Ethnography, first, is a kind of work that some social scientists engage in with their informants but, even more significantly perhaps, with each other. One becomes an ethnographer above all by having one's work accepted as ethnography by the community of practicing ethnographers in their great diversity. Being accepted as an ethnographer by at least some ethnographers is a matter of engaging in a complex practice and the, eventually, the only way to start this process is by actually starting this kind of practice.

This course is intended to do this by, first taking the students through the various steps into which this practice can be analyzed (from proposal to final write-up) and, second, by expecting that all students conduct a pilot project in parallel to the class discussions

For heuristic reasons the course is organized in four main parts.

1. The first two lectures expand the opening paragraph of this outline and set my epistemological understanding of ethnography as a situated practice.
    
   1. The main issues
   2. Constructing a method
       
2. The following five lectures focus on the activities most typical of ethnography: those that involve direct contact with the people in whose life we are interested (our "subjects")
    
   1. The phenomenological and experiential aspects of contact
   2. The tasks of ethnography: fieldnotes and other recordings
   3. The problems: ask?
   4. listening?
   5. eliciting?
      
      
3. The next six lectures focus on the most essential activities of ethnographers: organizing one's writings in the field and transforming them into plausible new knowledge about the subjects
    
   1. Grounded theory
   2. Indexing
   3. Transcribing
   4. Questioning the text
   5. Formal analyses
   6. Structural analyses
      
      
4. The final two lectures address what becomes the public product of the ethnographer's work: the writing of the final report
   1. Writing, analytic
   2. Writing, policy.