The 17th Annual Ethnography Symposium

At the Symposium we will be:

• welcoming presentation of papers from any disciplinary background on any theme, provided they invoke a method of ethnography and encourage the conversation about tradition and innovations
• holding sessions dedicated to PhD and Early Career Researchers development, led by Dr Robin Burrow (University of York)
• hearing from guest speakers, Professor Rick Delbridge (Cardiff Business School), Dr Jenna Pandeli (University of the West of England), and Dr Robin Smith (Cardiff University School of Social Sciences).

The 17th Annual Ethnography Symposium

Theme: Crises, Change, and Continuities

Hosted by Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 28-30 August 2024

Conference Organising Committee

• Dr Anna Galazka, Cardiff Business School
• Dr Katherine Parsons, Cardiff Business School
• Dr Tracey Rosell, Cardiff Business School

Conference Co-Chairs

• Dr Abigail Schoneboom, Newcastle University
• Dr Harry Wels, VU Amsterdam
• Dr Mike Rowe, University of Liverpool
• Dr Robin Smith Cardiff University School of Social Sciences
• Dr Tom Vine, University of Suffolk

Registrations

For co-authored papers, each co-author must register and pay their appropriate fee separately. If you are attending the symposium and/or the PhD/ECR event but are not intending on presenting the paper, you will still need to register and pay the appropriate registration fee. If you are paying the PhD rate, please email a copy of your PhD student card, or another document, to demonstrate that you are eligible for that lower rate.

Best paper award

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Professor Rick Delbridge, Cardiff Business School: 'Reflections on the continuities and contexts of workplace ethnographies'
  
  Rick Delbridge is Professor of Organizational Analysis, Cardiff Business School and co-convenor of the Centre for Innovation Policy Research, Cardiff University. His ethnographic research on the shopfloor experiences of workers under ‘Japanese’ management and manufacturing techniques was published in papers in the Journal of Management Studies and Sociology and in book form as Life on the Line in Contemporary Manufacturing: The Workplace Experience of Lean Production and the 'Japanese' Model by Oxford University Press a long time ago. More recently, he drew on autoethnographic data to discuss the development of Cardiff Business School’s public value strategy in a paper with Martin Kitchener that was published in Academy of Management Learning & Education. He remains an enthusiastic advocate of ethnographic research. He is editor-in-chief of Research in the Sociology of Work and the first volume under his editorship, Ethnographies of Work, was published last year. RSW now also features a regular section, Spotlight on Ethnography.
• Dr Jenna Pandeli, University of the West of England: 'Changes in ethnography: a reimaging of the ethical research process and a call for change'
  
  Jenna Pandeli is an Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at UWE, Bristol. Her research interests focus on using qualitative methodologies, namely ethnography, to provide a greater understanding of the everyday experiences of work. She has a special interest in prison labour and other forms of invisible work. In 2020, she was awarded the SAGE prize for Excellence and Innovation for her publication ‘Captives in Cycles of Invisibility: Prisoners’ Work for the Private Sector’. She has undertaken ethnographic research in diverse settings including with anti-consumer subcultures and inside prison, and is currently involved in two research projects, 1) Collaborating with a charity to create, deliver and evaluate enterprise education for previously incarcerated people, 2) Researching women’s experiences of invisible work on maternity leave during the covid pandemic.

• Dr Robin Smith, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences: Bread and Butter: beyond the crises of ethnography toward a methodography of crisis response.
  
  Robin is currently Reader in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, where he teaches ethnography, urban sociology, interactionist theory, and ethnomethodology. Having spent his career in Cardiff, his research is influenced by the “open exploratory spirit” of that School, as well as the work of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks. With a range of collaborators, he has completed several ethnographic and ethnomethodological projects – large and small – describing urban outreach work with the street homeless; social scientific reasoning and coding practices; classroom interaction; social work assessment; street-cleaning and moral order; orienteering and navigation; and categorisation and perception in cycling, walking, and running. In his spare time, he has been conducting an ongoing participatory study of Mountain Rescue. He is also the UK lead on the ORA7/ESRC international project Visions of Policing, investigating how visual technologies shape emergent forms of police oversight and accountability in public, legal, and training contexts. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Qualitative Research, and co-editor of Urban Rhythms; The Lost Ethnographies; On Sacks: Methods, Materials, and Inspirations; Leaving the Field; and the forthcoming New Directions in Membership Categorisation Analysis.

