Ethnography is Creative Understanding
I sat at a table with five students. The room was as still as it was quiet as it was slightly damp on a mid-May day in Baltimore. Students were thinking. Like every college classroom, the aroma of Starbucks and Chik-Fil-A swirled about the room. Or maybe that’s just the air here at UMBC. Strangely, reflecting on it now, the majority of us in that room identified as vegetarians. Or recovering vegetarians. Those smells either pulled our thoughts to food or drove them to its opposite. But we managed to remain focused on the goal at hand.
Each student had their own project in mind. And each project was challenged by the intersection of not-enough-hours-in-a-day and not-enough-energy-for-all-those-hours-left. They struggled to define what their projects were about, and what they argued. They struggled to write with a voice that stood alone, unshackled from the loud echoes and tangled prose of the French philosopher, American social scientist, German social theorist, of Chilean artist, and of Jamaican organic intellectual. But they were successful — these five especially so. From examining how the hip hop histories of struggle narrated by young activists alienates black women and their cultural production, to understanding the unconscious process by which university students adapted a radical French absurdist play into an implicitly authoritarian set of relations, these students wanted to know what made people complex. What made them think complex thoughts? What made their actions and relationships complex? Can paper, words, capture complexity?
How are people complex? It seems like a strange question, if only because the measures of action, people, behavior, use, and technology are neatly packaged and sold through numbers that remove all aspirations of — capacities for — complexity. Ethnography is something different. Ethnography is a strange hybrid of writing and research. The power of narrative is both central and not the most important thing. The prowess of the novelist must be matched with the attention to detail of the engineer, at least if ethnography is going to be of any value in understanding how people live in, with, and through complexity
Ethnography is a method aimed at embracing the complex, contradictory nature of our beliefs, behaviors, and actions; of our joy and sadness; of our sweat and sleep; of our cultural production and consumption. Ethnography is creative understanding.
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This publication is a documentation of experiments in media ethnography produced by students in UMBC’s Media and Communication Studies program. Informed citizens and aspiring knowledge workers, students gain hands on experience in one of the most important methods used in the communications industries. Playing with words, vision, sound, taste, touch, smell, and all of their intersections, these students are primed to creatively understand contemporary communication problems — the pre-requisite for creatively solving them.
Senior Seminar, Spring 2017 — Syllabus
MCS370, Summer 2017 — Syllabus and the READINGS FOR W1+2
