Questioning Ethnographies Essays in Cultural Politics

Questioning Ethnographies brings together papers by Phil Cohen written over a 10 year period, many of them hitherto unpublished. The book makes a specific intervention into the debate about the value, purpose and effectiveness of ethnography as a research method. Spanning a diverse range of subjects: from visual ethnography to crime narratives; auto/biography to playground cultures; cultural geography to collective memory, the book at once bears witness to people's capacity to create new meanings out of the raw materials in their everyday lives and explores the difficulties and importance of the ethnographic project.

Phil Cohen is Director of the Centre for New Ethnicities Research at the University of East London and author of Rethinking the Youth Question of which Thomas Crow (Professor of History of Art at Yale University) wrote "what gives this lasting import is [Cohen's] ability simultaneously to theorise - in a way that anticipates much later thinking in architecture and social art history - the competing claims to the street inthe modern metropolis...Rethinking the Youth Question demands attention".

Introduction * PART 1: RETHINKING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTRACT * Making Tracks: the limits and conditions of 'situated knowledge' * Getting Real: participant observation between mimesis and masquerade * Curiouser and Curiouser: the dialogic imagination in visual and narrative studies * Welcome to the Traumafest: autobiography, authenticity and the hidden CV * The Other Scene of the Crime: fact, fiction and phantasy in the investigative method * PART 2: STUDIES IN CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY * Forbidden Games: race and gender in playground cultures * Voices and Echoes: power and register in stories of schooling * Finding the Way Home: adventure stories and precautionary tales in young peoples' landscapes of safety and danger * PostNatal Attractions: the power of place in East End lives * Born to Flying Glass: post war memory and changing stories of the Blitz * Index