You Will Never Walk Alone: Ethnographic Training as Collective Endeavor

Abstract

Despite being intensely sociable, ethnographic research is also deeply isolating. Although fieldworkers may feel lonely, we contend that they are not (or should not be) alone. At the 10th anniversary of Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, we reflect on the ethnographic training cultivated there. We detail objectives, experiences, and lessons learned while also considering challenges for pedagogical projects of ethnographic collectivity—as well as techniques to address them. We contend that learning and teaching sociology through the ethnographic craft is not limited to the classroom but combines reading, writing, fieldwork, and dialogue with other ethnographers. These four dimensions are cultivated through various, simultaneous, classroom-based and research-development activities. We examine activities conducive to the creation of what we call, borrowing from Norbert Elias, an “ethnographer aperti.” Finally, we discuss the replicability of this model, suggesting how universities can expand pedagogical support by pursuing ethnography as more than work in isolation.

Despite being intensely sociable, ethnographic research is deeply isolating. As they immerse themselves in groups, communities, and organizations and “deeply hang out” with others, ethnographers engage in and learn from a multiplicity of more or less intimate interactions (Desmond 2009; Geertz 1989; Jerolmack and Khan 2017; Wolcott 1999). As we read in the Acknowledgments of ethnographic monographs, the quality of the final product depends to a great extent on those trusting, profound, personal relations (Auyero and Swistun 2009; Evans 2020; Hoang 2015; Scheper-Hughes 1993; Stuart 2018). Ethnographers also experience loneliness. Scores of Methodological Appendixes and our own experiences in the field and advising graduate students attest that field research not only demands “the same willingness to be uncomfortable, to drink bad booze, to be bored by one’s drinking companions, and to be bitten by mosquitoes,” as Sidney Mintz (2000:176) famously put it, but can also generate an intense sense of solitude—not only of being solo but also navigating the disorientation that typically accompanies the initial stages of ethnographic immersion.

The basic idea that a decade ago led us to create (and that still animates) the Urban Ethnography Lab (UEL) at the University of Texas at Austin is that although fieldworkers may feel lonely—in fact, they will feel lonely—they are not (or should not be) alone. Neither when they first think about their projects—when they begin to reflect on warrants, puzzles, or enigmas—nor when they conduct fieldwork, code, analyze, and write should ethnographers “walk alone.”

“You Will Never Walk Alone” the title of the song sang by Liverpool FC’s fans (and perhaps one of the world’s most popular football chants) vividly captures the mission of an academic endeavor such as the UEL, its objectives and practices. Apprentice fieldworkers are told, implicitly or explicitly, that they will be lost and disoriented, experience anguish and anxiety, confront a myriad of fieldwork obstacles and ethical dilemmas, but that they will eventually “find their feet” and be able to carry on. We created the UEL so students would feel that they will not, appearances to the contrary, walk alone before, during, or after fieldwork. ¹ Oscillating between the descriptive—what we have been doing to make sure students do not walk alone—and the aspirational—what we think we should be doing more—the following account describes the pedagogical, organizational, and community-building activities of the UEL as it turns 10 years old.

The UEL’s 10th anniversary provides an opportunity for reflection on the ethnographic training, broadly defined, cultivated there over that time. We define ethnography as “social research based on the close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, in which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way they do” (Wacquant 2003:5). In what follows, we detail the objectives, experiences, and lessons learned; consider the obstacles and challenges confronted in such pedagogical projects of ethnographic collectivity; and propose techniques and avenues to address them. We contend that learning and teaching the ethnographic craft is not limited to the classroom but consists of a balanced combination of reading, writing, fieldwork, and dialogue with other ethnographers, academics, and publics. These dimensions are well cultivated through various, simultaneous, classroom-based and research-development activities.

Based on testimonies provided by past UEL participants, ² we begin with a brief reconstruction of that experience to set the stage for our reflection. We then examine activities (both inside and outside of the seminar room) conducive to the creation of what we call, borrowing from Norbert Elias (1984), an “ethnographer aperti.” ³ Finally, we discuss the replicability and broader purchase of this model, including other spaces where such practices have been developed and instituted, to signal how universities can expand pedagogical support by pursuing ethnography as more than work in isolation.

A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: From Fieldworker Clausus to Ethnographers Aperti

In What Is Sociology, Norbert Elias (1984) calls to replace the highly individualized conception of the human agent (the singular, closed individual, homo clausus) with one that focuses on a multiplicity of connected agents (the “open people,” homines aperti). Animated by this Call and inspired by well-established scholar communities at the University of Texas at Austin, such as the feminist working group Fem(me) Sem and the Population Research Center, for the past 10 years, UEL’s founders and members have undertaken the following questions to create a generative collective space: How do we cultivate a shared understanding of an ethnographer’s work and identity as one based on interdependency—not just dependency on research subjects but on a dense interweaving with other ethnographers? How do we create an intellectual “community” in the highly individualistic and competitive world of the U.S. academy where the notion of “success” is perniciously placed on the singular person of the scholar?

