ethnography – Ethnographic Marginalia

Etnografía transnacional: hacia una conversación honesta

25 May 2026 Marcos Emilio Pérez Realizar trabajo de campo cualitativo transnacional durante un doctorado es una gran experiencia. La oportunidad de conocer sobre otras personas, explorar un tema relevante y desarrollar habilidades hace que la etnografía sea muy gratificante, tanto a nivel personal como profesional. Sin embargo, también es una metodología exigente, especialmente para…

Messy Methods: Ethnography Under Structural Violence

27 March 2026 Priyanjali Mitra I initially intended to study the working lives of migrant workers in a city I grew up in and thought I knew. What I was not prepared for was how consistently those conversations kept turning toward fear, precarity, everyday violence as one register of a much larger, layered order of…

Crossing Borders to Do Fieldwork: Towards an Honest Conversation

13 March 2026 Marcos Emilio Pérez Doing transnational qualitative fieldwork as a graduate student can be an incredible experience. The opportunity to learn about other people’s lives, explore a topic you care about, and hone your skills make ethnography both personally and professionally rewarding. However, it is also a very demanding endeavor, especially for early-career…

What is Lost Still Follows You

Challenging borders from a pair of pedals: Ethnographic insights of the bicycle riding migrant diaspora in Chiapas, Mexico

13 January 2025 Rogelio Ramos Torres On the road A misty moon shines at midnight over a rushing crowd in a sports park on the coast of Chiapas, Mexico. More than three thousand people, members of one of the last caravans that for some years have been crossing the country heading north, are preparing their…

Of Marital Rape, or “What do they do when they can’t find a body?”

11 October 2024 Urmi Bhattacheryya What follows is a piece of fiction, written for a PhD-level seminar called “Feminist Media Studies” at the University of Colorado, Boulder, instructed by Dr Michela Ardizzoni. However, what it also is, is a pastiche of life experiences and voices that have been articulated to me, over and over again,…

‘Bearing Witness’ in the Field

28 August 2024 Shahdab Perumal The sun is merciless in April. I mostly stay at home and spend time with my mother Salma. In some ways, the privilege of doing fieldwork in my village is that it blurs the distinction between home and field. My conversation with my mother blurs that distinction further. Our conversations…

Fielding the Familiar: Reflections on Researching the Hometown

What “degrees of familiarity” can expand or limit fieldwork for an ethnographer based in the Global South? Or to put it more simply, who can afford to be familiar or distant?

Ethnographic Marginalia

Tag: ethnography