Deep Ethnography, Transnational Social Movements and Vulnerable Populations
Raul Pacheco-Vega
Professor of Public Administration, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Mexico)
Monday, October 19th, 2015
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Storrs Campus
Wood Hall, Basement Lounge
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. For more on Dr. Pacheco-Vega, see http://www.raulpacheco.org
This talk is part of the TAULA series of El Instituto. it is co-sponsored by the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights, El Instituto, and the Departments of Political Science and History
For more information, contact: Mark Healey at mark.healey@uconn.edu