Batch XIII Academic year 2023/2024

What is ethnography? Is it investigative journalism? Is it a form of social storytelling? Is it a modus operandi to understand the rationale that governs contemporary social phenomena, actors, and spaces at different scales? The course introduces ethnography as a theoretically oriented practice in anthropology. It will investigate how ethnography can help analyze cultural difference and their uses in complex social contexts. Their conditions of possibility, their effects, and their role in transforming territories and cities will also be addressed.

The course aims to show how this research practice, based on individual interactions, conversations, and observations of different social contexts, is highly pertinent for understanding social actors’ relationship with more  “invisible” structural mechanisms and global processes. It will also address the issues of power, violence, ethics, and poetics in field research and the relationships between description and interpretation, narration, and theory. No ethnographic experience is required; however, the students who have conducted fieldwork, although limited in scope, and are preparing to do it again during the master's degree program, will benefit the most from this course.