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Two overarching principles governed its conceptual design and organization.
First, the Field School program combined intensive and long term field
research with a pedagogical agenda of training students in ethnographic
fieldwork. Second, the Field School program sought to both theorize
and put into practice a mode of ethnography that it called experimental
ethnography. While this term has come to refer to a movement focused
on issues of representation in ethnographic writing, it is used here
to refer to an emergent theory and practice of fieldwork.
Experimental ethnography is a paradigmatic mode of fieldwork in which
given, prior and assumed knowledges are used and recirculated in fieldwork
activities, dynamics, and practices with the goals of actualizing an
ethnographic process that both a) has relevance to and for the communities
with which research is conducted and b) experiments with the very practices
of fieldwork itself with the aim of theorizing, and reconfiguring alternative
forms of, ethnography.
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