The social world we study has changed in many ways (e.g. epistemologically, technologically and culturally) and so does how we practice ethnography. While the principles of long-term immersion in the field, systematic observation and writing detailed fieldnotes remain at the heart of ethnographic research, much has changed about the definition of the ‘field’, the focus of the research, the style of writing, and the mode of communication.

Ethnographers have embraced new ways both in how they explore social phenomena and how they communicate their research. This involves an increased awareness of the importance of utilising a wide range of senses - beyond observation - to navigate ethnographic research and explore hidden aspects of social life (e.g. ‘deep story’). Ethnographers are also increasingly utilising a range of communicative resources in their work – including recorded sound, still and moving images, as well as speech and writing (e.g. multi-modal ethnography). Further, some other researchers work on the olfactory as well as the visual and auditory aspects through ethnography. More recently, researchers have adapted ethnographic methods to the study of communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interactions (whether as virtual ethnography or netnography and even auto netnography). There is a clear recognition that multisensory experience and advanced technology have changed the way we understand and research everyday life.

In this year’s Ethnography Symposium, we would like to bring together ethnographers in different disciplines who engage in wide forms of ethnographic research. The symposium aims to showcase the richness and diversity of ethnographic methods. We expect that the majority of the contributions will be submitted in a written format and will be delivered using traditional presentational software, we are, however, open to contributions which use alternative media. Beyond this, and in keeping with past conferences, we aim to have the conference open to all who are interested in ethnographic methods. We welcome submissions from both postgraduate researchers and more experienced scholars.

Hosted by the University of Portsmouth, Faculty of Business and Law and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Conference Co-Chairs

• Dr Hamid Foroughi, University of Portsmouth
• Dr Sarah Charman, University of Portsmouth, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies
• Dr Mike Rowe, University of Liverpool

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Dr Harriet Shortt, University of the West of England
• Dr David Calvey, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Professor Paul Atkinson, University of Cardiff

Registration

The deadline for registration is Monday 29 July 2019.

Pre-conference workshop

We are hosting a free pre-conference workshop on Visual Methodology in Contemporary Management Studies on Tuesday 27 August. This workshop is suitable for early career researchers and PhD candidates. Find out more and book your place on the workshop. 

Location

The conference is located in Eldon Building. which is on Winston Churchill Avenue, only a very short walk from Portsmouth and Southsea train station. Registration will take place in the reception area of Eldon building from Tuesday 27 August onwards.

Find us with our Maps and Directions.   

Programme

Wednesday 28 August 2019

10.00am-12.00noon: PhD Workshops

• Beginners: Setting Out, Negotiating Access and Ethics, run by Mike Rowe
• Advanced: Ethnography, Emotion and Generating theory, run by Hamid Foroughi

12.00noon-12.45pm: Lunch

12.45pm-1.00pm: Opening and Welcome to the Conference

• Professor Francis Pakes - Associate Head (Research) Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

1.00pm-1.45pm: Keynote Address

• Harriet Shortt, University of the West of England, introduced by Hamid Foroughi

2.00pm-3.30pm: Panels

• Panel A (Chair - Anna Galazka)
  • ‘My world right now’: an ethnographic approach to researching young children in foster care. Veena Meetoo and Claire Cameron
  • How do we care for care itself? Towards an ethnography of self-directed support: some methodological considerations. Felicity Morrow
  • "Informal interpreters and cultural mediators in the construction industry" by Morwenna Fellows
• Panel B (Chair - Sarah Charman)
  • The Nurturing of ‘Good’ Capitalists: Prisoners and Private Prison Labour. Jenna Pandeli
  • Transforming Rehabilitation: Probation practice, architecture, and the art of distributions. Matthew Tidmarsh
  • Ethnographic research on crime and deviance. Lisa Potter

3.30pm-4.00pm: Break

4.00pm-5.30pm: Panels

• Panel C (Chair - Sarah Charman)
  • Using all of the senses; an ethnography in a hospital setting. Ruth M Strudwick
  • A study of Team Coaching within a multidisciplinary team in an adult mental health setting. Imelda Noone
  • “Wound healing: where dirty work meets clean work, nursing meets doctoring, and art meets science”. Anna Milena Galazka
• Panel D (Chair - Mike Rowe)
  
