Center for Global Ethnography
Center for Global Ethnography David Stentiford
Since its initiation in autumn 2019, the Center for Global Ethnography has brought together faculty and graduate students to foster rigorous, meaningful, and ethical ethnographic fieldwork across the disciplines. The Center was formed as a collaboration between the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) and the Department of Anthropology. The Center’s purpose is to showcase interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations of ethnographic research, and to support the training of graduate students and researchers interested in linking ethnography with other methods. Support in the form of funds and administrative assistance from IRiSS has been crucial to the Center’s public programing, which has reached a broad range of graduate students and faculty, as well as scholars and publics outside Stanford. To date, the Center’s public programing has drawn more than three hundred attendees to live in-person and virtual events, and its asynchronous programing has reached tens of thousands of viewers online. At Stanford, ethnographic research is conducted across all seven schools. To help bring these practitioners together, the Center has developed a wide network of affiliated members from a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines. Below is a brief description of the Center’s events held over the past two academic years since its launch in 2019. After March 2020, it should be noted, all events were held remotely over Zoom. This includes the series, “Doing Ethnography Remotely,” which was developed specifically to help graduate students expand their fieldwork methods and adapt their research projects in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 39
