Ethnolab is a small ethnographic project at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John. Sponsored by start up funds from the Daniels Family Foundation, Andrea and Mark Daniels, and EasyDNS, as well as research funds from the Department of Social Science at UNB, Ethnolab focuses on the use of multimedia to do applied research. Director, Dr. Eric Weissman, primarily a visual ethnographer, started the lab for a few key reasons and with specific goals.
- Affirming visual ethnography for the 21st century: The first reason is that there seems to be an emphasis of multimedia in academic and community-based research, but the meaning of ‘ethnography,’ per se, seems to have been conflated with almost anything that concerns people or culture, or that is produced by people. So a primary goal of Ethnolab is to primarily help students at all levels of their studies at UNB, researchers, faculty, communities and other parties connect with the spirit of classic ethnography rooted in visual anthropology and visual sociology. Ethnolab embraces many forms of ethnography, however. We embrace the intertextuality of forms of presentation and knowledge mobilization. For us the key is to emphasize scholarly approaches that maintain a fidelity to the ethical and critical nature of the work of social research – our approach is a form of applied and public ethnography; meaningful, rigorous, and useful to many kinds of audiences.
- Connecting UNB and our community to ethnographers abroad: Reinforcing the lessons learned from various ethnographic traditions helps our members to infuse the work we do today with the experiences of great ethnographers throughout history. One might ask, what is ethnography? More, one might ask what makes a film, or a photo essay, ethnographic for example. These are tough questions, answerable only by understanding what the founders of the tradition had said, and knowing what others are doing today. There is a lot of good work out there and many organizations and projects that pursue these goals. Ethnolab has ethos of transparency and engaging in cooperative and collaborative visual research where people can see others’ work, share ideas, post their projects, access resources from within the UNB and the broader Maritime community. One of our goals is to be a key maritime node in the broad network of organizations doing serious ethnographic work across the globe by providing links, contacts and events. We want to be an elevator of ideas and a connector of ethnographers.
- Knowledge production and mobilization: Simply put, Ethnolab provides some basic tools, such as cameras and editing technology for some of the students at UNB who work with Dr. Weissman and his colleagues (we are in the process of reaching out to other sources of funding to improve the capacity of the lab). Working with students on advanced projects, or through Dr. Weissman’s courses in visual research, are two ways that the student body can benefit from the lab. However, we also are engaged in projects with the community, such as a film project looking at two new housing programs in Saint John and Fredericton. Our projects support the solo work of ethnographers and the collaborative, community-based projects such as that film. Ethnolab wants to enable quality knowledge production and assist in translating those experiences through the use of various media into experiences to assist with solving issues.
- Satisfying various needs: In order to affect changes in our communities and those of our collaborators, Ethnolab supports experimental and creative approaches to disseminating ethnographic knowledge. In our opinion, so long as the information is gathered in ways that honour the rigours of ethnographic inquiry, then, we have “the good bones” on which to build a number of presentations crafted for different audiences, from school kids to politicians. As the site develops, you will see the research section and the current projects increasingly reflect the diverse forms and audiences that our members address.
- Membership: Because this is a research site where people can upload research, proposals, collaborate and share intellectual property, access to some elements of Ethnolab.ca will be restricted to people who join the community and agree to a community standard. There will be a research sub-folder and community page only for members, while some of the content will be publicly accessible. At the same time, members can share their content as they please, and since much of our communities works will be linked to their public sites like YouTube, non-members are not excluded.
- More to come: As this is the first week that we have been up, there will be more to come and we appreciate your comments about what you would like to see or anything else related to the site.