Tangible Tools in Para-ethnographic Fieldwork

Emotional work: ethnographic fieldwork in prisons in Ecuador

Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Study of Game Production

The purpose of this essay is to show the ways in which ethnographic methodology provided a useful means for investigating the work and activity of an emergent game production team and system. With neither expertise in game design nor software programming, the researcher gained access to the unit of analysis, the production of educational computer games, as a research and instructional design ap...

Problematizing the Field: Theorizing Spatial Volatility in Ethnographic Fieldwork

The purpose of this paper is to problematize the idea of the ethnographic field that is usually taken for granted in Information Systems (IS) field research. The field is the touchstone of reality which the ethnographer encounters yet it is often thought of something fixed and merely ‘out there’ where the ethnographer goes to conduct the research. However, recent advances in anthropological sch...

Ethical Challenges in Participant Observation: A Reflection on Ethnographic Fieldwork

In this essay I reflect on the ethical challenges of ethnographic fieldwork I personally experienced in a female gambling study. By assuming a covert research role, I was able to observe natural occurrences of female gambling activities but unable to make peace with disturbing feelings of my research concealment. By making my study overt, I was able to fulfill ethical obligations as a researche...

Ethnographic Fieldwork Under Industrial Constraints: Toward Design-in-Context

In this paper, we discuss ethnographic fieldwork as a research technique for user centred design in the industry. We take a look at the original meaning of fieldwork in ethnography, and discuss how ethnographically inspired fieldwork can enrich research and data gathering in a participatory design setting. The ethnographer in his field seeks to ‘go native’. But in an industrial setting there is...