Open AccessSelf Ethnography: Or, How I Earned My Berkeley Citizenship in an Ethnographic Journey through the Crunchy Granola and the Scientific
Author(s) -
SCHWINDT BETH
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
ethnographic praxis in industry conference proceedings
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1559-8918
pISSN - 1559-890X
DOI - 10.1111/1559-8918.2019.01280
Subject(s) - feeling , ethnography , intuition , aesthetics , sociology , frontier , popularity , citizenship , psychology , epistemology , psychoanalysis , social psychology , cognitive science , philosophy , anthropology , political science , law , politics
A researcher who used to combine “thinking + feeling” lines on a journey map found herself on the feelings frontier by widely exploring new innovations in neuroscience, psychology, and mind‐body connection, alongside the resurgence in popularity of “old” ways of healing – Chinese medicine, crystals, tarot cards. Through her self‐ethnographic journey, she found that by stripping back ethnography from the measurable, the scientific, the business cases she rediscovered its foundational backbone to carefully tune into and interpret feelings. She redefines ethnography as about finding truth and not judging it — even the parts that don't make sense right away and asserts that believing the tiny fragments of feelings and glimmers of intuition is the future of our practice. The new science and the old wisdom revealed that feelings are the root of agency, or “the feelings we have a say in the world we live in and experience, and it is our new frontier to help people articulate the wealth of their feelings to make a world where we have a say — even before we may have words.