Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: Observation and ethnography

  • New Publication: Ethnography as Method, Practice, and Ethical Commitment

    I’m pleased to share my latest publication, which explores ethnography as a vital method within qualitative research. The article examines what makes ethnography so enduring and so necessary: its ability to capture the complexity, depth, and lived meaning of social life through immersive engagement in the field. Rather than treating people as abstract data points,…

  • Doing research as if participants mattered

    Almost all qualitative and quantitative research into human society involves the participation of other humans. However, they are frequently rendered passively in research outputs as ‘research subjects’. In this post, Helen Kara, argues that the way we define participants in research is outdated and presents three ways in which research participants can be made more central…

  • Fieldwork in a village in Central Nepal

    I was watching this video as part of a seminar on ethnography at the Comillas Institute at Columbia University, and while taking notes I began to organize its insights around what can be understood as the different stages of fieldwork. What follows is not a rigid model, but a way of presenting the process more…

  • “City, Street and Citizen The Measure of the Ordinary” by Suzanne Hall

    How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don’t know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city’s public parts, allowing…

  • The Antropology of the desert between US and Mexico

  • Book: “Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families”

    In this revealing study of a white working class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Howell shows us that there is more than one kind of blue collar worker in America today. Hard Living on Clay Street is about two very different blue collar families, the Shackelfords and the Mosebys. They are fiercely independent southern migrants, preoccupied…

  • Book: “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”

    From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of…

  • Example of using sporadic conversations as a research method

    Great example of how to engage with the target group of your study by sporadic conversations. The original source is an article on Trump victory and the reality of rural areas in US. In it, the political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison  Kathy Cramer speakes about his last book The Politics of Resentment, where…

  • Gentrification of a postsocialist old centre in Gdansk, Poland

    Yesterday, walking from industrial area in the surrounding of Gdansk until the historic old center. It was worth photographing the difference in terms of housing in hardly half a kilometer, as well as the contrast between old industrial sites by the river and the new real state that is being raised. The river side is…

  • Postsocialism and postindustrialism: how outsourcing and offshoring boom is transforming Gdansk city, Poland

    Gdansk city is emerging as the next outsourcing city. As many other mid-size cities in the country in the last decade, as well as the capital Warsaw did since 1990, the city is harbouring a increasing number of multinational corporations that aim to outsoource certain business process. In a preious post I echo a very interesting…