Public Ethnography; Ethnography as Public Sociology

Abstract

Since ethnography is arguably the kind of sociology of most appeal to the lay public, public ethnography, particularly participant observation research, should be a major form of public sociology. Public ethnography differs from academic ethnography when its sites and subjects are relevant to what the lay public wants and needs to know, and when it is written in non technical English. This article spells out the requirements, conditions and processes involved in making relevant ethnography acceptable to the lay public and thus turning it into public ethnography.Five years have now passed since Michael Burawoy reintroduced the idea of public sociology to the discipline at the 2004 Annual Meeting (Burawoy 2005). Since then, much disciplinary activity about public sociology has taken place. Several books (Blau and Smith 2006;Clawson et al. 2007;Nichols 2007;Jacobsen 2008;Jeffries 2009) and special journal issues as well as many other articles have appeared, and an ASA section on public sociology has been organized.The time is now very ripe for a second stage: to concentrate on doing more public sociology that can reach and attract the lay or non-sociological public. This requires more sociological research and other writing of relevance to the larger world beyond sociology and in all the corners of the discipline.For example, quantitative sociologists need to learn how their sociological analyses can catch the attention of the lay public. They will also have to help educate lay people to understand statistical reasoning, including the difference between correlational and causal analyses. This paper proposes a similar task for ethnography: to develop a public ethnography that is first and foremost about what interests and what should interest non-sociologists. 1 Ethnography for me is primarily the kind of participant-observation in which the researcher can observe

Three Conceptions of Spatial Locality in Chicago School Sociology (and Their Significance Today)

“…Anderson's work also offers an implied argument for the distinction between this form of ethnography and, say, long form journalism: the subjective state required to perform the research is also the state required to behave appropriately in the social spaces he describes, and in this sense, his own perceptions provide a shortened path to a description of social reality. Aside from the value this work may have for sociology in itself, it is clear that this work arouses the interest of a much larger public, and may be understood as a particularly influential form of public sociology (Gans 2010).…”

WHY ETHNOGRAPHY MATTERS: On Anthropology and Its Publics

“…Addressing more specifically ethnography—rather than sociology or anthropology—as a public undertaking, to follow Herbert Gans's () proposition, is interesting on several grounds. First, being a method, it crosses disciplinary boundaries and concerns sociology and anthropology as well as, potentially, other domains including political science or communication studies.…”

Public ethnography: an introduction to the special issue

“…Madison, 2011), decolonized (Denzin et al, 2008), collaborative (Lassiter, 2005), and policy-focused (Becker et al, 2004;Tedlock, 2005;Vaughan, 2005) orientation can allow them to move from a simple do-no-harm ethics to a do-something-good agenda (see Borofsky, 2011). In addition, public ethnography has the potential to educate and even entertain lay audiences thanks to its engaging approach, sensitivity to current affairs, intimate and personable orientation, and affective style (Adler and Adler, 2008;Gans, 2010;Plummer, 1999;Vannini, 2012b;Vannini and Milne, in press). In particular, we find that four groups of people have a stake in the development of public ethnography.…”