Past UEL members’ experiences ⁴ indicate the UEL has functioned as a community that helped them navigate the isolation of both graduate student life and fieldwork. As one put it:

The Lab was a lifeline throughout my fieldwork and time in grad school. It felt like everyone adopted the perspective that “a rising tide lifts all boats” and we put a lot of time and energy into supporting one another’s work. Qualitative research can feel isolating—especially international fieldwork. The community of lab students and faculty meant I always had a group to turn to work through dilemmas, brainstorm ideas, and workshop proposals and papers (whether I was in Austin or abroad).

Memories, as we know, are bound to be idealized. Participation at the UEL may have never existed in quite the form it was remembered—though the precarity and uncertainty of graduate student life in contemporary academia are unlikely candidates for romanticization. Above all, past UEL members stress the cooperative atmosphere created and its usefulness in their own learning experience. As two former members state:

The Lab taught me what collaborative work looks like. . . . During my time there, I enjoyed the opportunities to share and receive valuable feedback from a generous ensemble of peers and professors who kindly took the time to rigorously engage with my research.

The Lab solidified a nascent community of scholars doing ethnography around the world, creating a support system in which ideas flowed and comparisons developed. People read each other’s drafts, shared experiences, and suggested improvements. What is most important, we supported and encouraged each other as we navigated the frequently challenging waters of academic life.

Without wanting to celebrate or exalt what is (and should remain) an ongoing project, we think that past and present UEL students jointly discover a powerful sociological truth: “[T]he most satisfying selves we will ever know are those that attach to communities and purposes outside of our selves” (McAdam 1988:138). As another past member put it, the UEL “fostered debate and constructive critique, but also connection and friendship.”

These testimonies signal that despite appearances to the contrary, ethnographic research is a collective endeavor. ⁵ From its inception, the thinking of a theme; to its germination, the working on a research question, a puzzle, an enigma; to the actual conducting of fieldwork, ethnographers work jointly, with others present and afar. And their work is better for it. To be sure, collective work is not unique to ethnography; most, if not all, social-scientific methodologies rely on dialogue at multiple stages of research development. Here we attend to how everyday collaboration improves ethnographic training.

Institutional and field dynamics tend to act against efforts to learn together and create a collective. ⁶ Time and again, we face a central question: How do we foster “buy-in” to a joint project like the UEL given the atomization and alienating competition often felt ever-presently among graduate students (above and beyond, and separate from, the perception of ethnography as a solo enterprise)? Cooperative endeavors are difficult to create—let alone maintain—in the highly individualized world of contemporary academia. Collective intellectual projects require and rely on notions of ongoing reciprocity, which starkly combat dominant notions students confront of the “optimization of time,” clearly measurable outcomes, and individual success.

In what follows, we turn to the actual workings of the UEL to examine how we try to accomplish this project of the ethnographer aperti. We describe the two-course Ethnographic Sequence taught at the Lab and detail specific activities outside the classroom (from “Bagel Mondays” to “Friday Brown Bags”) that complement it. Next, we briefly describe two collaborative research projects that emerged out of the UEL.

In the Classroom

“Knowledge emerges,” Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire (2014:72) once said, “only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” Along these lines, the animating principle of UEL conceives of students of ethnography not as receptors of knowledge but as “problem-posers” (Freire 2013, 2014). Teaching the ethnographic craft should not be akin to “depositing” knowledge (as in Freire’s “banking” model), but to fostering interactions of dialogic enrichment. While we often think of ethnographic training as shaped through the dialogues an individual student has with their advisor, social actors in the field, and existing literature, crucial, too, is a co-constructed space of horizontal conversation fostered in the classroom. Here we understand dialogue as transcending dyads—beyond mentorship and the construction of an individual study—to a productive and generative principle for shared collective learning. ⁷

A two-course Ethnographic Sequence was instituted with the Lab’s founding to provide foundational ethnographic graduate training and to dovetail with and bolster the Lab’s objectives. ⁸ Others have noted the twofold tension of teaching ethnography as a method and methodology—as both a practical toolkit and unique logic of inquiry. In the face of these dual objectives and the struggle to pursue both in a single semester (Cordner, Klein, and Baiocchi 2012), the Ethnographic Sequence entails a semester each of readings and practical experience.

As we have noted elsewhere (Jensen and Auyero 2019), single-semester courses often—due to both the anxieties of students and proclivities of instructors—foreground “learning by doing” as the approach to qualitative methods—over learning by reading and discussing (Corte and Irwin 2017; Leblanc 1998; Scheel 2002; Takata and Leiting 1987). Yet, learning by “doing” ethnography is not exclusively a practice-oriented toolkit concern. Along with establishing rapport, learning how to write fieldnotes, and beyond, doing ethnography also entails interpretation and analysis in relation to theory and crafting an ethnographic object. This latter perspective—learning through reading and discussing—offers much generative space for developing students’ ethnographic sensibilities through conversation.

