[Ethnocomm] e-seminar

[Lydia Reinig]

The past fall I had the opportunity to engage with Katriel’s “Expanding
Ethnography of Communication Research: Towards Ethnographies of Encoding”
in an Independent Study with Mary Caron, Katie Peters, and David
Boromisza-Habashi.  As Caron, Peters, and I work to define ourselves as
Ethnographers of Communication, tracing the develop of EC scholarship, we
were excited and intrigued by Katriel’s discussion of “encoding.”  As I
read it again and ponder Leeds-Hurwitz’s response I would like to suggest
that encoding has the potential to help ethnographers of communication
think reflexively about the encoding processes by which codes develop in
situ and in response to growing mobility and globalization, and to address
the more temporal dimension of cultural codes as they shift and are
co-constructed.



Here’s my—albeit more local—example: Nearly two years ago I completed two
pilot project interviews with two young people who I had first interacted
with (but not interviewed) during fieldwork for my study of community
sense-making around rural youth migration in 2011.  By 2014 G and M had
settled in large metropolitan cities, one in the U.S. Southwest, and the
other in the U.S. Pacific Northwest region, far from the small Midwestern
farming communities where the three of us spent the first 18 years of our
lives.  Unlike my previous work, these were less research interviews as
they were conversations about our relationships to where we lived now and
where we had grown up.



What stands out to me now are the ways that these conversations did not so
much developing around enacting a shared code as they did trying to encode
meanings that would allow us to account for shifting temporal locations, to
simultaneously situate our affinity and distain for the ways of being,
speaking, and acting associated with each locality, using aspects of
multiple familiar codes.  In other words, we were carefully “re-mixing”
various codes, to talk about country folks, city people, the literal
distances and meaningful spaces between our current residence and our
hometowns.   I think it would be innovative to think about the temporal
processes we were engaging in to co-construct a code for sense-making.



These are a few nascent comments.  Hopefully they can contribute to the
ongoing discussion.

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 12:03 PM, David Boromisza-Habashi <
david.boromisza at colorado.edu> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
>
>
> With Wendy’s post, the first Ethnocomm e-seminar is officially open! I
> hope all of you will find the time and the energy to respond to Tamar
> and/or Wendy and/or each other between now and February 17.
>
>
>
> Remember: joining the conversation is EASY. Just write your response in a
> regular email, include “e-seminar” as the subject line, and send your email
> to ETHNOCOMM at listserv.linguistlist.org.
>
>
>
> Or, you can hit reply after reading someone else’s contribution – just
> make sure that your reply goes to ETHNOCOMM at listserv.linguistlist.org as
> well as the person whose email you are responding to.
>
>
>
> Cheers, David
>
>
>
> --
>
> David Boromisza-Habashi, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
>
> College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado
> Boulder
>
> http://colorado.academia.edu/DavidBoromiszaHabashi
>
>
>
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-- 
Lydia Reinig, MA
Doctoral Student & Graduate Part-Time Instructor
Department of Communication
University of Colorado Boulder
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