Imaginative Ethnography, Silenced Histories, and Landscape Assignment

Team names, titles, and institutions:

  • Maia Butler, Associate Professor of African American Literature, UNC Wilmington

  • Krista Benson, Associate Professor; Grand Valley State University—Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department, Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies

  • Alexandra Gelbard, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University (Ph.D. expected Spring 2023)

  • Matthew Wilson, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

Introduction:

How can imaginative ethnography engage landscape? How can it foster knowledge production about human groups and their relationships to place amidst contexts of silenced histories? This assignment focuses on the practice of ethnography as a data collection method and as a means for research dissemination within the landscape of DC’s streams. Using the ArcGIS “The District’s Historical Streams” Map https://dcgis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=a781a05c42b74274aa8cacda90d26cbd as a historical reference point, this assignment encourages students to engage in imaginative ethnographic data gathering techniques and dissemination methods to engage landscape sites of fluidity, movement, and contact amidst a context of silenced Native and Black histories within Washington, D.C. This assignment is constructed for undergraduate or graduate qualitative research methods courses engaging ethnography as a data gathering and dissemination technique.

Reading Assignment:

  • Elliott, Denielle, and Dara Culhane, eds. A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Power in the Story” (Chapter 1), in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 1-30. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995.

Ethnography is a multifaceted qualitative data collection method and style of research dissemination that engages “‘entangled relationships’ among humans, nonhumans, and natural, social, and virtual environments” (Culhane 2017, 3; Ingold 2008, 1797). The essays in Elliott and Culhane (2017) serve as an introduction to imaginative ethnography situating imagination and creativity as daily practices, “that shape and are shaped by social relations, politics, and cultural formations that infuse lived experience” (3). This approach to ethnographic data collection and dissemination maintains the core facets of ethnography while engaging and questioning processes of knowledge production. Reflexivity, frameworks of knowledge (epistemology), worldview (ontology), and power structures are all key tenants of ethnographic practice that are questioned, re-framed, and re-examined. Imaginative ethnography posits that knowledge production occurs as “collaborative” and “co-creative” when centering relational processes within “zones of entanglement” (3). It also re-frames the use of embodied experiences when engaging in ethnographic practice through sound, movement, senses, and performance.

Activity:

Identify two sites from the ArcGIS “The District Historical Streams” Map (link above) along current and/or former water routes. Using the processes for sensing ethnography, and two of the imaginative techniques for disseminating knowledge articulated in Elliott & Culhane (2017) (i.e., writing, recording & editing, walking, performing), engage in two data gathering sessions at each site. (Should one be unable to physically go to the sites, google street view is an alternative.) For example, two sites could be the “daylighted zone” Broad Branch tributary and the headwaters of the Tiber Creek, which are two geographically parallel locations on either side of Rock Creek Park.

For the first session at each site, set a timer for twenty-five minutes; spend five minutes each focusing on one specific sense describing what you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. How do your reflections about the site impact how you experience it?

After the first session, students should delve into historical/contextual research about the locations they picked. Upon returning for their second visit to the sites, engage in the sensory exercise again. After writing reflections based on the different sensory experiences, does knowing more historical context change how you experience the landscape? Why or why not?

Conclude this assignment with a dissemination product expressed through any of the suggested techniques articulated in the reading. Students should be thinking about the social, historical, political, and economic variables that impact the locations they chose and what the landscape might look like and/or be used for had any of these contextualized variables been different.

Module F Citation

Benson, K., M. Butler, A. Gelbard, M. Wilson. “Imaginative Ethnography, Silenced Histories, and Landscape Assignment, Module F,” (Roberts, A., Way, T. Directors), 2022. Available from Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital, NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty, Retrieved on (date retrieved) website: https://www.apeopleslandscapehistory.org/syllabus-bank.