Taking this into account, the Ethnographic Sequence begins with a semester on Readings in Ethnography focused on the co-constitutive shaping of data and theory in ethnographic productions. Through joint analytical reflexivity and fine-tooth dialogical analysis of ethnographic texts, the course dissects how ethnographers construct their objects. One way we found to develop such sensibilities is through reading and guided collective discussions. ⁹

For the first two to four weeks, students engage key tenets and debates through short fiction and methodological texts (Becker 1958, 1996; Geertz 1973, 1985; Jerolmack and Khan 2017; Katz 1997; Snow, Morrill, and Anderson 2003), alongside which they read classic ethnographic monographs (e.g., Bourgois 1996; Scheper-Hughes 1993; Willis 1977). During that period, a set of questions are posed: Besides the empirical case (e.g., drug dealing, infant mortality, school culture), what are these texts about? What general lesson(s) about the workings of the social world do authors expect us to learn from the text? Conversations cover the epistemological issues these works confront, the methods they use, the interpretive analyses they offer, and how they speak beyond their contexts of origin.

Following, the course considers varied approaches to ethnography, showing a wide range of objects, subjects, and levels of analysis in contemporary ethnographies—violence, health, migration, housing, religion, labor, and education, among them (Comfort 2007; Contreras 2013; De León 2015; Desmond 2009; Hoang 2015; Parvez 2017; Rivera 2016; Sullivan 2018; Wendland 2010). Each week’s discussion is organized and moderated by a student pair. Students lead each other in engaging and debating questions regarding core topics: How does the author use, refine, or challenge theory? Would other frameworks help illuminate the social world under investigation? What are the links between the theoretical claims and empirical evidence? What data are the reader provided? What is the balance between data gathered from interviews and garnered from observations? How does the writing style make students feel as readers?

None of these questions have preset or preordained answers. Instead, the act of posing the questions—and discussing them together—is generative for learning ethnography. By addressing theory directly and consistently with these texts, for example, students come to see ethnography as a theoretical accomplishment. Students’ varied answers and their consequences clarify how the questions themselves matter. Irrespective of the outcomes of discussions, rather than reach definitive conclusions, students come away with their importance for carrying out ethnographic work. The objective is not to agree on shared answers but to sensitize students to important questions related to the ethnographic craft. From this perspective, discussion and dialogue help students learn that they will confront these questions in their own work before, during, and after fieldwork (and how to do so).

One such instance of generating collaborative dialogue emerged at the beginning of a semester by distributing a quote from Jack Katz’s (2019:22) “On Becoming an Ethnographer”:

At this stage of your life, are you the kind of person who likes to schmooze, hang out, subordinate your interests to those of others so as to “give them voice” in the terms and over the range of involvements they find important? Or do you find it too uncomfortable to sustain a promiscuous dependency on others’ lives? Do you “have the patience,” that is, can you control your anxieties about making a recognizably significant contribution long enough to enter a social world you do not know and wait for patterns to emerge? Do you find that, to make sense of your life—to tell yourself the story of yourself that will sustain your motivations, to tell your friends and family what you are doing so that they will support you, to tell your colleagues what they need to know to promote you and sustain your research funding—you need quicker analytical “news” from your field interventions? And can you handle the criticism that may emerge if you become diffusely engaged with immoral or criminal subjects?

Students were asked to respond with their own yes/no answers to Katz’s questions. The dialogue that ensued—pinballing between anxieties prefieldwork, positionality, and “what’s the use” of ethnography—helped students clarify to themselves and with and to each other what they felt it takes to do ethnography, why it is important, the legitimacy of the craft, questions of ethics and positionality, and their own future places in academia. The quote’s multimodal nature provided students space to discuss with each other themes that emerged among them—rather than, and distinct from, the passing down of prescribed knowledge from seasoned ethnographer to novice. As others have noted, “students learn best when they feel a sense of control over their education” (Cordner et al. 2012:216). Such conversations highlight how lively dynamism, in a flexible format with both the road and destination unknown at the outset, generates insights for instructors and students alike through collective learning and intellectual discovery.

