Writing Project 2: Ethnography

Background and Overview
For Writing Project 1, you examined a ritual, practice, behavior, or habit (what we will generically refer
to as a “cultural phenomenon”) in your personal life to better understand your cultural identity, relying
on the conventions of autoethnography to write about it from a first-person perspective. In many ways,
you crafted a narrative (or story) that explained how and why this cultural phenomenon defined who
you are as an individual.
For Writing Project 2, we are going to ask you to look beyond your own identity to the identity of a
larger cultural group or community to which you belong. We are all a part of multiple, different,
sometimes even contradictory cultural groups or communities: through our families, we might be
connected to a specific ethnic or racial community; our religion might connect us to another community;
the music we listen to might connect us to another group; sports activities might connect us to yet
another community. This assignment asks you to choose one of these groups or communities to which
you belong and to investigate it.
You will investigate this group or community in order to inform others about what these cultural
phenomena suggest about the community and its values, beliefs, and practices. This will give you and
your readers greater insight into how the group or community understands and defines its own identity.
As an insider, you may think you already know your community well. However, one of the goals of the
project is to challenge your own preconceptions and reflect more deeply on what defines this group. To
this end, you will engage in research as a participant-observer, meaning you will engage in primary
research—interviews, observations, and field notes—to understand this cultural phenomenon from the
inside out.
Requirements and Deliverables
1. In your essay, you should include a narrative structure that tells the story of how you
conducted your research.
2. You should summarize, explain, and discuss the results of your close, detailed observations and
field notes in a way that is understandable to your readers.
3. You should also summarize, explain, and discuss the results of your interview(s).
4. Drawing upon your observations, field notes, and interview materials, your essay should
present your reflections and insights on the community or group you have researched. Your
primary insight should derive from your synthesis of the data you have accumulated: your
observations, field notes, and interview materials. You should discuss this material at length,
explaining how it supports or frames your insight, what it suggests about the role of specific beliefs, values, and practices in defining the community, and drawing conclusions about why and how the
community defines itself.
5. Your essay should be organized in such a way that a reader can follow your thinking and
reasoning from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph. Your primary insight should
help to structure the essay for the reader.
6. You should include 2-3 multimodal elements such as photographs (of the people, sites,
activities, and artifacts that you have researched), hyperlinks to relevant materials, clips of audio or
video from recorded interviews, and so forth. You must make sure that your reader understands
why you are including these elements and why including them enriches your piece of writing.
Consider what media beyond text might reinforce your main idea to readers, convey in another
way the significance of your autoethnography, and/or appeal to your readers from a different
register.
7. Your completed essay should have a title and be approximately 1700 words in length.