Leading the PhD Workshop: 'Getting published'

• Professor Paul Atkinson, Cardiff University
  Paul Atkinson is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at Cardiff University, where he was a Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of the School of Social Sciences. His ethnographic research has encompassed medical education, the discursive work of medical specialists, the everyday life of an opera company, and the work of craft artists. His quartet for SAGE consists of: For Ethnography, Thinking Ethnographically, Writing Ethnographically, and Crafting Ethnography. His best known book, with Martyn Hammersley is Ethnography: Principles in Practice (now in its fourth edition). Recent books include Whitaker and Atkinson Ethnographic Explorations, and Delamont and Atkinson Ethnographic Engagements (both with Routledge. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Workshop and Dinner speaker

• Professor Ismail Al-Amoudi, Grenoble Ecole de Management: 'Doing fieldwork, no time for philosophy?'
  Ismael Al-Amoudi is a Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management and a Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University Business School. He joined Cardiff University as a lecturer in 2013 and has remained affiliated to the University since then. He is currently acting as an Associate Editor for the journal Organization, an Editorial Review Board member of Organization Studies, and an Academic Advisory Board Member of the Independent Social Research Foundation. Since 2018, he is the Director of the Centre of Social Ontology founded by Prof. Margaret Archer.
  Ismael’s research is grounded in critical realist social theory but he also draws reflexively from other philosophical traditions such as post-structuralism (Foucault), the sociology of conventions (Boltanski & Thévenot), and even Actor Network Theory (Latour) and the more recent works of Judith Butler. Doing so provides insightful perspectives on norms, violence and de/humanisation in contemporary organizations and societies. Ongoing projects concern the legacy of Margaret Archer to the social sciences; the nature of virtual reality; and how capitalist organizations legitimize violence.

Call for Papers

Ethnography has been traditionally thought of as a longitudinal and individual immersion in distant cultures. However, it has “taken on new stripes in the past few decades” (Tevington et al., 2023). Today, many ethnographers undertake transdisciplinary and creative research that produces original narrative and applied outputs.

The ethnographic research process has seen many innovations. To name just a few: there has been a proliferation of ‘quick and dirty’ rapid ethnographies (Vindrola-Padros & Vindrola-Padros, 2018) focused on short-term and intensive data collection in crisis-stricken healthcare; COVID-19 restrictions on in person research have led to a surge in evolving digital ethnographies (Forberg & Schilt, 2023); anthropocentric ethnographies have made room for multispecies analyses that give voice to non-human agents (Cornips & van den Hengel, 2021); other scholars have focused on the development of retrospective, collaborative autoethnographies (Tripathi et al., 2022) and carnal accounts (Wacquant, 2015) where researchers voice personal experiences and use their bodies for better sociological understanding.

But ethnography is not just a methodological research process. It also concerns the choices we make to write or otherwise present our findings (Forberg & Schilt, 2023). Books allow ethnographers to recreate the worlds examined in ways less constrained by word limits in journals (e.g. Delbridge, 1998), but even the latter increasingly create spaces for longer narrative accounts and non-conventional presentations that draw on creative methods to introduce new ways of thinking about the studied phenomena.

How has ethnography innovated itself over the years? What does the future of ethnography look like (Parsons et al., 2022)? What opportunities have these innovations created, and what challenges have they posed? How can ethnography continue innovating without forgetting its roots? The 17th Annual Ethnography Symposium is taking stock of the variety of ethnographic innovations while learning from the wisdom of ethnographic classics. We welcome papers from any disciplinary background on any theme, provided they invoke a method of ethnography and encourage the conversation about tradition and innovations.

Submission Details

Abstracts (up to 500 words) should be submitted to EthnographySymposium2024@cardiff.ac.uk, as a Microsoft Word format (doc. or docx.), saved as the author’s surname followed by the paper title, by Friday 19 April 2024. Abstracts should list all authors, an e-mail contact and institutional affiliation details at the top of the first page. Decisions on acceptance of papers, subject to external refereeing, will be provided by e-mail no later than the 26 April 2024.

References available on request.