Your assignment for this project is to tell the story of a community group of your choosing.
ANTH 102 Class Project (Working document)
Your assignment for this project is to tell the story of a community group of your choosing. This will consist of conducting ethnographic interviews with members of this group. The focus of the project will be to determine what your collaborators perceive to be the problem/s that most affect them and what they think possible solution/s might be. Each student will first select a community with which they would like to work, as discussed in class. After you have self-selected a group, your assignment is to first work with your community collaborators to find out who they are, what they are trying to accomplish, and to determine a problem that is most pressing to them. You should focus on a single problem, or set of closely related problems, for this assignment rather than simply listing all of the problems they confront. You will then work with your collaborators to find possible solutions to their problem/s.
Part 1: Fieldwork
You will need to conduct interviews and perhaps attend group meetings in order to facilitate this process. As you are not trained ethnographers, you should keep your focus on answering the first two questions quickly, so that you can use most of the interview time determining the problem they would like to work on, and then finding out what solutions you can come up with together. As you go through this process, you should keep careful notes about their responses and any other information you think is important. One way that ethnographers often do this is by recording the interviews and writing up the notes later. This allows her to focus on maintaining a rapport with people and making observations rather than on writing everything down in the moment. Save your notes! You will need them to write your paper and you will turn them in as proof of your work. Be sure to record in the notes who is conducting the interview/s. Your collaborators may or may not want you to record their names, please respect their wishes. Be sure to take note of whatever demographic and social information you think is pertinent. Also, don’t forget that you are the informed academic – use your knowledge of the systemic factors at play to aid in the efforts of your community collaborators!!
Part 2: Ethnographic Analysis
Following the interview phase, you will write up the results. You should produce a paper of 2 pages in length (double-spaced without titles or spaces between the paragraphs). These papers should be a cogent synthesis of the process and its results, including any problems or obstacles that arose during your work. Your paper should briefly present your community collaborators and the problem you identified together. As you analyze the results, reflect upon the systemic issues or historical factors discussed in class that relate to the community and its problems. Take the perspective of the community members in discussing what was important to them and why. Your paper should use material we have discussed in class as a part of their analysis. Ask yourselves, “How does the material we have covered so far in class relate to your community and their issue? For example, how might what you have learned in class help you put your results into perspective? You should also discuss what you found most surprising, moving, interesting, or frustrating about the exercise.
You will be graded on the following (rubric):
How much effort you put into your project, including conducting the interviews.
The degree to which you collaborated with your community (quality of listening).
The insight and synthesis apparent in your papers. The effectiveness of your synthesis with class materials.
Community Project: __________________________________________________________________
Team Member Name: _________________________________________________________
Interview effort/quality: /15
Quality of collaboration: /10
Individual effort: /10
Insight/synthesis: /10
Use of class materials: /5
Team Member Name: _________________________________________________________
Interview effort/quality: /15
Quality of collaboration: /10
Individual effort: /10
Insight/synthesis: /10
Use of class materials: /5
Team Member Name: _________________________________________________________
Interview effort/quality: /15
Quality of collaboration: /10
Individual effort: /10
Insight/synthesis: /10
Use of class materials: /5
