 46

Why do Images Matter?

Answer 46

• Images are important means through which ideologies are PRODUCED and onto which ideologies are PROJECTED
• Ideology is often associated with the idea of ‘PROPAGANDA’ or the attempt to use images to persuade people into holding certain beliefs and values
• However another way to think about ideology, is that it is a much more pervasive, mundane process in which we all engage (whether aware of it or not)

Question 47

Key themes to explore (4)

Answer 47

–> In what ways do adverts draw upon images of SPACE and PLACE in order to sell the product?

–> What types of ENV are associated with diff products?

–> Do adverts such as this promote particular ideologies?

–> What meanings do readers make of adverts?

Question 48

Key References

Answer 48

Johnston (2009) - Ethnography definition stuff

Cook (2005) - Participant Observation

Joan Cassel (1988) - People nervous in the room so would use note cards as mnemonics for each night’s session at the word processor

Morgan (2003) - Investigating Visual Images

Crang (1997)- Picturing Practices

Question 49

3 Parts of an Image to Analyse (Barthes)

Answer 49

1) EMBEDDED RELATIONS
- geog/hist. specifity and social relationships

2) NATURALISING FUNCTIONS
- Make opaque the exercising of power (Foucualt)
- What is incl/excluded and re- arranging of space for what particular purpose?

3) LITERAL AND SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS