Keywords: Applied ethnography, empathy, homelessness, outreach work, observations, assumptions, positionality
In this resource, you will find the story “Climbing the Wall of Empathy”, and two related themes with questions, exercises and related materials:
- Theme 1: Applied ethnography—observing
- Theme 2: Descriptions, assumptions, interpretations, and positions
You can jump to the theme by clicking the title of the theme you wish to work with.
Read or listen to the story before continuing with the themes:
Music by Coma-Media and andrey327ap from Pixabay
THEME 1: Applied ethnography—observing
When working with this story, you can become familiar with some overlaps between the disciplines of anthropology and social work. More specifically, the focus is on becoming aware of the ways in which ethnographic observation, and later writing, can underpin both interactions and documentation in social work.
The term ethnography derives from the Greek word’s ethnos, ‘people,’ and grapho, ‘writing.’ It is a type of social research or enquiry that usually involves examining, and later carefully describing, a field, a phenomenon, an issue etc., from the participants’ perspective. Sustained observation in the lifeworld’s of participants is a typical method in ethnography. As social workers are neither anthropologists nor ethnographers (among other things because social workers do not only describe and analyze, but also act), we use the term applied ethnography to underline that we are talking about a specific approach and mode of being in social work.
The theme rests on the belief that good social work practice often goes hand in hand with social workers’ ability to observe and consider very subtle details in the environment in which they work and act and plan their work accordingly. In doing so, social workers can also become better at postponing the presumptions, conclusions, or judgments that we are usually quick to apply to things we see or hear.
According to Wendy Haight, Misa Kayama and Rose Korang-Okrah (2014), who have written about ethnography in social work, ethnography allows social workers to obtain in-depth knowledge about a context and environment, including the service users (and other actors) who inhabit the context. They underline that such in-depth understanding of a context is necessary in, for example, effective advocacy and for social justice purposes:
“Just as social workers seek a firmer grasp of their increasingly diverse clients’ everyday lives and perspectives, a goal of ethnographers is to understand what it means for people to be differently situated in terms of values, goals, resources, and social standing. Ethnographers seek to understand diverse individuals’ and groups’ complex systems of beliefs and practices as embedded within particular sociocultural and historical contexts.”
(Ibid., p. 128)
It is important to understand that, while ethnographic fieldwork is usually sustained over time and engaged with its research objects, most social workers will not have time to engage in ethnographic fieldwork. Thus, the strength of applied ethnography lies in its ability to offer social workers a position for describing, analyzing, and reflecting on our own practices—from a position outside the contexts that we often take for granted.
Applied ethnography is about being present and postponing judgment; allowing one-self to notice details (and perhaps banalities) and arrive at unexpected insights; seeing your context in new ways. At its best, this position can:
“…make visible the complex processes that cross the artificial divide between micro- and macrosocial work practice, showing the ways in which, the actions of workers respond to and shape theories, organizations, policy and social conditions and vice versa.”
(Gillingham & Smith 2020, p. 2235)
Applied ethnography is an approach, and set of tools, which can enhance your understanding of the co-productive relationships between social and physical structures, human actions, and social change.
Having read or listened to the story “Climbing the wall of empathy, Seeing Floki,” choose a concrete place you find interesting (or relevant to the theme you are working with).
- Take a walk of minimum 30 minutes and train your ability to observe using all your senses. Pay attention to all details and note the ways in which they affect your interpretations during the walk.
- After the walk, use 30 minutes to write down your observations.
THEME 2: Descriptions, assumptions, interpretations, and positions
Having read the story “Climbing the wall of empathy, Seeing Floki” and made the activities in theme 1, you can now start reflecting on the positionality of voices in a text.
In most texts it will be possible to distinguish between information that is communicated in a ‘matter-of-fact’-style and information based on the writer’s assumptions, interpretations, and position. Here, we assume a position on writing where we maintain that, just as writes are never neutral, nor are texts (for a thorough discussion see Brettell, 1994). Writing on what has been termed the ‘interpretive perspective’ in anthropology, Caroline B. Brettell quotes anthropologist Michael Jackson, who has described the perspective as a:
“shift away from the analytic, positivist conception of knowledge to a hermeneutical one which, to adapt Weber’s phrase, sees both the anthropologist and the people he or she studies as suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun.”
(Jackson 1989: 182)
Texts have so-called descriptive power; they allow us to form pictures in our mind. In social work, it is key that the texts we produce are written in a manner where the reader (be it service users or other professionals) can clearly distinguish between, on the one hand, ‘matter-of-fact’ descriptions and, on the other hand, assumptions, interpretations, and positionality. Thus, as a writer you must be very aware of substantiating assumptions and interpretations with careful and detailed descriptions. In ethnographic writing, a similar attention to details has been discussed on the term ‘thick descriptions’ (see Geertz, C. 1973). If, for example, you imagine yourself at a home visit in a household where the authorities are considering placing the family’s children in foster care, you will have to document your visit in writing. Observation might not be part of what you normally consider as ‘data’ for this type of writing. Nonetheless, observations are likely to affect our documentation. Thus, training your ability to think of observations as a tool in social work is advisable, but equally important is the training of your ability to write in a transparent manner. If, for example, the report you make after your home visit states that “The home was filthy and seemed unfit for children,” the reader needs your detailed description of what led you to these assumptions. Otherwise, it is impossible to access the rationales behind your assumptions.
Based on the information you have from the case, discuss the following:
- Read your observations from the activities in theme 1 thoroughly. Decide which parts of your text are ‘matter-of-fact’ descriptions, assumptions, and interpretations respectively (you can color-code your own text if it is helpful).
- Team up with a fellow student and exchange texts. Read through each other’s texts and try to identify which parts of the text are ‘matter-of-fact’ descriptions, assumptions, and interpretations respectively. Communicate your readings to each other without making judgments or discuss the findings. If you need to, ask for elaboration on why your reader has identified the part of the text in this way.
- Using the feedback from your fellow student, go through the descriptions on your own again and reflect on whether they are ‘thick,’ or detailed, enough to determine how you arrived at your assumptions and interpretations. Add more details to your descriptions if needed.
- In the story “Climbing the wall of empathy, Seeing Floki” the writer’s position is striking and emphasized—reflect on the position from which you have written your own text. Could the text have been written from a different position? And how would that have changed the text?
Extra material to “Descriptions, assumptions, interpretations, and positions”
If you want a more thorough introduction to applied ethnography, you can use the training course for professionals. Here, you also find exercises for working with applied ethnography in groups.
References
Brettell, C. B. (1994) When they read what we write: The politics of Ethnography. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gillingham, P. & Smith, Y. (2020). “Epistemological Siblings: Seven Reasons to Teach Ethnography in Social Work Education.” In: British Journal of Social Work (2020) 50, 2233–2251. doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcz153
Haight, W., Kayama, M. & Korang-Okrah, R. (2014). “Ethnography in social work practice and policy.” In: Qualitative Social Work, 2014, Vol 13(1) 127–143, DOI: 10.1177/1473325013507303