  • Question your teaspoons: Tea-drinking, coping and commercialisation across four planning organisations. Dr Abigail Schoneboom
  • When East meets West: Reflection on using organisational ethnography methods in international context. Maryam Shadman-Pajouh and Mervyn Martin
  • Dilemmas and pragmatics in approaches to continuing studies in at home ethnography. Derek Shaw

5.30om-6.45pm: Drinks reception sponsored by Routledge

7.00pm-9.00pm: Light buffet and welcome drink at The Dolphin sponsored by the Journal of Organizational Ethnography

Thursday 29 August 2019

9.00am-10.30am: Panels

• Panel E (Chair - Sarah Charman)
  • ‘Don’t go over this stuff, that was 200 years ago’: the significance of police stories and silences in discussions/non-discussions of race and racism in a provincial police force. Nikhaela Wicks
  • “Are you crewed up with that bird from the uni?” The complexities of conducting ethnographic research in policing. Claudia Cox
  • Shifting Patterns in Police Use of Powers. Mike Rowe and Geoff Pearson
• Panel F (Chair - Hamid Foroughi)
  • ‘People don’t understand being mixed man... you got to live it’ – Exploring mixed heritage identity affiliations and everyday practices with multimodal ethnography. Jesse Shipp
  • Reconstitution of an “imagined community”: Sharing regional geography and history involving the activation of a community. Yasuko Kawatoko
  • Interpretations of a Bedouin Culture in the Middle East – by Ibtisam Al-Wahaibi

10.30am-11.00am: Break

11.00am-12.30pm: Panels

• Panel G (Chair - Sarah Charman)
  • Making Sense of Humour: An Ethnographic Study of Humour during a Dispute. Darren McCabe
  • The End of a Beautiful Era: On Fishermen at Work, Seafaring, Violence and Freedom. Elen Riot, Kenji Ogai
  • “It’s like being on a tightrope”. An Ethnography of the Working Lives and Experiences of Stand-Up Comedians. Thomas Hurdsfield
• Panel H (Chair - Harriet Shortt)
  • ‘But that’s not what they said they did...’ The use of photographic and film records as a counterbalance to oral history in Second World War British Army studies. Jonny Briggs
  • The family album is dead, long live the family album: noticing the changing cultural practice of the family album from ‘memory object’ to connections, requiring a shift from an ethnography of things to an ethnography of Streams. Dawn Langley
  • Problematising Agency and Discretion in Police-Citizen Encounters. Mike Rowe

12.30pm-1.15pm: Lunch

1.15pm-2.00pm: Keynote Address

• Paul Atkinson, University of Cardiff, introduced by Mike Rowe

2.15pm-3.45pm: Panels

• Panel I (Chair - Jenna Pandeli)
  • Ethnography and Research into Human Resource Development in Small and Medium Enterprises: An ideal match? Heather Short
  • Objectification and valorisation in architects’ work. Johannes Coughlan
  • A Problem of Place: Networks in Organizational Ethnography. Kenneth N Ehrensal
• Panel J (Chair - Sarah Charman)
  • Visualising origami art as resistance in immigration detention. Joanne Vincett
  • On Refugee Fatherhood: A Philosophical Ethnography. Redha F. Qabazard
  • Inter-class policies and intra-class victimization. How residents in ghettoized neighborhoods handle the risks of crime victimization. Mads Madsen

3.45pm-4.00pm: Break

4.00pm-4.30pm: Panels

• Panel K - Autoethnography (Chair - Mike Rowe)
  • Embodying patriarchy: Outing myself as a gender researcher in the electronic music industry. Sam Warren

4.30pm-5.30pm: Panels

• Panel K1 - Break out (Chair - Mike Rowe)
  • Investigating the ‘pracademic me’ through autoethnography. Leon Crascall, Fred Sherratt and Alan Coday
  • Autoethnography and Lévinas - Lessons for a Manager. Henning Grosse
• Panel K2 - Break out (Chair - Sam Warren)
  • Issues in Researcher Positioning in a Precarious Workplace: a view from the Maritime Industry -Polina Baum-Talmor
  • The cultural double take: a layered lens in ethnographic sense making - Oluyemisi Bolade-Ogunfodun

