Author Archive for Amble

Stoller

At the beginning of this course, I had a vague idea that the way to ‘do’ ethnography was to show up with a notebook, a recorder, a video camera, observe, come home, edit everything down and end up with something…

Commentary – Ferguson

It’s a cliche in crime dramas to say that a murderer wasn’t a murderer until he killed someone, but it is true. The circumstances that led up to their decision can be traced back to the playground at school, or…

Commentary – Pryer

“The writing of memoir may be understood as a hermeneutical process that serves as entry point into a community of discursive relationships. It is a living practice, at once hopeful and uncertain, which necessarily involves the creation of fictions –…

Commentary #7 – Foucault

Amble Hollenhorst Dr. De Vries ENGL 5870 21 April 2009 Commentary #7 Our society is the panopticon, each individual is both a captive and an observer. We have no king, no guard that we can distinguish. Indeed, as we have…

5870 Mid-Term

Amble Hollenhorst Dr. Kim De Vries ENGL 5870 Question 2: The question of subjectivity is an important one to discuss because it is virtually impossible for us as people to be entirely objective about the things that we witness. We…

Class Log

Amble Hollenhorst Dr. Kim De Vries ENGL 5870 3 March 2009 Log for Second Half of Class on Tuesday, February 24, 2009 • Writing Prompt: 1. What do you think is the biggest challenge you will have in doing observations?…

Commentary #6-Percy

I think this reading got much more in depth into the theory of perception than I was prepared for. It took the idea of the “most photographed barn in America” to a new place for me. But as much as…

Commentary #5 Goffman

I think we are all conscious at some level of the differing roles we take on in our lives; as teachers, students, parents, children, siblings, spouses, friends. We are not only playing different roles in different situations, we play them…

Commentary #4 Liminality

Bonnie Sunstein argues that a good ethnography lives in the liminal space between story telling and informational text. This is a very fine line, because if we force ourselves to present the information we gather in as objective a way…