IRFL10040 Ethnography of the Everyday

Academic Year 2023/2024

Listening, observing, and sensing the world around us are essential components in the field of folkloristics. Ethnography is the study and description of peoples, societies, and cultures through direct observation and enquiry. At the centre of folklore studies lies ethnographic fieldwork. Traditionally through person-to-person engagement, often in the form of interviews, fieldwork has evolved and expanded to dynamically engage unofficial, vernacular culture in our everyday physical and digital landscapes.

Students will develop and refine personal research strategies by undertaking the study of folklore through active personal engagement. We will explore the objectives of ethnography in both the positivist and interpretivist frameworks and identify research questions and technological methods of documentation in conducting the design and application of field research. In so doing, we will highlight critical theoretical issues in ethnography, the ethics of fieldwork and the researcher’s responsibility towards research subjects, along with the place of the reflexive self in research. Students will engage with practical ethnographic methods and techniques by carrying out participant-observation fieldwork, which will include: preparing for interviewing, fieldwork ethics and relationships, and post fieldwork processes of archiving, analysing and dissemination. Through direct personal engagement with various modes of recording folk knowledge and expression, the keeping of descriptive field diaries, and the writing-up of findings, students practically identify the best approaches in documenting many forms of folklore. Ultimately, students will find and refine their self-reflective voices to communicate the folklore of everyday life as an integral endeavour of the folklorist’s craft.