The Motherload is a look at the realities of contemporary motherhood in the time of post-pandemic pressures,...
Tag: gender
Researcher Positionality and Identity Validation: A Case Study in Organizational Friction over the Framing of a Demographic Questionnaire
This case study offers strategies for navigating internal frictions within research teams faced with sensitive...
The Root Cause is Capitalism… and Patriarchy
Case Study—The authors used anthropology and other design research methods to develop a new kind of study to capture the world of professional creatives and the people they work with. To uncover core collaboration challenges for professional creatives the authors asked them to walk through past...
Toxicity v. toxicity: How Ethnography Can Inform Scalable Technical Solutions
While a number of scholars have studied online communities, research on games has been mostly focused on the business, experience, and content of gameplay. Interactions between players within games has received less attention, and toxic behavior is a newer area of investigation in academia....
No One Reason for It: Workforce Diversity, Cultural Complexity, and Staff Retention at BMW MINI
This case study is based on an ethnographic investigation conducted in 2003 at the BMW Plant Oxford automobile factory focusing on issues of staff retention. The study found that the workforce, as well as being diverse in conventional terms, was also divided in less immediately identifiable ways,...
The Worst Technology for Girls?
The aim of the research was to discover how teen girls use technology in relation to privacy practices in their everyday lives. Asking teenage girls to describe the worst technology they could imagine was a fruitful way of exploring their feelings towards location-awareness, tracking and...
The Giving Caregivers: Resilience as a Double-Edged Sword in the Context of Healthcare
In this paper we challenge an assumption about caregivers of chronic patients that we’ve repeatedly encountered in our ethnographic fieldwork: that of the inherently and permanently resilient caregiver, or a...
It’s Not Childs’ Play: Changing Corporate Narratives Through Ethnography
Case Study—After discovering that there were over 25 projects going on in various business units in the company that involved children as end users, and that most people had a limited understanding of children's play, the researchers proposed a multi-cultural ethnographic project called...
Radicals in Cubicles
“A radical approach specifically aims to uncover root causes and original sources, as opposed to surface level explanations.” —Thomas Wendt Thomas Wendt is one of many eloquent voices urging designers and ethnographers to take responsibility for the social roots and implications of our work. This...
Do I Have to #MeToo? The Productivity of Silence in Instances of Sexual Harassment and Assault in Field Research
- How did you two meet again? - Let’s head back to the yacht club for sunset. - What happened to that bottle of champagne? - Please don’t fall off the boat. - Live music doesn’t have the same raw character here. - Tahni, go deal with your friend. - What happened to that bottle of champagne? -...