Response to Pink and Morgan — Alessandra

This essay——probably by course design——could not have come at a better time. My partner and I are at a complete loss for what we’d want to do our final project on, much less what ethnographic research methods we would employ. Everything we were coming up with didn’t seem to work because we would need an extremely long time to conduct our research. Pink and Morgan really stress that ethnographic research done in a shorter timeline is not “limited” or inferior, but rather another tool to observe human behavior and draw inferences. The authors emphasize that with the higher-paced setting of short-term ethnographical research, it is in some ways a better reflection of the human experience and “being in (and with) the world.” This research method is useful because it demands the researcher understand more about the space they’re entering, without the guise of endless time to figure it out. Short-term ethnographic research in my opinion is superior to a longer timeframe because it asks more of the researcher and offers more reward for time spent. However, this depends on the researcher. If they’re simply looking for an opportunity to publish and are not invested in the social environment they’re researching, the short-term ethnographic research method will not yield good results. In fact, because of the mentioned reasearcher’s unwillingness to immerse themselves wholly in their subject, this method may actually damage and contradict anything the researcher had prepared beforehand. My partner and I feel very confident that we can comfortably and efficiently use the short-term ethnographic research method to our advantage for our final project.

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