Upcoming talk: Deep Ethnography, Transnational Social Movements and Vulnerable Populations

On Monday October 19th, I will be at the University of Connecticut (Storrs campus) hosted by El Instituto/The Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, giving a talk titled “Deep Ethnography, Transnational Social Movements and Vulnerable Populations“. My talk will be from 2:30pm to 3:30pm, so if you are in the area, please feel free to come by! The abstract of the paper is below. The paper is still in very drafty form, but I plan to post at least my slides on my SpeakerDeck page.

Ethnographic inquiry (the study of social and political phenomena using qualitative methodologies, especially in-depth observation) has recently come under strong scrutiny given the ethical, methodological and substantive challenges in its recent implementation. Studying survival behavior of extremely vulnerable populations using ethnographic methods presents different issues to the examination of activist strategies of transnational social movements. In this talk, I share my experience studying transnational environmental non-governmental organizations’ mobilization strategies and compare it with my recent analyses of informal waste pickers’ strategic choices across a broad range of Latin American and European countries. In the talk, I address both the substantive issues of undertaking comparative public policy studies across different target populations, and the peculiarities of fieldwork in two very different environments. I draw some preliminary conclusions on what we can learn about ethnographic methodology and how we can address the ethical issues within deep ethnography.

If you’re interested in my work on transnational social movements, much of what I’ve published is available on my Publications page, on my Academia.Edu page and on my ResearchGate page.

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