Your proposal/research plan will answer the following questions:
What is the topic you have chosen to explore? (please select any place in Hoboken or Jersey City in New Jersey, USA.
This could take the form of I want to explore how XYZ concept functions in ABC time and place. Concepts could include things like uncertainty, futurity, crisis, communal or historical change, risk, repair, improvisation, etc.
This could also take the form of I want to explore how XYZ social practice looks in ABC time and place. Social practices could include things like sharing, gifting, or exchange, norms about the body, norms about health, the enactment or making of cultural heritage, collecting, identity formation/presentation (in online or offline spaces), rule-making or rule breaking, knowledge-practices in labs, in climate science centers, or in coding communities, engagements with urban ecologies like parks or beaches, competition in online or offline spaces, bird-watching, foraging, etc.
Where do you propose to explore your topic?
What will be your fieldsite or fieldsites?
How will you access them (i.e. are they open to the public, are they part of your everyday life, will you need someone to guide you, introduce you to, or help you navigate them?)
What do you know about these places at the outset?
What is the ethnographic question that you will try to answer?
An ethnographic question means one that you will be able to answer through participant-observation in your fieldsite, in the limited time that we have to conduct these projects (due May 3).
What will you do methodologically in order to answer your question?
How many times will you go to your fieldsite or, if your fieldsite is part of your everyday life, how many times will you turn your attention to it in a methodological way in order to see it differently?
What kinds of things will you be paying attention to?
What kinds of questions will you need to ask people or learn from people?
What will participation look like in your case?
In addition to writing fieldnotes, will you use any sensory-ethnographic tools like audio or visual recording, photography, collecting of tactile things, drawing, mapping, etc.
What are some assumptions you have going in, either about the site itself or about how XYZ concept or ABC social practice will look? You may also include assumptions you think are broadly shared (like, we tend to assume that people are just acting transactionally and individually when they go grocery shopping, but what if there is more going on to do with kinship, sociality, and community formation?)
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