ANTH 1940 aims to help students understand the different theoretical assumptions that shape research efforts; to examine how hypotheses and research questions are formulated; and to appreciate the ethical and scientific dimensions of research by hands-on experience in fieldwork projects.

In this course spotlight, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Joshua Babcock offers a brief synopsis of ANTH 1940: Ethnographic Research Methods.

“This semester, we've been learning to fail over and over and over again. But not in the ways you might think. We're not just falling down again and again. We're learning to grow through our failures, to see them as opportunities to let go of the goals and expectations we never needed to set for ourselves or our research in the first place. In short, we're learning to see failure not as failure, but as a turning point toward new ways of building accountability into our ethnographic research. The texts that best illustrate this are Andrew Causey's 'Drawn To See,' on ethnographic drawing, Magnus Course's 'Three Ways to Fail,' an ethnographic perspective on the productive role of ‘failure,’ and finally Sara Ahmed's essay, 'Selfcare as Warfare.'”

Learn more and explore other course offerings in anthropology at cab.brown.edu