7.00pm-10.00pm Conference Dinner

• The Still and West, Old Portsmouth

Friday 30 August 2019

9.00am-10.00am: Journal of Organizational Ethnography Writing Workshop

• Mike Rowe

10.00am-11.30am: Panels

• Panel L (Chair - Geoff Pearson)
  • The Crafty Robot: Ethnographic Study of new flexibilities in the Prosumerist space. David Weir
  • The experience of a Brazilian researcher in the Czech Republic: how Neural Machine Translation mobile apps affect ethnographic work. Renan Nascimento Araujo
  • The Impact of Digital Transformation on Organisational Ethnography. Irina Popova
• Panel M (Chair - Hamid Foroughi)
  • Breakdowns for breakthroughs: Using anxiety and embarrassment as insightful points for understanding fieldwork. Annabel Tremlett
  • Widening ‘circles of sentience’ in multi-species ethnography: Challenging conventional fieldwork methodologies and exploring new avenues of re-presentation. Frans Kamsteeg and Harry Wels
  • (Dis)ordering within and through a chaotic method: justifying a messy ethnography. Akash Puranik

11.30am-12.00noon: Break

12.00noon-12.45pm: Keynote Address

• David Calvey, Manchester Metropolitan University, Creative Ethnography - a Rehabilitation of Covert Research introduced by Sarah Charman

12.45pm-1.00pm: Closing of conference

1.00pm: Packed lunch on departure

All abstracts and full papers received prior to the conference, and no later than Friday 9 August 2019, will be circulated electronically to delegates.

Awards

This year's Best Paper Award will be co-sponsored by Emerald Publishing. We also glad to offer four £200 Best Presentation Awards for Doctoral Students, and a Best Poster prize for a doctoral student.

This award will be made at the Symposium to a paper selected from among the full papers submitted to the conference webpage.  When submitting a full paper, please indicate whether you wish your paper to be considered for the Best Paper Award.  Submission for the Best Paper Award should be via e-mail to ethnog@port.ac.uk by Friday 9 August 2019. A submission to the Best Paper Award will be treated as an intention to publish the paper in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

The Best Poster prize is a waiver of the conference fee for the 2020 Symposium. We would like to encourage all doctoral students to present a poster, which may be in addition to the submission of a paper and/or cover a different aspect of your research. Should you wish to use innovative forms and technologies, please contact us.

Social Events

Conference dinner at the Dolphin pub, Wednesday 28 August

The Dolphin Pub is situated at 41 High Street in Old Portsmouth. Everyone is welcome for a light buffet and welcome drink from 19.00-21.00 on Wednesday 28 August. The Dolphin is the only building in the immediate vicinity to have survived the bombing in World War II practically intact. The Dolphin was first granted a licence in 1716. Click here for more information about The Dolphin and its location. 

Informal Gala Dinner at the Still and West pub, Thursday 29 August

The Still and West is situated at Bath Square in Old Portsmouth. Everyone is welcome for our informal gala dinner from 19.00-22.00 on Thursday 29 August. The Still and West is an 18th-century pub on the quayside of Old Portsmouth It was originally called the Still, the name of the pipe from the bosun’s whistle that was used to summon deck-hands.  The pub was renamed in the late 19th century when it was taken over by the owner of the neighbouring East & West Country House tavern. Under its new moniker, it survived sailors on shore leave, German bombs and the battleship HMS Vanguard heaving three sheets to the wind and missing it by a nor’wester. Find out more information about the Still and West and its location.

Accommodation

The alternative to student accommodation is The Queens Hotel where a limited number of rooms have been reserved for our delegates at the special rate of Double room £95 or Sea View room £105. Please contact the Reservation Manager directly by emailing JasonWilson@queenshotelportsmouth.com.

Enquiries

Queries regarding this conference can be made to ethnog@port.ac.uk

Follow us on Twitter: @Ethnography_LK #ethsym19

We look forward to welcoming you to Portsmouth in August.