Comments on: Interview with Gina Hunter (Ethnography of the University Initiative)

By: What does a critical ethnography of the university look like? A critical reading of Hugh Gusterson – Academography

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 19:59:19 +0000

[…] University of Illinois’ longstanding Ethnography of the University Initiative, which we’ve written about before here, and the University of Toronto’s somewhat less extensive Ethnography Lab research projects […]

By: Davydd Greenwood

Davydd Greenwood — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 07:27:51 +0000

Hi Gina, Thanks for the response. I see from what you said that what I had in mind is not what I conveyed. I was not thinking about big “R” research skills but learning about a social science or humanities field by learning how it approaches gathering and interpreting data. For a number of years before I retired, a colleague and I taught a no prerequisites alternative to the standard introductory anthropology course. It was called “Engaging Other Cultures”. With between 20-30 students, we taught basic social anthropology and linguistics by having them select a topic of personal interest and study it through a sequence of exercises. They began collecting lexical and discourse items and wrote a 3 page essay. At the same time, they read a bit of linguistics and some articles on language and culture. Then on to social roles and social structure through brief participant observation and an interview with another short write-up and readings on this subject. Then onto the world of symbols, worldview, etc with the same process. These short exercises were mentored and peer mentored and added up to a final research paper that the whole class shared. Any course in the social sciences can be taught this way. Indeed, I realized that knowing a field depends on knowing how the people in it gather and interpret data.
I am now in the final process of a three year action research reform of Cornell’s study abroad immersion program in Seville, Spain. The program was not working despite the fact that students came with good Spanish skills, live with families, take course directly in the University of Seville with Spanish and Erasmus students, etc. Their inability to engage, improve linguistically, and their 24/7 engagement with the internet and smartphone maintained cultural bubble kept them from learning. We have restructured the whole program around a semester-long course on how to learn about language, society, and culture in Seville through ethnographic and linguistic methods promoting direct engagement with Sevillano society. The results have been very encouraging and the students are also much more confident and outgoing.
So I wasn’t thinking of forcing everyone to take a research methods course. The bifurcation between introducing a discipline by laying out its important findings and dimensions (which were the results of research) and research methods as an advanced and more abstractly methodological activity is, I think, a mistake. And when we make that mistake, we end up, as in Seville, with a bright bunch of students who have no idea how to deploy ways of learning and analyzing what they are learning in context.
I hope this is clearer.

By: Gina Hunter

Gina Hunter — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 01:33:18 +0000

Thank you, Davydd, for your interesting comment. Despite the recognition of the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates, it still difficult to carry out in the space of a semester. Social research that goes public or that students can build on from one semester to the next usually requires Institutional Review Board (research ethics) oversight, and that requires tremendous time and labor. At my institution, there are only a few instructors who regularly teach our research courses and it is easy for them to get burned out.
EUI was wonderful in being able to offer an “umbrella” IRB (although I believe this became more difficult over time and as the diversity of courses increased) and for providing a supportive faculty cohort. I think that any institution that wants to encourage undergraduate research has to find ways to navigate IRB requirements and support faculty. Without this is hard to see how one can really make social research accessible to a large number of students.

By: Davydd Greenwood

Davydd Greenwood — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:53:49 +0000

Thank you, Gina and Eli, for a really illuminating discussion. I had read The Intimate University some time ago and always wondered how it all worked. Now I have a better idea.

I have only one substantive comment. In emphasizing having students engage in research on the institution they are in, a goal that is entirely reasonable, you skipped over what has became increasingly evident to me in my last decade of teaching and now in the reform of the CASA-Seville study abroad program. It is that our students rarely have experienced conducting any kind of social research at all, not just organizational research on the university. In 10 years, I had no students in a course that relied on doing local ethnography who had ever done an interview, formulated a research question, developed and tested interpretations, and synthesized them in writing. Perhaps Cornell students were uniquely bereft and most of these did not come from anthropology, but I suspect that learning how to do social research of any kind may be the larger issue of which blindness to the organization of the university is one manifestation.