Maynooth University Development and Alumni Relations Office (DARO)

2025 Ethnography Winter School

The Raw and the Cooked: Ruminations on Food and Ethnography

27 to 31 January 2025
Important: This module will be delivered in person at the Maynooth University campus.
 
The annual ‘Ethnography Winter School’ hosted by the Department of Anthropology at Maynooth University will take place from 27 to 31 January 2025.  As always, the school will bring together postgraduate students, professional researchers, and others for focused reflection on ‘ethnography’ today.  We have structured the module as a one-week workshop or ‘laboratory,’ enabling students, established scholars, and others to work through challenges and opportunities related to their own research and writing projects in dialogue and critical engagement with each other.  We hope this format will attract participants of diverse disciplinary orientations and career stages, and we further hope that this cross-fertilization of perspectives will yield fresh insights into what ethnography can teach us about the world in which we live.
 

This year the theme undergirding the Winter School is ‘The Raw and the Cooked: Ruminations on Food and Ethnography’. Although the projects that Winter School participants bring to the table need have nothing to do with food, this edition of the Winter School will schedule interventions and provocations on this broad theme to get the juices flowing. Anthropologists have long been preoccupied with food – from potlatches to potlucks – trying to understand the inextricability of food with culture and sociality, and with questions of status and power. Ethnographic research frequently involves conversations at kitchen tables, participating in and observing ceremonial feasts, helplessly watching people make do in conditions of food precarity. In a world riven by poverty, inequality and conflict, with an overarching climate crisis, the questions of present-day access to food for all and of its future sustainability loom large. The contributions of our invited speakers, including keynote speaker Professor Valeria Siniscalchi (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; author of the 2023 book Slow Food: The Economy and Politics of a Global Movement), and of various Maynooth colleagues will lead and inform the intensive discussions that take place during the January 2025 Winter School.
 
Module Description AN862:  Ethnography Winter School
This module is a comprehensive introduction to ethnography.  The course is delivered in a burst format over one week, and features the collaborative teaching of practising ethnographers, including both academics and professional researchers.  ‘Ethnography’ is more than a ‘method’:  it comprises a whole style of thought encompassing forms of observation, analysis, and writing.  The module therefore emphasizes analysis and theory in addition to the research practices (interviewing, participant observation, note-taking) conventionally associated with qualitative research methodology.  Themes covered include:  culture and difference, contexts and cases (working in NGOs, clinics, corporations), styles of representation and the politics of knowledge, research ethics and ethnographic engagement.  The module is also structured as a workshop, so that ethnographers at various stages of their careers -- from students planning proposals, to dissertation writers analysing previously collected material, to research professionals who may not be based in academia -- will be able to produce work within the module that relates to their respective career stages, locations, and goals.  This work, such as a proposal draft or a stretch of ethnographic writing, forms the basis for module assessment. It is not necessary for this work to tie in with the theme of the current edition of the Winter School.
 
Research students based at institutions other than Maynooth University are welcome to register for the Winter School, but the procedures for enrolling in the course for credit will necessarily be somewhat complicated. You are advised to be in touch well in advance with the Maynooth Anthropology Department Office ([email protected]) and Dr Chandana Mathur ([email protected]).
 
Further details will be available in the coming days. The first important date to bear in mind if you are planning to participate in the Winter School is 17^th January: please send in a piece of writing you are working on – be it a research proposal or essay, or even a 5,000+ word chapter draft – by then to [email protected].