Paper Short Abstract:

Over 15 years of interdisciplinary work in anthropology, sociology, and media across the UK, Denmark, and Sweden, I’ve faced the tension where "ethnography" is often reduced to short-term qualitative methods, like interviews, rather than the immersive, long-term fieldwork central to anthropology. I argue that while we should embrace diverse methods, it’s essential to uphold the value of sustained, everyday engagement to co-produce knowledge and truly understand cultures.

Paper Abstract:

In the last 15 years, having worked in anthropology, sociology and media departments in the UK, Denmark and Sweden, taking part in three comparative and interdisciplinary EU and Danish funded projects (besides my own two individual projects), I was usually hired as the anthropologist, who will be doing the “fieldwork/ethnography”. Similar to Howell’s (2017) frustration of how other disciplines describe ethnography, I have also found myself in tension or in confusion that when the projects referred to ethnographic methods or fieldwork for me to do, they mostly meant “qualitative methods” and required for instance collecting qualitative interviews in a few months. Equivalently, when I attended conferences relating to interdisciplinary subjects, such as migration, what some migration scholars meant by ethnography was to conduct interviews in an asylum centre and visiting the centre on some occasions to volunteer. For those of us who work in between/intra/trans disciplines combining anthropology, migration and mobility studies, and media and communication, what I argue is to embrace the methodological contributions of different disciplines, but still emphasise the long-term, immersive ethnography, where the anthropologists co-produce culture and anthropological knowledge together with the informants. It is during the long-term immersive ethnography, through living together, learning together and sharing the everyday life, life at its own pace and serendipity that we, anthropologists get to know cultures and produce anthropological knowledge.