Waubonsee Community College

Exploring everyday life, strategies for ethnography and cultural analysis, Billy Ehn, Orvar Löfgren, and Richard Wilk

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Exploring everyday life

bibliography

911180116

Billy Ehn, Orvar Löfgren, and Richard Wilk

strategies for ethnography and cultural analysis

The numerous tasks and routines that shape our daily existence can seem mundane, even invisible--and yet they play an extremely powerful role in structuring and reproducing society. Exploring Everyday Life casts light on these so-called trivialities, serving as both a guide to the invisible world of the everyday and an instruction manual for first-time explorers. Ehn, Lofgren, and Wilk demonstrate how to use a broad array of ethnographic tools to discover, map, and document new and unexplored territories and guide readers through the process of cultural analysis. Their concrete examples shed light on how a study or paper assignment can evolve and point to how cultural analysis of everyday life can be practically applied in business, government, and other arenas outside of academia.--Publisher website

Hidden worlds : Finding the tools ; From idea to finished product ; The need for a cultural perspective ; Analytical strategies -- The importance of small things : The first step: Getting going ; The second step: Searching the literature ; The third step: Collecting material ; The fourth step: The analysis ; The fifth step: Writing -- Making the familiar strange : Making a first attempt ; Looking for entrances ; To avoid the predictable ; Choosing methodological entrances ; New questions and surprising answers ; Return to the past ; A life-history perspective ; The strange home ; The home as an art installation ; The importance of details and activities ; The advantages of limitations -- Sharing a meal : Table manners ; The hidden world of the dinner table ; Forming a family meal ; Power at the table ; Class and family history ; Doing mealtime ethnography ; Meals as models -- Do you remember Facebook? : Exploring media in everyday life ; Beginning at the end ; Analog and digital living ; Media taking place ; Virtual intimacy ; Are you there? ; Follow the objects -- Catching a mood : Locating the setting ; Analytical approaches ; Touring the senses ; The station as a sensorium ; Changing moods ; Describing atmospheres ; Intimate moods ; Changing tracks ; Sensing the world -- Crafting wood and words : Ethnographic writing ; Making things with words ; Autoethnographic writing ; Describing nonverbal experience ; Do it by feel ; Writing DIY: three versions: Manual; Story; Analysis ; Working knowledge ; The importance of failure ; Working and writing -- Demystifying fieldwork : The classic style ; Making changes to the classic mold ; The jungle ideal ; Where is the field now? ; Organizing information ; Past, present, future -- Taking cultural analysis out into the world : The surprise effect ; Open fieldwork ; What's this thing about culture? ; A double cultural analysis ; Learning to communicate ; Time discipline and teamwork ; Three ways of surprising a client ; So what? ; The critical edge