Festival of Ethnography

The aim of the Ethnography symposium has always been to build a community of ethnographers to support and encourage each other and so it is perhaps more important that we try to gather this year, even if not in Ipswich as planned.

Over the three days, we propose to host:

• Networking events, perhaps particularly for doctoral and early career researchers engaging with ethnography and themed around the research journey for those starting out, engaging with ethical review, in the field or analysing their data.

• Webinars lead by researchers on themes to be announced.

• Shorter presentations of your research that will be the spark for more connections and conversations.

• A writing workshop with editors from the Journal of Organizational Ethnography

• Social events – some might even be ‘in person’ at regional locations if the pandemic allows.

• Virtual writing retreats organised in clusters and emerging from the networking and themed forums.

Joining one or more of these will not be a commitment to participating in all of them. We are all becoming tired of the many hours spent on Zoom, Teams, Blue Jeans, Jitsi… the list goes on. We envisage timetabled gatherings on each of the three days, well spread out to allow for breaks from the screen and recognising that many of us will be juggling other commitments while we are at home. However, we also envisage that, emerging from the networking events, there might an appetite for further discussions and gatherings, much as there would be during breaks at the symposium, to discuss particular shared experiences etc.

We do not plan formalised sessions of three papers in 90 minutes (this is too demanding on screen in our experience) but will encourage shorter sessions.

If you would like to present your work during the festival, please submit an abstract (c150 words) for a 5-minute presentation to ethnog@liv.ac.uk by Wednesday 12th August. If you would like also to present a poster which we will post to the website, please send us a PDF to the same email address and we will make arrangements.

We would welcome some indication of interest and any ideas for other activities that we might include. Further details will be at: www.liverpool.ac.uk/ethnography.