UM Ethnography Group

We are ethnographers connected to Maastricht University. We meet on a monthly basis, usually in an online setting, to share ideas, work-in-progress, methods, and many more thoughts on ethnographic fieldwork, analysis, and writing.

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The Group

Our ethnography group video gives you an impression who we are and what we do.

You also find a Dutch-language introduction to our group in the university newspaper The Observant:

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We are open to welcome new members. Please reach out to us!

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Our meetings take place every last Thursday of the month, 4:00–5:30pm (CET).

Future Meetings

Past Meetings

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Resources

This page is always under construction. We share our favorite readings, audios and other media on an ongoing basis.

Ethnography Summer Podcasts

International Friend of Mystery (Invisibilia)
35min
In 2007, American anthropologist Katherine Verdery found herself staring at almost 3,000 pages worth of Top Secret files... all about her. What Katherine found in that dossier turned her world upside-down and tested her most basic assumptions about trust, betrayal, friendship and power.

The Native Scholar who Wasn’t (The Daily)
65min
Andrea Smith had long been an outspoken activist and academic in the Native American community. Called an icon of “Native American feminism,” she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy work and has aligned herself with prominent activists such as Angela Davis. Last fall, however, a number of academics, including Ms. Smith, were outed as masquerading as Black, Latino or Indigenous. While many of them explained themselves and the lies they told, Ms. Smith never did. Why?

David and the Wire (RadioLab)
30min
David Weinberg was stuck. He had been kicked out of college, was cleaning toilets by day, delivering pizzas by night and spending his weekends in jail. Then one night he heard a story on the radio and got it in his head that maybe he too could make a great radio story. He’d cast himself as the main character in a great documentary and he’d travel and live and steer his way out of his rut. So he bought a recorder and began to secretly record every last meaningful and mundane minute of his life and he found his great idea transformed into a troubling obsession. The very thing that gave him hope and purpose was also distancing him from those he loved the most. What if he’d created an archive of his life that had become his life?

Textual Feelings Podcast: Discussion of Testo Junkie
73min
In this episode, the textual feelings duo discusses Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, a wild mixture of theory and self-experimentaion. Some talking points include queer sex writing, the disturbing and racialized history of the pill, and how we can come to understand the mechanisms of the Pharmacopornographic era.

The Science and Belief in Society Podcast: Measuring Mediation. The Study of Contemplative Science with Mareike Smolka
63min
In this episode, James and Will welcome Mareike Smolka, a PhD Researcher at Maastricht University in Science and Technology Studies and Fullbright Scholar at Arizona State University, who has ethnographically explored this community. Mareike’s work traces the development of Contemplative Science from fringe to mainstream interest, and demonstrates the tensions and trade-offs in play when exploring religious practices from within the boundaries of the neoliberal academy.

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Events

You find more information about the event on this website.

The exhibition is part of the UM Making Clinical Sense project, a comparative ethnographic study on how doctors learn in digital times.

The documentary festival is co-organized by our ethnography group member Laura Ogden. The works presented at the festival draw on audio-visual ethnography.

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Contact

The ethnography group is currently co-organized by Anna Harris, Candida Sanchez Burmester, and Mareike Smolka. You can reach out to them if you have questions, suggestions or would like to join the group.

Send an e-mail to: [email protected]