Engaging Ethnography: Student Engagement as a Means for Creating Change

Abstract

Our communities, particularly the poor and minority, are experiencing the destructive effects of neoliberal policies. Such policies dismantle social safety nets, locate causes of poverty and criminality in individual bodies and neighborhoods, and foster the privatized “free” market as the solution to our society's problems. Although government, at all levels, abandons the social welfare agenda, individual residents and neighborhoods are forced to assume further responsibility for managing and improving immiserated conditions. Dedicated residents, student volunteers, and service agency workers provide the only stop‐gap between “making ends meet” and destitution (Edin and Lein 1997). This paper is an account of a summer youth program developed by two anthropology students, as a result of their long‐term, politically engaged ethnographic work among community residents, and children and staff at a recreation center located in an ethnically diverse but minority and low‐income concentrated neighborhood. Incorporating the aspects of experiential education, service‐learning, community development and applied anthropology, we endeavored to demonstrate that a politicized anthropology was capable of doing more than just documenting the effects of structural violence, the dif.culties experienced by marginalized populations, and the effectiveness of personal agency. Through engaged ethnography and collaboration we helped create new knowledge and applications that have been useful and valued by the community and other researchers at the University of South Florida.

Shifting Subjectivities and Shifting Teaching: Participatory Action Research in Prison

“…As other scholars have found (Hathaway and Kuzin 2007; Bialostok 2019), it is not always reasonable to expect PAR to result in broad social changes. Given the carceral context, this was not the intent of our research.…”

Participatory Action Research in Education: Benefits and Tensions Across Contexts

“…While each approach is distinct, these labels overlap in their emphasis on collaborating with the community and sharing research findings with communities as a means of "redressing causes of social inequity" (Brondo, Kent, and Hill 2016, 202). Still, much of the discussion concerning new approaches to research tends to focus on how these approaches impact the relevance of the field of anthropology and the training of new researchers (Brooks 2016;Copeland et al 2016;Glass-Coffin 2016;Hathaway and Kuzin 2007;LeMaster, Quintiliani, and Hunt 2013). The studies presented in this special section contribute to the dialogue concerning participatory research by examining how communities can benefit but also by drawing attention to how community members who collaborated in the research were impacted as individuals.…”

The Forgotten Farmworkers of Apopka, Florida: Prospects for Collaborative Research and Activism to Assist African American Former Farmworkers

“…Combining anthropology, engagement, and experiential learning can provide a collaborative creation of knowledge (Hathaway and Kuzin ) and also teach students to critically evaluate seemingly self‐evident yet ambiguous ideas such as “empowerment” and “self help” (Hyatt ), which ultimately comport with neoliberal agendas of increasing individual responsibility and masking systems of inequality. To many students, these terms are innocuous and do not carry associations with furthering hegemonic aims.…”