 | Decolonizing Ethnography Subjects: Marginality Social; Decolonization.; Education and globalization.; Education Higher; Racism in higher education.; Critical pedagogy.; Eurocentrism.; Ethnology; Anthropology; In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García--two local immigrant workers from Latin America--joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization. Carolina Alonso Bejarano is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. She is also a DJ and a cartoonist. Lucia López Juárez is an activist who fights for equal rights for all people, a domestic worker, and a mother who cares for her home. Mirian A. Mijangos García is a singer, songwriter, and naturopath. She is also a mother, an ethnographer, and an immigrants' rights activist. Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City , also published by Duke University Press. |
