Ethnography - Organizational Field Study
GUIDELINES FOR AN ACTIVIST ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY
(6) Secondary research (intellectual and visual copyrighted materials. Second generation.)
11.) Generate an outline for the organization of your ideas, paragraph titles, and overall structure of your ethnography.
12.) Select media that may assist you in your inquiry, such as a film or play, and incorporate any and all as secondary research sources.
13.) Decide on a thesis/anti-thesis statement (which is the beginning of a formal argument) and coordinate your research findings into the eight sentence introduction paragraph, that will later serve as the organizational map for your subsequent eight paragraphs, which will cover the EIGHT STAGES of Moyer’s Movement Action Plan. The total paper will be nine paragraphs, which include the introduction and the following eight paragraphs detailing the strategic development of Homeboy Industries.
14.) Follow the format provided and later interweave the various quotations from your research into a developed definitive statement and antithetical counterpoint to your thesis as stated.
15.) Incorporate primary research as an anchor for your argumentation and reason fully the cost-benefit analysis of your anti-thesis statement.
16.) Approximate two to three paragraphs for each page. Use the APA Style Sheet for your paper.
17.) Write in full paragraphs and keep sentence length between eight to twenty sentences.
18.) Keep the ethnography in a formal academic writing and all paragraphs in third person. Additional writing can be in first person reflexive notes. Include as an Appendix as a journal, which also includes your ethnographic jottings from your on-site observations and participatory engagement.
Attach a References (APA) last page for all sources, including your primary references. Xerox the page you draw your source from and highlight the passage used in YELLOW.
Xerox each page of secondary research that is used and referenced (points will be taken off if these are missing!)
If you have interviewed people please type out your transcript and attach before the References (the APA model of a bibliography) page. Give each a contract, have them sign it, and pay them one dollar for their interview.
- Select an activist organization that has a track record in the community. Identify the organization’s praxical engagement, which includes both a theory (e: Boal, Freire, etc.) and a practice that is rooted to a significant cause or concern. Next find an activist/artivist practitioner that can be witnessed through the lens of a particular area of performance history.
- Locate the organization that you want to learn more about. Contact the organization and volunteer some days to them. As a participant/observer/researcher plan to take in the entire organization and the people who founded it and are currently run it. Identify who each of the key people are and what they say, actually do, and how that affects the people they service.
- For instance: Homeboy Industries, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Theatre of the Oppressed (programs in prisons and international gang intervention), and Father Greg Boyle.
- Identify a social movement (Youth Social Justice), an inspiring and unique theorist (or practitioner) for the artivist (Jesus Christ, Dorothea Day, Cesar Chavez), and additional performance studies selected readings, lecture, and viewings recorded from the community of gang-interventionist activists worldwide (Dwight Conquergood).
- Go and hang out for at least three days. Take copious notes. Ask many questions. Get to know the people who run the organization and the people ( the constituency or demographic group) whom the organization is seeking to serve. List the products and services, or what the spirituality that is sought beyond the material. For Boyle, he is not as interested in the products and services as much as he is committed to the practice of finding kinship with each person. His ready embrace of compassion, instead of judgement.
- Keep Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan handy as a ready reference as you study the organization’s website, promotional materials, and the actual site experience.
- Boyle’s message is one of hope, of walking with those homeboys/homegirls who are on the margins. It is his praxis. As a Jesuit priest he engages in his every action the goal of changing the metaphor that guides young gangsters lives. Your time spent there should be transformational. Out of the time spent and your own praxical reflection, it should compel you to ponder larger issues, problems, and approaches based on your experience of the organization, additional readings and activist/artistic experience.
- Develop the Activist Organizational Ethnography as a means of investigating the potential answer to your academic inquiry and as an opportunity to contribute new writing to the field of grassroots artivist performance writing.
- Specify your topic/thesis statement in the formal academic question of sentence 2 (common ground=thesis) and sentence 3 (disruption=anti-thesis). This does not need to be a literal question but rather an antithetical consideration. From this organic ethnographic source material, consider an academic question that situates a current and pressing issue and/or inquiry into the field of gangs, crime, and joblessness (common ground) and the disruption to the common ground. Finding the disruption might be found in the Homeboy Industries’ six businesses and the mission of the organization, which is a mission dedicated providing ‘jobs not jails’ (their Unique Selling Proposition).
- Utilize at least eight research sources. Suggested order:
(6) Secondary research (intellectual and visual copyrighted materials. Second generation.)
11.) Generate an outline for the organization of your ideas, paragraph titles, and overall structure of your ethnography.
12.) Select media that may assist you in your inquiry, such as a film or play, and incorporate any and all as secondary research sources.
13.) Decide on a thesis/anti-thesis statement (which is the beginning of a formal argument) and coordinate your research findings into the eight sentence introduction paragraph, that will later serve as the organizational map for your subsequent eight paragraphs, which will cover the EIGHT STAGES of Moyer’s Movement Action Plan. The total paper will be nine paragraphs, which include the introduction and the following eight paragraphs detailing the strategic development of Homeboy Industries.
14.) Follow the format provided and later interweave the various quotations from your research into a developed definitive statement and antithetical counterpoint to your thesis as stated.
15.) Incorporate primary research as an anchor for your argumentation and reason fully the cost-benefit analysis of your anti-thesis statement.
16.) Approximate two to three paragraphs for each page. Use the APA Style Sheet for your paper.
17.) Write in full paragraphs and keep sentence length between eight to twenty sentences.
18.) Keep the ethnography in a formal academic writing and all paragraphs in third person. Additional writing can be in first person reflexive notes. Include as an Appendix as a journal, which also includes your ethnographic jottings from your on-site observations and participatory engagement.
Attach a References (APA) last page for all sources, including your primary references. Xerox the page you draw your source from and highlight the passage used in YELLOW.
Xerox each page of secondary research that is used and referenced (points will be taken off if these are missing!)
If you have interviewed people please type out your transcript and attach before the References (the APA model of a bibliography) page. Give each a contract, have them sign it, and pay them one dollar for their interview.