Our mission is simple. Ethnolab’s primary purpose is to ensure that the integrity of ethnography is not lost to the world’s current fascination with lenses and recorders, memes and bots, AI artists or whatever is coming next. As tools, all these things are useful to ethnographers and also potentially elements or foci of ethnography. But ethnography is complex, historically and socially constructed, and thick and rich description of life. When combined with various media, especially visual media, it is easy to think we are doing ethnographic work simply by capturing sights and sounds etc. We don’t agree. Ethnolab wants to provide the resources, guidance and facilities to link multimedia with ongoing concerns for the social sciences – we support creative and novel approaches, but we want to help maintain a fidelity of the work ethnographers do with these tools to the theoretical and ethical questions that are important to critical social inquiry. Oh, yeah… we want to have fun too.
