Ethnography with a Twist

12–14 February 2019, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Contemporary political, environmental, and social challenges and crises, rapidly changing societies, development of technology, and encountering of people and cultures produce new environments of research and a need to rethink innovative research methods. The ETHNOGRAPHY WITH A TWIST conference will bring together researchers from diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. We welcome papers, panels, posters and experimental workshops that explore ethnographic research from a wide range of perspectives that reflect the variety of backgrounds and/or address personal and affective experiences of the researchers. The conference will provide an interdisciplinary arena for lively discussion and exchanges in an inspiring environment that allows ethnographic research to be approached without the weight of tradition and encourages thinking outside the box and the usual comfort zones in our respective fields.

  • How does ethnographic research create substantive knowledge of current processes, phenomena, implications, and meanings of social life and culture across diverse rapidly changing, technological, natural, and/or everyday settings?
  • How can new roles and relations of researchers and their ‘fields’ in ethnographic research be perceived?
  • What kinds of new twists are emerging and could be explored in ethnographic research?

We invite empirical, theoretical, methodological, and experimental contributions, based for example on (but not limited to) in-depth interviews, participant observation, collaborative research, auto-ethnography, art-based field studies, audio-visual methods, virtual/cyber/netnography, multi-sited research, dance/somatic ethnography, sensual ethnography, post-human approaches, and other forms of experimental inquiry.

Keynote speakers: 

-Marie Sandberg (University of Copenhagen)

-Tom Boellstorff (University of California, Irvine)