Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science

by Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Daniel M. Goldstein, Lucía López Juárez

In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García—two local immigrant workers from Latin America—joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.

Genres: Anthropology, Ethnography, Nonfiction, Academic

208 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2019

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book takes on the laudable task of showing the process of collaborative research and its essential role in decolonizing ethnography. That said, the hierarchy portrayed within the research group that fails so see “research assistants” as fully fledged collaborators and the inability to see who did what in the writing process, undermines the book’s goals. This is more a critique of Goldstein than any of the other authors. That said, the book does a good job of discussing method in accessible language, and does still show the importance of collaborative research methods. My issue is that they don’t go far enough.

[Savannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to read for a class