11:00 - 11:30

Amy Shuman -- "Getting it right"

Abstract:

        Many kinds of scholars do fieldwork (broadly understood as research with people), but we have very different ideas of what "getting it right" means.  For some, it means finding more than one means of ascertaining that our results are accurate (such as triangulation). For creative non-fiction writers, getting it right is an aesthetic measure.  For ethnographers, it may be both of these, but it is also a question of ethics.  Our relationships with our subjects complicate the mandate to understand others as they understand themselves.  Our work often serves multiple purposes and audiences, at the very least conflicting obligations of scholarship and community.   We could describe a conflicting ethics of truth for fieldworkers who become apprentices as a means of learning about cultural practices (Narayan, Romberg).  Further, most fieldworkers face ethical questions in determining how to represent situations that are potentially embarrassing or worse (Rini, Behar).  I will describe fieldwork ethics as a two-way street (J. Benjamin) in which both fieldworker and subject negotiate the minefields of misunderstanding and disappointment (El Or) in an effort to get it right.

About Amy Shuman:

Amy Shuman's fieldwork includes an inner city junior high school in Philadelphia, a community of orthodox Jewish women in Jerusalem and Brooklyn, artisan stonecarvers in Pietrasanta, Italy, Columbus Jewish philanthropists, and people applying for political asylum. She is the author of Storytelling Rights, Other People's Stories, and (with Carol Bohmer) Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century.