SESSION: DISCOURSIVE ETHNOGRAPHY
Organizor: Giampietro Gobo1 and Anne Ryen2
Contact: 1Dept. of Social and Political Studies, University of Milan, Via Conservatorio 7 - 20122
Milano, tel. ++39-02-503-18813 (office); fax: ++39-02-503-18840, Giampietro.Gobo@unimi.it
2
Agder College, Norway
Keywords: discourse, conversation, ethnography
Abstract
This session is devoted to those studies which combine ethnographic and discourse analytic
methods. Against traditional approaches which promoted on the one hand purely discourse
analytic methods, or on the other hand purely observational studies, this session aims to gather
studies which investigate everyday life interactions, work practices or linguistic activities,
focusing both the relationship between talk and its ethnographic context, and the relationship
between observational data and participants’ accounts. These studies believe that ethnography
without talk could be misleading, and talk without ethnography is blind.
Will be particularly welcome studies based on
Fieldwork observations with interviews with participants
Fieldwork observations accompanied by transcripts of conversation or discourse
The purpose of this session is not to show substantive results only but also the benefits of a such
approach, methodological problems faced by these studies, different ways of managing and
analysing this kind of data.