Oct 21, 5:00 PM: Virtual Turns: Doing Ethnography During and Beyond a Pandemic

Understanding the complex processes that create and reinforce social inequalities, discrimination, and oppression in communities across the world has never been more urgent. Yet, with the COVID-19 pandemic, our ability to safely and ethically conduct in-person ethnographic research is limited. In this panel discussion, our speakers - three ethnographers who have pivoted to teach courses on virtual/digital methods - talk through the unique challenges and new opportunities facing qualitative researchers today. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, the Ethnography Incubator, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation About the Panelists: Sneha Annavarapu, UChicago Social Science Teaching Fellow Sneha Annavarapu is a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow. Sneha is an ethnographer who studies urban governance, gender and class in India. She is teaching a class titled "Digital Lives, Virtual Societies" in Winter 2021 in which students will learn how to do qualitative research in the absence of the possibility of face-to-face interaction. You can learn more about Sneha's research and writing at www.snehanna.com Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela, Postdoctoral Fellow at the UChicago Ethnography Incubator and the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation A cultural anthropologist and photographer, Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela is a postdoc at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. Part of the Chicago Ethnography Incubator, Benjamin is a multimodal ethnographer and a sociocultural anthropologist, and his research centers on youth, education, and politics, especially in Brazil. His current book project on the politics of time in Rio de Janeiro stems from his broader interest in the waning viability of forms of spatial control and the corresponding rise of time as the object of governance and resistance in Latin America. In summer 2020, he taught a course on virtual methods for undergraduates. Cate Fugazzola, Earl S. Johnson MAPSS Postdoctoral Instructor Cate Fugazzola is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor of Sociology in MAPSS. She is an ethnographer whose work centers on transnational queer movements in authoritarian contexts, and her pre-pandemic research focused on LGBT organizations in the People’s Republic of China. Cate is currently teachig a course titled “Digital Ethnography” in which students develop an online ethnographic project and explore epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in the study of virtual worlds. To learn more about Cate’s work, you can visit her website www.cfugazzola.com Moderated by Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor of Sociology This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required via the Zoom link below. If you need assistance to attend, please contact tbrazas@uchicago.edu.

Date: October 21, 2020
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM