Ethnographic Café
The Ethnographic Café is a place for ethnographers to meet across disciplines, generations, and countries. We gather to talk about all things ethnographic, from history, design, and method to analysis, writing and dissemination.
We meet monthly on Zoom to discuss a recently published ethnography with its author (see our schedule of events). We also convene periodically for special thematic sessions around a salient topic in the practice of ethnography.
We continue the online conversation through short photographic essays picturing the field, video interviews of ethnographers sharing the nitty-gritty of their fieldwork, reading recommendations contributed by the community, and through a directory that will help ethnographers with shared interests to find each other.
We aim to stimulate and support the work of a new generation of ethnographers, especially doctoral students, postdocs, and junior faculty, and we hope you will join us in this endeavor.
The Ethnographic Café Organizing Team:
Ashley Mears, Ekedi Mpondo-Dika, Loïc Wacquant, and Natalie Pasquinelli
Fall 2024 Schedule
09/13 Poulami Roychowdhury with Ashley Mears, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India
10/18 Javier Auyero et al. with Cecilia Menjívar, Portraits of Persistence: Inequality and Hope in Latin America
11/08 Michel Anteby, The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field
See the events here!
Friday, October 18, 2024 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET
Portraits of Persistence: Inequality and Hope in Latin America
with Javier Auyero and co-authors Eldad Levy, Katherine Sobering, Alexander Diamond, Katherine Jensen, and Maricarmen Hernandez of the UT-Austin Urban Ethnography Lab
in conversation with Cecilia Menjívar
Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952
Password: 1234
*Read excerpts here
The Urban Ethnography Lab is a collaborative academic space that works to foster engagement with and training in the ethnographic method. Graduate fellows and affiliated professors carry out qualitative and ethnographic research around the globe. Portraits of Persistence is the result of the collective work of the UT-Austin Ethnography Lab. Grassroots activists and political brokers, private security entrepreneurs and female drug dealers, shantytown dwellers and rural farmers, migrants finding routes into and out of the region: through intimate and granular accounts, contributors explore issues that are common throughout contemporary Latin America such as precarious work, gender oppression, housing displacement, state violence, environmental devastation, and access to health care. Portraits of Persistence puts individual lives in their structural context to reveal the meaning and strategies of persistence at society’s margins. It also illustrates the virtue of team field research and ethnographic writing.
Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin and Ikerbasque Research Fellow at the University of the Basque Country. A 2024 Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, Javier writes and teaches about urban poverty, ethnography, and collective violence. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics, Contentious Lives, Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina, and. Patients of the State. He is also the co-author (with Debora Swistun) of Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown, (with Fernanda Berti) of In Harm’s Way. Interpersonal Violence at the Urban Margins, (with Katherine Sobering) of The Ambivalent State, and (with Sofía Servián) of the forthcoming Squatter Life. Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires. He is the editor of Invisible in Austin and Portraits of Persistence. He is the founder of the Urban Ethnography Lab at UT-Austin.
Cecilia Menjívar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Chair and is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research focuses on two areas: U.S.-bound migration from Central America and gender-based violence against women in Central America. The general theoretical strand connecting her work centers on the state and its actions (and inactions, neglect, and abandonment) through legal regimes, bureaucracies, institutions, agencies, and agents. In the United States, she has undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in Central American communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Phoenix, and rural Kansas. In Latin America, she has conducted ethnographic research in Guatemala. Her latest project focuses on the structural roots of gender-based violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.