Ethnographic and Narrative Ways of Knowing

"The Open Youth Research Seminar Ethnographic and Narrative Ways of Knowing focuses on the use of ethnographic and narrative approaches in youth studies. By reconsidering, challenging and remixing these approaches the seminar seeks to find new ethnographic and narrative ways of knowing. The seminar consists of two key note lectures held by two leading scholars in the field: Ann Phoenix (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies / UCL University College London) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow Pierluca Birindelli (University of Helsinki)". Read more about the seminar here. The title of my lecture was Cultural Experiences Abroad: An Ethnography.  I presented the key points of ethnography as a practice: “If you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do …. In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners do is ethnography” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretations of Culture, 1973, 5). Therefore “doing” ethnography is not a matter of methods but, still with Geertz, it’s the kind of intellectual effort: “thick description”.