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Creative and diverse approaches to ethnographic knowledge production and writing

 

Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for researchers, how they collect data, and how it is analyzed within the social sciences. Naked Fieldnotes, a unique compendium of actual fieldnotes from contemporary ethnographic researchers from various modalities and research traditions, unpacks how this research works, its challenges and its possibilities.

 

The volume pairs fieldnotes based on observations, interviews, drawings, photographs, soundscapes, and other contemporary modes of recording research encounters with short, reflective essays, offering rich examples of how fieldnotes are composed and shaped by research experiences. These essays unlock the experience of conducting qualitative research in the social sciences, providing clear examples of the benefits and difficulties of ethnographic research and how it differs from other forms of writing such as reporting and travelogue. By granting access to these personal archives, Naked Fieldnotes unsettles taboos about the privacy of ethnographic writing and gives scholars a diverse, multimodal approach to conceptualizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork. 

 

Contributors: Courtney Addison, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria U of Wellington; Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Brandeis U; Sareeta Amrute, The New School; Barbara Andersen, Massey U Auckland, New Zealand; Adia Benton, Northwestern U; Letizia Bonanno, U of Kent; Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, U of Victoria; Michael Cepek, U of Texas at San Antonio; Michelle Charette, York U; Tomás Criado, Humboldt-U of Berlin; John Dale, George Mason U; Elsa Fan, Webster U; Kelly Fayard, U of Denver; Michele Friedner, U of Chicago; Susan Frohlick, U of British Columbia, Okanagan, Syilx Territory; Angela Garcia, Stanford U; Danielle Gendron, U of British Columbia; Mascha Gugganig,  Technical U Munich; Natalia Gutkowski, Hebrew U of Jerusalem; T. S. Harvey, Vanderbilt U;  Saida Hodžić, Cornell U; K. G. Hutchins, Oberlin College; Basit Kareem Iqbal, McMaster U; Emma Kowal, Deakin U in Melbourne; Mathangi Krishnamurthy, IIT Madras; Shyam Kunwar; Margaret MacDonald, York U in Toronto; Stephanie McCallum, U Nacional de San Martín and U de San Andrés, Argentina; Diana Ojeda, Cider, U de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia; Valerie Olson, U of California, Irvine; Patrick Mbullo Owuor, Northwestern U; Stacy Leigh Pigg, Fraser U; Jason Pine, Purchase College, State U of New York; Chiara Pussetti, U of Lisbon; Tom Rice, U of Exeter; Leslie A. Robertson, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Yana Stainova, McMaster U; Richard Vokes, U of Western Australia; Russell Westhaver, Saint Mary’s U in Nova Scotia; Paul White, U of Nevada, Reno.

In Neatness Counts, Kevin Kopelson reflects on the poetics of the desk—rolltop or bureau-plat, cluttered or bare, the nestlike desk, the schematic desk, the dramatic desk, the dramatic lack of any such furniture. Exploring the topography of literary creation by way of the topography of work space, Kopelson, one of today’s most important critics, offers a series of meditations on how orderliness, chaos, and other physical states correspond with both the exhilaration of production and the desperation of writer's block.Focusing on the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the novelist Marcel Proust, the critic Roland Barthes, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Neatness Counts is at once critical and creative, examining how various writers' work habits relate to their published work. Kopelson also considers desks of his own—one that had belonged to an older brother, one he borrowed from a messy friend, one now shared with a partner. And by pursuing these two lines of inquiry to their unlikely but enlightening conclusions, Kopelson both fabricates a virtual library of literary insight and commemorates an era in which the term “desktop” didn’t denote one’s computer screen.Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His books include, most recently, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky.

A new collection of writing by contemporary Minnesota writers.

This companion volume to the widely praised North Writers: A Strong Woods Collection features the work of a variety of authors-some new voices, some old friends-all of them writing about life in northern Minnesota.

The essays included in North Writers II explore the special relationship that exists between the people of northern Minnesota and the rugged yet beautiful landscape that surrounds them. These writers consider the things that make living in the far north unique—the red earth of the Iron Range, the spectacular and forbidding wildness of Lake Superior’s North Shore, the elemental nature of climate and wilderness that tests one’s mettle. There are also the farms and towns of northern Minnesota, with their heritage of self-reliance and the insight that comes with it. Taken together, these essays provide an exploration of the character, the essence, the spirit of this northern country, as well as the mystique it holds for those from more hospitable climes.

How does contemporary literature contend with the power and responsibility of authorship, particularly when considering marginalized groups? How have the works of multiethnic authors challenged the notion that writing and authorship are neutral or universal?

In Novel Subjects, Leah Milne offers a new way to look at multicultural literature by focusing on scenes of writing in contemporary works by authors with marginalized identities. These scenes, she argues, establish authorship as a form of radical self-care—a term we owe to Audre Lorde, who defines self-care as self-preservation and “an act of political warfare.”

In engaging in this battle, the works discussed in this study confront limitations on ethnicity and nationality wrought by the institutionalization of multiculturalism. They also focus on identities whose mere presence on the cultural landscape is often perceived as vindictive or willful. Analyzing recent texts by Carmen Maria Machado, Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, Toni Morrison, and more, Milne connects works across cultures and nationalities in search of reasons for this recent trend of depicting writers as characters in multicultural texts. Her exploration uncovers fiction that embrace unacceptable or marginalized modes of storytelling—such as plagiarism, historical revisions, jokes, and lies—as well as inauthentic, invisible, and unexceptional subjects. These works ultimately reveal a shared goal of expanding the borders of belonging in ethnic and cultural groups, and thus add to the ever-evolving conversations surrounding both multicultural literature and self-care.