Readings in Ethnography is followed by Field and Observational Methods, where students learn to write fieldnotes, memos, and interview guides through a hands-on project developed over the semester. Field and Observational Methods pursues a dialogic pedagogical approach to research design and development by teaching what is arguably the most individual portion of ethnography—fieldwork research—through a collective space. This has been accomplished, for example, by assigning students fieldwork in different census tracts in the same neighborhood, providing for bridging vantage points of entrée. Thematic field report assignments also structure student conversations around shared experiences participating in and observing types of social milieu—a site, social gathering, or organization—and writing them up. Students conduct a minimum of four hours of fieldwork per week and discuss their progress in class sessions. They also provide each other feedback on research instruments and share successful and challenging fieldwork experiences. As one student completing the sequence put it:

In “Readings in Ethnography” we discussed the importance of practicing reflexivity and being “epistemologically vigilant” about our data to become aware of methodological and ethical questions related to ethnography. In “Fields and Observational Methods,” we still reference those discussions, but this time with the main goal of developing practical tips for how to incorporate these practices into our research and writing.

As this student suggests, ethical issues related to ethnographic research are common drivers of discussions in both courses. Such dilemmas include representation (e.g., how to approach and portray sensitive data; how to effectively protect participants’ confidentiality in an era of readily available identifiable information) as well as access and participation (“How much should the researcher aim to resemble the lives of study participants?” and “How should the researcher react to situations of violence in the field?”). While ethical concerns are not limited to qualitative research, ethnographic fieldwork often requires quick, ad hoc decisions that can have consequences for the research and its participants. Hence, students consider ethical issues throughout the Ethnographic Sequence. While in Readings in Ethnography these questions are raised in discussing ethnographic monographs, in Field and Observational Methods, students turn such inquiries on to their own studies.

Assignments for Field and Observational Methods are designed to teach the steps toward developing a project that effectively interweaves fieldwork, theory, analysis, and writing. ¹⁰ As a final course assessment, students develop an ethnographic research proposal. This assignment asks students to consider their practical experiences throughout the semester to inform their study designs. By providing students an ongoing space to advance and reflect on the evolution of their research, Field and Observational Methods aims to mitigate the dichotomy between the classroom and the field. While the student may individually access their field site, the peer network and institutional resources available as they go between fieldwork and classroom are crucial to the research’s development.

Beyond the Classroom

The brown bags at the lab, and the classes with UEL faculty really complement each other. The brown bags, with their mix of proposals, grants, chapters, and article drafts, allow you a deep dive into the life stages of ethnography. At the same time, classes allow you to be gradually and systematically introduced to the method, as per your life stage in the graduate program. The lab is this great space that lets you go between the two, really pushing you to think about your project in its entirety. (UEL member)

UEL’s core purpose is to act as an umbrella space for interactive pedagogical and research-based activities. As stated previously, it pursues ethnographic training through the combination of reading, writing, fieldwork, and dialogue with peers and mentors. Taking this into account, activities aim to provide graduate students two types of tools. One is concrete and focused on specific methodological skills. Examples include trainings on how to develop research instruments, put together successful funding applications, and use qualitative research software tools, among others. The second type, the (not so) “hidden curriculum,” seeks to socialize graduate fellows as ethnographers aperti, where the student is at the center of their research but is not the sole actor in its development. Instead, research emerges through iterative engagement with a network of peers and mentors, the field and literature.

In this section, we describe four activities through which the UEL advances its purpose, outline some of their outcomes, and reflect on challenges that have affected their development. Beyond illustrating the UEL’s specific activities, this section shows that this model of teaching and learning ethnography is bolstered by a range of activities and spaces that complement each other and provide multiple opportunities for collective engagement.

Friday Brown Bags

Driven by student demand and by an ongoing pursuit of horizontality between faculty and graduate students, Brown Bag sessions are one of the pillars of the Lab. Brown Bags are one-hour sessions where UEL members—including graduate students from all cohorts and faculty—provide feedback on a specific piece of work in progress—such as grant proposals, dissertation proposals, and articles—submitted and distributed in advance by an UEL fellow. Brown Bags are student-led and -focused. UEL student managers coordinate the pairing of presenters with discussants and facilitate communication prior to the session to center feedback that is useful for the student presenter. Common examples of questions distributed among participants include: “Is there a sound relationship between the theory and claims included?”; “Is the puzzle presented clear and compelling?”; and “Are there other theoretical frameworks that could be incorporated?” Beyond being helpful for the author of the pieces discussed, recurring questions help other participants identify important features to address in their own research.

On a concrete level, this space operates as a channel for members to receive feedback on works in progress from scholars with a range of expertise in the craft and a range of familiarity with the specific area discussed. Participants, particularly students who are in early stages in the program, also benefit from engaging with pieces of writing in different stages of completion and getting a better sense of the writing process. On a broader pedagogical level, we find that Brown Bags allow participants to identify effective writing styles as well as recurrent points of debate, oversights, and gaps. Through the collective analysis of the specific features of one piece, it is not only the presenter that may receive feedback. Rather, all participants have opportunities to recognize characteristics worthy of emulating in their own work as well as common missteps to avoid, questions to address, and literature to engage with.

