Grounded in a multi-layered participation that emerged out of a small core-group faculty in interdisciplinary units, the Yale Ethnography Hub marked its official launch on May 2nd, 2023 with a spring workshop, Ethnographic Departures, that expanded outwards to include other ethnographers on campus, including faculty in other disciplines and graduate students. The workshop was structured around three concurrent sessions that showcased ethnographic research by Yale faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students framed by issues of ethnographic crises, experimental ethnography, and historical ethnography. A group roundtable discussion moderated by Eda Pepi (WGSS) contextualized these ethnographic tensions as different forms of interdisciplinary departures, from the field, disciplines, canons, and genres.
- ‘Ethnographic Crises‘, co-organized by Doug Rogers (Anthro) & Madiha Tahir (American Studies), took up disruptions of war, political evacuations and deportations, pandemics, and so on.
- ‘Experimental Ethnography‘, co-organized by Evren Savci (WGSS) and Kalindi Vora (ER&M/WGSS), engaged in experiments with method (autoethnography, writing about virtual spaces, mixing elements of ethnography with other methods) as well as form and genre (using ethnography with other creative forms of writing such as memoir, fiction, etc.).
- ‘Historical Ethnography‘, co-organized by Nana Quarshie (HSHM) & Zareena Grewal (American Studies/ER&M), explored interdisciplinary approaches to history and anthropology.