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, Dilan Eren, and Elif Birced
Friday, March 31, 12-1.30 pm (PT)
Kimberly Kay Hoang
in conversation with Bruno Cousin
Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets*
*Read the chapters here
Kimberly Kay Hoang is Associate Professor of Sociology and the College and the Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago. Dr. Hoang is the author of two books based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork: Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press 2022) and the award-winning Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California Press 2015).
Bruno Cousin is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po (France), where he holds the Endowed Chair on Cities, Housing & Real Estate. He has conducted several ethnographic and interview-based research projects among the upper classes, on topics like urban self-segregation, class prejudice, forms of bourgeois sociability, corporate boards, elite transnationalism, and labor relations within super-rich households. He often combines ethnography with other methods and regularly experiences the heuristic virtues of doing fieldwork as a duo – mainly with Sébastien Chauvin (University of Lausanne) or Jules Naudet (CNRS & EHESS).