Publication by Angelika Poferl and Norbert Schröer

Angelika Poferl / Norbert Schröer (eds.)

Handbook of Sociological Ethnography

Published: 2022, Wiesbaden: VS Springer

We are very pleased that Eva Gerharz, Volker Hinnenkamp, Anne Honer and Udo Dengel, further members of the FGCSS and the Fulda University of Applied Sciences, are represented in the anthology.

Ethnography starts with the empirical investigation of social action, lifeworlds, practices, institutional contexts and cultural orientations through observation, co-presence, longer-term participation and involvement in the field under investigation. Its origins lie in ethnology and journalism. The studies of the Chicago School conducted from the 1910s to the 1930s took up both procedural approaches in order to be able to describe the dynamics and increasing confusion of social reality. This has led to the emergence of a sociological ethnography that focuses its attention on social and cultural differentiations in each individual society.

The aim of this handbook is to provide a systematic overview of the starting points, central approaches, debates and differentiations of sociological ethnography as a research method, and at the same time to trace the development of ethnographic research from its historical beginnings and foundations at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, through further developments in the 1960s, decisive decisions in the 1970s and 1980s, to its current diversity.

Free access (only with Eduroam connection or university VPN): to the handbook

Content

• The roots
• Pioneering phase - expansions - consolidations: Sociological Ethnography
• Upheavals and Productive Irritations
• Diversification and pluralisation from the mid-1980s onwards
• Specific programmatic, methodological and methodological orientations

Editors

Dr. Angelika Poferl is Professor of General Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the TU Dortmund University.

Dr. Norbert Schröer is a retired professor of qualitative methods of empirical social research at the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences Fulda.