Critical Ethnographies: A Feminist Pre-Conference

Critical Ethnographies: A Feminist Pre-Conference
October 20, 2011

Co-Organisers: Raka Ray (UC-Berkeley) and Anjali Arondekar (UC-Santa Cruz)

This year's preconference focuses on the question of critical ethnographies as a nexus for our feminist interrogations. For feminists working in the social sciences and the humanities alike, the ethnographic method has become a conflicted site of both promise and privation. While we might well claim that the romantic age of ethnography is over, we continue to desire the materializations that ethnography offers. Such an attachment to the thick and/or expansive logic of 'ethnography' is most evident in minoritized knowledge- formations such as gender studies, sexuality studies, ethnic studies and area studies, to name a select few. In the face of these contemporary challenges to ethnography as form and object, we invite presentations that examine what is at stake for us to carve out 'critical ethnographies,' as it were?

The types of issues we envisage participants addressing will ask what do we do with ethnography now? How do we do it and how do we read it?
What work does ethnography do? Some sub-topics would include:

* the politics of ethnography
* reading ethnography
* the death of ethnography
* comparative ethnography
* complex history of ethnographic work on South Asia
* ethnography as archive

Please send abstracts (only 1 page please) and contact information by or before June 15, 2011.

All submissions should be sent via e-mail to both-- Raka Ray (rakaray@berkeley.edu) and Anjali Arondekar (aarondek@ucsc.edu).