To increase dialogue between the field and writing process, at the beginning of the year, UEL fellows who received summer fieldwork funding participate in a special Brown Bag session where they briefly present their study and experience in the field. After that overview, the session opens for questions and comments. This Brown Bag session is designed to generate dialogue about fieldwork experiences from varied vantage points—from the perspective of students with firsthand experience and from others who identify compelling findings, questions, and features of the data and research design. This way, it creates a bridge not only between the institution and the field but also between students with different fieldwork experiences, advancing the principle that research is best developed through ongoing dialogue.

Brown Bags are inherently vulnerable spaces, particularly for presenters, but also for students in earlier stages of the program for whom the research process may still seem distant. Accordingly, we take measures to promote a communicative environment and mitigate power imbalances. Among these are Brown Bags community guidelines, which are agreed on and communicated to participants at the beginning of each semester. Such guidelines include focusing on providing feedback that advances the project as described by the author and being mindful of situations when one’s participation may limit others’ opportunities to offer feedback. Another is having graduate students speak first, to practically instill that all interlocutors have insights worthy of contribution and engagement, not only those more seasoned with the craft. These guidelines delineate our student-centered approach and aim to establish effective and participatory communication. A second measure taken to mitigate power imbalances is having faculty be the first to submit work in progress at the start of the academic year. This allows faculty to model how to engage feedback and gives students an opportunity to access the “behind the scenes” of developing publications based on ethnographic research.

Workshops and Presentations

With the goal of building community among student and faculty ethnographers, the Lab also organizes faculty workshops each semester. Workshops cover technical skills (e.g., annual Atlas.ti and Zotero workshops) and professionalization (e.g., grant-writing and career options panels), the latter also including the participation of current and former graduate students. Others explore specific questions within qualitative research, such as how to combine and triangulate data from interviews and secondary sources, address ethical questions within ethnography, and conduct interviews about topics that may be traumatic for participants. Finally, some workshops focus on demystifying the academic career. An example is a recent panel on setbacks in academia, during which faculty reflected on obstacles faced during their career and responded to questions about how they overcame them.

While workshops vary widely in methodology and topics addressed, they share one feature: Their goal is not to dictate how students should resolve questions in their own research but, rather, to collectively address questions that students may find pressing and bring attention to other important questions that they may not have considered. The topics of faculty workshops and presentations respond to the needs and requests of graduate students. At the beginning of each semester, UEL student managers ask UEL fellows what types of workshops they would like to be a part of and organize attendant activities. Faculty delve into specific areas of expertise and, in some cases, step outside those areas to offer advice on newly emerging topics. Recent examples include panels on careers outside of academia and on ethnography in the context of COVID-19. While these issues may be as new for faculty members as for students, workshops are designed as generative spaces through which researchers can engage with various perspectives.

The UEL also cultivates an ethnographic community by regularly inviting researchers from other departments and institutions to give lectures and lead workshops. External researchers present new work, discuss their research process, and participate in student-organized lecture series on specific topics, such as “Critical Criminology” and “Transnational Ethnography.” As the UEL seeks to act as a node connecting researchers across career stages, among invited scholars are UEL alums. In addition to providing former fellows an opportunity to present work, these visits allow current and former students to share their experiences. In this case, the UEL serves as a space for prior and current students to dialogue, advancing the teaching and learning of ethnography as a collective endeavor.

Bagel Mondays

A main strength of Brown Bags, presentations, panels, and workshops is that they focus on one topic or piece of work, which allows students to develop specific tools and knowledge. However, these sessions are ill-fit to meet students’ need for a space to work alongside one another, collaborate, and run nascent ideas by each other. Accordingly, the UEL also runs Bagel Mondays, a weekly three-hour writing group over breakfast for graduate students to pursue their work alongside peers and find opportunities for collaboration. Such spaces that operate in a more fluid, distended manner help foster community among graduate students and combat an atomized approach to academic work.

Bagel Mondays are organized around a 10/50-minute structure, where students state their goals for the session in the first 10 minutes and work on them for 50 minutes, with breaks every hour. This structure is suggested, and it is common for students to find opportunities for support and collaboration. We found that this is particularly effective in welcoming students earlier in the program and creating community across cohorts. Sharing work objectives at the beginning of the session, for example, opens dialogue and circulates knowledge among students.

Physical Space and Resources

Routine communication is essential for students to jointly produce and share knowledge, which is why an important component of the UEL is its physical space. The physical space of the UEL includes shared offices for UEL fellows and a classroom dedicated to UEL activities, which are on the same floor as most ethnography faculty in the department. While the change in modality due to COVID-19 resulted in less use the last two years, the shared UEL space has provided opportunities for students and faculty to ask and provide advice, share ideas, and create a sense of a collective. It serves as one avenue of many to foster community and communication, which we contend is essential to debunking ethnographic training as a purely individual endeavor.

