Fieldworking

FieldWorking , Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's acclaimed textbook, is an engaging guide to the fundamentals of ethnographic study, complete with practical help for research and writing. Emphasizing civic responsibility and community engagement, FieldWorking incorporates examples by professionals writers such as Mark Singer, Pico Iyer, Joan Didion, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as student research projects on topics as diverse as a local truck stop, dinner clubs, blogging, and a horse sales barn, to help students identify and define their own subcultures and communities. Because students are connected to their research, FieldWorking 's ethnographic approach makes projects fascinating and empowering for all students as they learn to observe, listen, interpret, analyze, and write about the people and artifacts around them.

Designed to fill the gap between reading about the process of fieldwork and actually engaging in the process and "writing up" the results, this innovative text presents specific methods and models -- and offers hands-on practice -- for carrying out all phases of field-based research. In considering the research process, FieldWorking addresses the reading, writing, listening, and speaking techniques and strategies necessary for understanding, interpreting, and presenting the lives and surroundings of others through their eyes -- not just one's own.