Browsing by Subject "Ethnography"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Institutional Ethnography: A Tool For Merging Research And Practice
    (Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Wright, Ursula T.
    Institutional ethnography draws from ethnomethodology focusing on how everyday experience is socially organized. Power is critically important as an analytic focus which crosses boundaries providing researchers a view of social organization that illuminates practices that marginalize.
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    Research Partnerships: Undertaking and Understanding Collaborative Ethnography in Indianapolis
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2010-04-09) Hyatt, Susan B.; Branstrator, Daniel; Baurley, Margaret; Dagon, Molly; Yarian, Stephanie
    Students will present a range of collaborative research projects they have undertaken in consultation with neighborhood and community-based organizations in Indianapolis. They will address the benefits, challenges and limitations that collaborative research has posed for them, as ethnographers-in-training
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    Rites of the Soil: Exploring the Ritualized Work of a Nonprofit Community Garden
    (2022-12) Alexander, James Robert; Craig, David; Benjamin, Lehn; King, David; Vogt, Wendy
    The field of ritual studies has often been relegated to the disciplines of religious studies and anthropology, and typically understood within a religious context. However, this dissertation applies the study of ritual to a nonprofit organization as a distinct organizational culture that engages in mission driven work that, at times, can also function as a series of deeply meaningful rituals; within ritual studies, this process of practical work taking on enhanced meaning is known as ritualization. Utilizing Ronald Grimes' categories of ritual sensibilities (specifically decorum, magic, ceremony, liturgy, and celebration), this research sought to better understand how the work of The Lord's Acre, a nonprofit community garden dedicated to addressing the conditions of food insecurity, can similarly be viewed as ritualized activities. The study was conducted through the use of intensive participant observation and interviews conducted between 2018-2020 on site in Fairview, North Carolina. The research uncovered several important revelations. First, the work of the garden often hinged upon the use of ritual language, spaces, and objects, and some of the rituals defied the clear categorization under Grimes' schema. Instead, ritual attitudes toward the work under observation became blends of multiple categories, such as celebratory ceremonies, thus helping to reify Grimes' theory. Secondly, at times, the rituals undertaken at the organization resembled rites of passage popularized by Arnold van Gennep and also sustained periods of liminality, or communitas, popularized by Victor Turner, especially in the organization's attempts to build community through educating others about food insecurity. Finally, the research discovered that the practice of liturgy, conventionally thought to reside within religious nonprofit organizations, was active within the organization and thus may also be alive and well within secular nonprofit organizations.
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    Taken Spaces: Perceptions of Inequity and Exclusion in Urban Development
    (2020-12) Chambers, Abbey Lynn; Haberski, Raymond J., Jr.; Guevara, Tom; Hyatt, Susan B.; Kelly, Jason M.
    American cities are rampant with structural inequities, or “unfreedoms,” which manifest in the forms of poverty, housing instability, low life expectancy, low economic mobility, and other infringements on people’s abilities to do things they value in their lives and meet their full potential. These unfreedoms affect historically and systemically disenfranchised communities of color more than others. Too often, economic development that is supposed to remediate these issues leads to disproportionate economic growth for people who already have access to opportunity, without adequately creating conditions that equitably remove barriers, extend opportunities, and advance freedoms to all people. This dissertation investigates why this pattern persists. In this work, I describe the significance of the differing ways in which economic development is perceived by people living and working in an historically and systemically disinvested urban neighborhood facing socioeconomic transformation near downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, and city decision-makers in governmental, nonprofit, and quasi-governmental organizations. The ethnographic research methods I used in this study revealed that: many residents described economic development as a process that takes real and perceived neighborhood ownership away from the established community to transform the place for the benefit of outsiders and newcomers, who are, more often than not, white people; and city decision-makers contend that displacement is not a problem in Indianapolis but residents consistently see economic development leading to displacement. I contend that the type of disconnect that persists between the perceptions of people who live and work in the neighborhood and those of city decision-makers is the result of exclusionary development practices and helps perpetuate inequities. This work concludes with a solution for rebalancing the power between well-networked and well-resourced decision-makers and residents facing inequitable and exclusionary development.
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    Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork: Responses to Menzies, Butler, and Their Students
    (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) Hyatt, Susan B.; Madariaga, Marcela Castro; Baurley, Margaret; Dagon, Molly J.; Logan, Ryan; Waxingmoon, Anne; Plasterer, David