The UEL also houses useful resources for graduate students, such as the UEL library and grants binder. The grants binder includes sample applications authored by prior and current students to help members in the process of applying for external funding. Binder materials are not to be copied or removed from the UEL because they are meant as a conduit for sharing knowledge among students and to build community based on ongoing reciprocity. ¹¹ Importantly, included samples are not exclusively from applications that secured funding. This familiarizes students with an array of feedback comments, which helps to normalize unsuccessful outcomes and to better understand the range of observations and requests that reviewers can provide.

One of the main limitations for developing ethnographic research at an early stage is securing resources for preliminary fieldwork. Aware of this pressing need, the UEL awards a limited number of summer fieldwork grants to students who are preparing their dissertation proposals. This allows recipients to spend meaningful time in the field prior to their dissertations and formulate better-informed research designs. Summer grants also build connections between the institution and the field by offering students opportunities to traverse the two.

Collective Research Endeavors

As others have noted, long-term research collaborations among professors and students can offer a useful antidote to the challenges of the “time-bounded traditional classroom approach to learning” (Collins, Jensen, and Auyero 2017; Cordner et al. 2012:216; Schmid 1993). In the UEL model, “hands-on training” is not the unique purview of the classroom environment. It also fosters long-term collaborative projects that exist and extend outside of the graduate seminar. Thus far, UEL members have engaged in two such collective research pursuits: Invisible in Austin, published as a book in 2015 (Auyero 2015), and Portraits of Latin America, now in preparation for publication.

Emerging out of graduate seminar Poverty and Marginality in the Americas, in which most of the book’s authors participated, Invisible in Austin (Auyero 2015) relied on extended life history interviews and ethnographic observation to portray the predicament of people living and working at the bottom of Austin’s socioeconomic order: house cleaners, office machine repairers, cab drivers, dish washers, exotic dancers, musicians, and roofers, among them. As a project that emerged from but exceeded the classroom, students ¹² worked together to delve into the subjective dimension of inequality by detailing the lives of 11 individuals on the “other side” of a prosperous—but increasingly inequitable, segregated, and exclusionary—American city.

In the process, Invisible in Austin (Auyero 2015) was also a collective pedagogical instance of qualitative training. As a group, researchers talked, discussed, and offered feedback on how to establish and build rapport, conduct interviews, and write up stories in ways true to subjects’ sensemaking while speaking to questions beyond them. Those experiences informed both the book that emerged and the qualitative research those students pursued for their dissertations and beyond.

Portraits uses similar methods and narrative strategies, but rather than concentrate on one city, it depicts individual lives throughout the Americas, framed in their specific political-economic, historical, and cultural contexts. In both cases, the authors’ task was to narrate one person’s story to better understand structural forces that shape individual biographies. This required extensive ethnographic engagement with subjects and ongoing communication among researchers, which was accomplished through the dialogic space generated within the UEL and extended beyond it. As with Invisible in Austin (Auyero 2015), this entailed weekly to monthly meetings workshopping each author’s chapter-in-progress. Most authors for both projects have been current and former UEL fellows, signaling how fruitful such spaces can be and what they can foster.

Challenges and Looking Ahead

While the UEL continues to generate avenues for teaching and learning ethnography, there remain important challenges. One—compatible with our earlier description—is some inconsistency in student engagement due to the individualizing pressures of academia. Creating a community of scholars depends not only on forming capable researchers but also establishing channels of ongoing reciprocity. We have found that participation tends to decline in activities that require prior work or are focused on a specific student’s research, such as Friday Brown Bags, in comparison to activities with a concrete, individual outcome, such as research-tools workshops. This is consistent with the pressures faced by graduate students to approach academic opportunities as “investments” with clear “returns.” That said, even the most “demanding” activities continue to have a critical mass of students that reflects the usefulness of the space beyond measurable individual benefits.

While not an exhaustive solution, our approach to combating this phenomenon has been to design programming that directly responds to the changing needs of graduate students. By generating spaces that address seemingly individual needs in a collective manner (e.g., “How can I produce publishable work?” or “How can I secure research funding?”), the UEL aims to build a dialogic foundation that deters an overtly individualistic approach to research and training.

Moreover, without normative prescription (we do not espouse such factors should be the mode of evaluation), the UEL’s activities and organizational structure have helped graduate students secure prestigious grants (e.g., NSF, Fulbright) and publish—through, for example, the fellowships binder and grant-writing and manuscript workshops. The UEL’s collective endeavor is thus not diametrically opposed, in zero-sum fashion, to students’ pursuit of what are often key academic benchmarks: obtaining funds for research and disseminating findings.

