Posts Tagged ‘Edward Said’

August 20th, 2011

The Help, ethnography, and ickiness

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This is a post about the politics of representation, postcolonial theory, and the Hollywood movie, The Help. And it begins with my Mom.

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Posted in Notes from the field | 3 Comments »

August 4th, 2011

Why I don’t read non-fiction from Barnes and Noble, and why that’s a problem for public scholarship; or, what I learned in third grade about epistemology and essentialization

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I have not been interested in the Barnes and Noble non-fiction section for a long time. There might be a few history books that catch my eye, or a few recent works of book-length journalism that show me how to do what I claim to do—which is ethnography—with an eye for detail, insight, and refreshingly clear prose. Yet most of the stuff that’s there—particularly in the social sciences section—is pretty basic, often uninteresting, and available for free (to me) in more rigorous form on JSTOR.

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Posted in Notes from the field | 7 Comments »