Center as Para-Site in Ethnographic Research Projects

We intend this as a mode of integrating graduate student research projects  into the purview of the Center, in the spirit of the above continuing projects.  We invite graduate students engaged with ethnography at UCI and elsewhere to propose projects where the Center event can serve as a para-site within the design of specific research endeavors.  This theme signals an experiment with method that is directed to the situation of apprentice ethnographers, and in turn stands for the Center's interest in graduate training and pedagogy as a strategic locus in which the entire research paradigm of ethnography is being reformed.

While the design and conduct of ethnographic research in anthropology is still largely individualistic, especially in the way that research is presented in the academy, many projects depend on complex relationships of partnership and collaboration, at several sites, and not just those narrowly conceived of as fieldwork. The binary here and there-ness of fieldwork is preserved in anthropology departments, despite the reality of fieldwork as movement in complex, unpredictable spatial and temporal frames. This is especially the case where ethnographers work at sites of knowledge production with others, who are patrons, partners, and subjects of research at the same time.

In the absence of formal norms of method covering these de facto and intellectually substantive relations of partnership and collaboration in many contemporary projects of fieldwork, we would like to encourage, where feasible, events in the Center that would blur the boundaries between the field site and the academic conference or seminar room. Might the seminar, conference, or workshop under the auspices of a Center event or program also be an integral, designed part of the fieldwork?--a hybrid between a research report, or reflection on research, and ethnographic research itself, in which events would be attended by a mix of participants from the academic community and from the community or network defined by fieldwork projects.  We are terming this overlapping academic/fieldwork space in contemporary ethnographic projects a para-site.*  It creates the space outside conventional notions of the field in fieldwork to enact and further certain relations of research essential to the intellectual or conceptual work that goes on inside such projects. It might focus on developing those relationships, which in our experience have always informally existed in many fieldwork projects, whereby the ethnographers finds subjects with whom he or she can test and develop ideas (these subjects have not been the classic key informants as such, but the found and often uncredited mentors or muses who correct mistakes, give advice, and pass on interpretations as they emerge).

We would like to sponsor and design Center events, workshops, mini-conferences, seminars, meetings simply-- that would further this dimension of fieldwork.

How para-sites might be created within particular fieldwork projects, how they might function as events of the Center-- these are matters for experiment which we invite you to think about in relation to your own projects.

If you are planning or have already undertaken research projects for which the Center event as para-site might play a useful and interesting role, we would very much like to hear from you. Please submit informal proposals one or two pages -- in line with this theme. The initial proposals should be a sketch of your ideas about how the Center might participate in your fieldwork.   We hope to be able to fund one or two small events, a seminar, a workshop, a mini-conference over an academic year or two in connection with each selected ongoing research project. We would like the Center to support, if funding permits, three or four para-site experiments each year. Students whose projects are selected would be designated Associates of the Center.

*The usage is inspired by the concept for the 8th volume of Late Editions, the fin de siecle series of annuals, edited by George E. Marcus through the 1990s: Para-Sites: A Casebook Against Cynical Reason, Late Editions 8, Cultural Studies for the End of the Century. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

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