The second major obstacle faced by the UEL in the last two years has been the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the human loss, mental health tolls, economic difficulties, and general uncertainty about the future, the pandemic brought an immediate suspension of research activities. As a craft based on embedding oneself in the field, the development of ethnography was unimaginable during the early pandemic and continues to present serious obstacles. Students have suffered disruptions to their research timelines with varying degrees of long-term consequences. Added to the immediate suspension of research activities, the uncertainty of the situation has raised doubts about future possibilities for “returning to normal.”

Under this situation, the UEL went from acting as a node in an ever-expanding network of scholars around the country and world to serving as a space for imagining together what ethnography can look like and contribute in the current global context. As one crucial channel for research development was suspended (fieldwork), the Lab turned to the other channels (reading, writing, and dialogue with other scholars) to continue to foster ethnographic learning. Workshops focused on new methodological questions that considered the limitations caused by the pandemic. Faculty members worked with students to design reading lists. Resources for developing digital fieldwork, long-distance interviews, and archival research were collectively put together to engage other avenues for research. In this context, the UEL has aimed to be a space where students could strengthen their skills with other methods and research dimensions in order to be prepared when fieldwork could resume.

The 10th anniversary of the UEL has served as an occasion to appreciate the space that many students and faculty have cultivated, and at the same time, it has prompted conversations about what we could do more of to advance its mission. In an UEL brainstorming session, graduate students expressed that more avenues to learn practical advice, routine coworking opportunities, and activities to socialize early-stage students into ethnography would be conducive to greater communication and collaboration among UEL members.

Building from those conversations, the UEL plans to launch new initiatives. One is the Undergraduate Ethnography Observatory (UEO), where graduate students will work with a faculty coordinator to teach ethnography to undergraduate students through a specific research project. The UEO will be designed to introduce undergraduate students to ethnography, develop graduate students’ pedagogical skills, and provide additional funding opportunities. A second initiative, provisionally titled “Ethnographic Foundations,” is a monthly informal discussion of one sociological, ethnographic text. Beyond introducing students to foundational works, this activity proposes to create opportunities for UEL members to raise questions, concerns, and observations outside classroom constraints. ¹³ Finally, a third initiative will create coworking opportunities focused on specific graduate school stages (e.g., MA thesis writing, dissertation proposal preparation, discussion of fieldwork experiences). While the UEL’s core activities will continue to bring together ethnographers across career stages, smaller gatherings provide for tailored, lateral communication among graduate students in shared positions.

Replicability and Purchase Beyond the UEL

The increasing appearance of similar communities in other universities, ranging from public to private—the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research (WISCER) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ethnography Lab at Stanford University, and Ethnography Incubator at the University of Chicago, among them—speaks to the hankering for and possibility of such spaces in varied arenas. ¹⁴ At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, insights garnered from experience at the UEL have been generative for furthering ethnographic community among faculty and students. WISCER and the qualitative methods workshop series it organizes are led and directed by graduate students and thus shares UEL’s student-driven focus. Inspired by Notes from the Field—which invited UEL fellows to check in from the field and discuss their work in brown bags to sustain a sense of intellectual community and mitigate the isolation of field research—a WISCER fellow in the throes of fieldwork initiated a similar group at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Notes from the Field has a slack group channel and monthly meetings to connect while in the field, talk through challenges, and support each other in that process. It is purposefully a space both for those in the field and those curious to learn more about that experience. In the words of its organizer, “Fieldwork can often feel like a pretty solitary endeavor, so this group helps us all stay connected and maintain a feeling of scholarly community while we’re out in the field.”

Moreover, other models for ethnographic community building outside of university confines are also gaining traction. For example, in 2021, Loïc Wacquant, Ashley Mears, and Ékédi Mpondo-Dika launched the website Ethnographic Café. It serves as an online platform for ethnographers to meet and talk about “all things ethnographic” across disciplines, generations, and countries. ¹⁵ Ethnographic Café includes a monthly Zoom meeting to discuss a recently published ethnography as well as alternative ways of building intellectual community through nontraditional scholar bios to photographic essays and capsule book reviews. In total, such emerging spaces suggest the broad desires for and possibilities of teaching and learning ethnography in collective endeavors, particularly outside the traditional classroom.

Conclusion

In the words of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (2007:214), “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” Paralleling such insights, this article pursues teaching, learning, and doing ethnography as nested in a cluster of relationships and interactions beyond those at field sites, mediated by the literature, or between advisor and student.

Drawing on 10 years of experience at the UEL at the University of Texas at Austin, we argue that teaching and learning the ethnographic craft is best conducted through multiple channels that promote interaction and communication among students and faculty at different stages of their research trajectories. Specifically, the UEL combines classroom, workshop, and field activities to foster the concurrent engagement of students with reading, writing, fieldwork, and dialogue with other ethnographers. This model is contingent on collective spaces that range in modality and purpose to open simultaneous communication channels and opportunities for support and collaboration.

