August 14, 2015
The August 2015 issue of Qualitative Research journal contains a new report by former Visiting Scholar Lee Ann Fujii (University of Toronto). During her time in residence at the Foundation, Fujii investigated the processes that drive people to join in brutal forms of violence against neighbors in their communities. Using data from intensive interviews and primary documents, Fujii researched public displays of violence in three contexts: the Bosnian War, the Rwandan genocide, and Jim Crow Maryland.
In her new article, Fujii discusses the ethnographic field research she undertook to study group violence, focusing in particular on how "accidental" interactions that took place outside of formal interviews and surveys informed her conclusions. The abstract states:
Observations of daily life are the bread and butter of ethnography but rarely feature as data in other kinds of work. Could non-ethnographic studies also benefit from such observations? If so, how? This article proposes ‘accidental ethnography’ as a method that field researchers can use to gain better understanding of the research context and their own social positioning within that context. Accidental ethnography involves paying systematic attention to the unplanned moments that take place outside an interview, survey, or other structured methods. In these moments the researcher might hear a surprising story or notice an everyday scene she had previously overlooked. The importance of these observations lies not in what they tell us about the particular, but rather what they suggest about the larger political and social world in which they (and the researcher) are embedded. The paper illustrates the argument by presenting five stories from the author’s experiences conducting research on local violence in Rwanda, Bosnia, the US, and elsewhere.
Tags: Anthropology, Reports, Visiting Scholar
