Spark Talk: “Situated ethnography: the researcher, the place and the time” by Victoria Reyes (November 1st, 2024)
Nov 1, 2024
10:30AM to 11:30AM
Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/11/2024
10:30 am - 11:30 am
Description: How do we understand the places and people we study? How do ethnographic approaches shape our analytic understanding of social life? The specter of masculinity haunts how scholars answer these questions through the two major approaches that continue to shape ethnographic research: Chicago School and global ethnography. This paper draws and builds upon women of color feminisms and Black feminisms that challenge such masculinist foundations of ethnography by theorizing the importance of power relations and decentering the West. Rooted at their intersections, I put forth a novel theoretical and methodological framework to understand urban life: situated ethnography, which attends to three key insights from these feminist traditions. First, it rests on the assumption that interrogating a researcher’s own positionality for knowledge production is critical and foundational for any project. Second, it relies on an emplaced field method, which sees place as embodied and constituted by multiple fields. Finally, it takes into account what I call a place’s situated history, which reimagines how to write about history and time. This has broader implications for the field as I show how these three approaches have distinct analytical foci, which has implications for how to undertake comparisons, understand the macro-micro link, and for the types of research questions we ask.
Bio: Victoria Reyes is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside. She is author of the multiple award winning books Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2022).