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…
Read more Messy Methods: Ethnography Under Structural Violence
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…
Read more Crossing Borders to Do Fieldwork: Towards an Honest Conversation
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…
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…
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?
Read more Fielding the Familiar: Reflections on Researching the Hometown
Ethnographic Marginalia 