Ethnography Division

The Ethnography Division promotes research and teaching associated with the ethnographic study of communication. We seek to foster a distinctive community of communication scholars in and through which we work to understand and depict the human experience of communicating in a cultural context. We are interested in how people use symbol systems that organize their collective knowledge, beliefs, and values. We focus on how people meaningfully express their experience and interpret the expressions of others. In this process, we believe, people create, maintain, and transform their identities, their relationships, and their communities. We endorse the research methods of participant observation, qualitative interviewing, and artifact analysis as appropriate means for achieving this type of knowledge. We embrace both traditional and experimental means of representing ethnographic research. Finally, we promote effective pedagogy that exposes undergraduate and graduate students to the opportunities and challenges of conducting ethnographic research.