They just don’t get it: Strategies, tools, and best practices for explaining ethnography to stakeholders

Ethnography is a popular buzzword, broadly used but poorly understood – and even harder to explain. Furthermore, ethnography is driven by the logic of discovery, not verification. Ethnographers don’t bring their preconceived notions to the settings they study; they don’t want to predict just what will be discovered before fieldwork has begun. While the inductive nature of ethnographic research is its strength, this very strength makes it challenging to explain the benefits to folks who operate in business environments where managers pre-set their targets. 

The goal of this workshop is to share and leverage each other’s experiences in explaining what ethnography is. The benefit for participants is to be able to anticipate and address challenging questions about ethnography, as well as fill in gaps about how best to explain it. The target audience is (1) ethnographers who are stumped or frustrated with repeatedly answering the hard questions, and (2) anybody who wants to clarify his or her understanding of ethnography.

Please contact EPIC2010@parc.com for more information.