This is not a reinvention of the ethnographic wheel. Historian Charles King’s (2019) Gods of the Upper Air follows the emergence of cultural anthropology, chronicling the tumultuous lives and research ventures of those like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ruth Benedict. It also captures how early ethnographies, although often imagined as lonesome endeavors, relied on and were improved by a support network of fellow researchers. Even in the early twentieth century, ethnographers’ letters circled the globe as they corresponded with each other about research struggles and insights. As such, we do not argue that the UEL invented a new way to craft ethnographies. Instead, we have made that process explicit and transparent—that it happens, what it can entail, and its merits—and detailed further channels for fostering community among ethnographers.

Building spaces for nonprescriptive dialogue allows students to simultaneously discuss methodological questions collectively and answer them individually as they relate to their research project. Many of the issues that are now fostering lively discussions among ethnographers—issues that take place at different stages of fieldwork such as whether to anonymize informants and sites, whether to preserve or destroy data, and how to share the data produced (Murphy, Jerolmack, and Smith 2021)—are often decided on a case-by-case basis. Because these are highly consequential decisions, they do well to include a community of scholars beyond the standard student-advisor-committee triad. Given the rapid transformations and attendant debates in ethnography, collective spaces such as the UEL provide crucial places where changing ethnographic conventions may be consensually discussed, renewed, or modified.

As we have explained, this model is not without challenges. The main obstacle the UEL has faced throughout its trajectory has been the deep-rooted atomizing pressures of contemporary academia, which urge students—and to a degree, also faculty—to approach academic engagements according to their measurable individual outcomes. This sometimes translates into limited participation in activities that require in-depth engagement with works-in-progress or practice presentations or offer long-term benefits but may not have clear, immediate outcomes. To combat this issue, we aim to design programming that blurs the division between the needs of the student and the group. By dedicating some collective activities to questions that students often face in their individual research, the UEL pursues the message that the advantages of a dialogic approach to ethnographic teaching and learning exceed interpersonal camaraderie and include concrete benefits for research design and development.

A set of additional challenges emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic. The suspension of in-person research activities moved researchers in all stages of their career to acknowledge, question, and reconsider methodological assumptions in how ethnography is conducted. The pandemic also created concrete impediments to working together. While our efforts to foster shared spaces and resources pivoted toward new forms of communication, the individualizing pressures already present in academia are likely to have compounded during the pandemic. That said, in a context of many foundational questions and few conclusive answers, the UEL model for nonprescriptive, generative dialogue became essential to formulate new avenues for the adjusted continuation of ethnographic research.

The challenges the UEL has faced demonstrate that although we strive to cultivate a practice-oriented collective of support and engagement that expands beyond the mentor-student relationship, there are always tensions in this pursuit and its exercise in practice. It may be an always unattainable goal, but one worth aiming for: to develop lines of contact that more closely resemble an intertwined hexagon, connecting each point to each other—rather than bouncing a “ball” to the professor and back again.

Our reflection on the UEL’s 10-year trajectory raises a broader question: What can it mean for ethnography as a practice to think about ethnographic teaching and learning as a collective endeavor? Exceeding and preceding our experience at the University of Texas at Austin, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “collective intellectual” as “a form of intellectual militancy” (Lenoir 2006:29) invites ethnographers to think about tacit and deeply ingrained assumptions of the use and value of individuality in academia. As Lenoir (2006:26) explains:

The terms “collective” and “intellectual” are notions that the scholastic tradition . . . has placed in opposition, like those of “theory” and “empirical research.” These oppositions are regarded as sacrosanct within, and are reinforced by, the division of academic labour and in scholastic hierarchies.

As director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, Bourdieu faced obstacles that derived from these dichotomies. His response was to develop organizational measures to promote reflexivity, dialogue, and adaptability. Among them were initiatives compatible with some of the UEL’s, such as a workshop model, a focus on creating an amicable and collaborative environment, and the pursuit of teaching and learning as “a modus operandi rather than an opus operatum” (Lenoir 2006:27). Bourdieu sought to generate a scientific habitus—the dispositions that structure how we perceive and practice research—based on a collective approach.

The success of Bourdieu’s model buttresses our thesis that pressures for individualization in sociology can be combated through targeted, localized initiatives that promote dialogue and collaboration in every stage of teaching and learning ethnography. That said, as Bourdieu would have likely warned, the experiences of a given institution cannot serve as a manual because it is not institutionalized spaces that propel collective intellectuals but, rather, “the constant, continuous, deliberate labour of inculcation” (Lenoir 2006:33) that generates a scientific habitus.

Such endeavors are not without adversity, sadness, and lamentations. But as former Liverpool manager and player Kenny Dalglish reflects, it’s “about sticking together even when your dreams are tossed and blown” (Green 2021:12). That such projects are increasingly taken up at universities and other spaces signals that the ethnographic craft is often, and often best, engaged collectively.