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Workshop Descriptions & Sign ups
Below are the 8 workshops that will run simultaneously from 1:30-4:00pm on Monday, November 14th, 2005; the first day of EPIC 2005. Workshop sign up has now closed, as was publicized via email. If you did not sign up for a workshop a slot was reserved for you in one of the 9 workshops to ensure you had one open to you. To find out which workshop you are registered for emailworkshops@EPIC2005.com. Defining the impact of physical spaces on social interactions Workshop Facilitators: Rich Radka & Lillian Shieh NEST - The Home Lab Activities: The characteristics of physical space can determine how social interactions develop in any human experience. Clear, rigorous, and reusable tools for analyzing physical spaces can allow us to better understand this dynamic and to better communicate the abstractions and nuances of ethnography to cross-functional audiences. In this workshop, participants will be presented with an initial framework that could be used to study the influence of spaces upon interactions. The group's reaction to this framework will act as a catalyst as we break into smaller teams to develop other potential approaches to the problem and then test these methods against use scenarios in nearby physical spaces. Teams will then report back to the group and we will attempt to identify the most useful techniques and frameworks. A record of the workshop dialogues, activities, and conclusions will be sent out to participants after the end of the conference. What to bring: Explanations of any past frameworks, materials, or insights on how physical spaces shape social interactions Maximum number of participants: 15. Pre-registration as well as requests for any specific themes for inclusion are encouraged but not required. -THIS WORKSHOP IS FULL- Business Ethnography for the Bottom of the Pyramid Workshop Facilitator: Nirmal Sethia, Professor of Management, Cal Poly Pomona On corporate horizons a new and totally unfamiliar opportunity is emerging: the &lquot;Bottom of the Pyramid&rquot; (BoP) markets-representing almost four billion people, or nearly two-thirds of humanity, who live at the bottom of the economic pyramid. This workshop is designed to engage the presenters and participants in a collective and collaborative exercise with the three-fold purpose of:
HOMEWORK: Some advance preparation will be expected of all participants. Reading list and assignments will be sent by October 15, 2005 to those who register for this workshop. Maximum number of participants: 20 WORKSHOP PRESENTERS AND LEADERS Nirmal Sethia, Ph. D., Professor of Management, Director-Center for Business and Design, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Organizer) Alexandra Mack, Ph. D., Workplace Anthropologist, Pitney Bowes, Shelton, CT. Darrel Rhea, Principal and CEO, Cheskin, Redwood City, CA. Erica Seidel, New Business Development, Pitney Bowes, Shelton, CT. Jeff Smith, Co-founder and CEO, Lunar Design, Palo Alto, CA. Philip Swift, Design Manager and Senior Project Lead, Pitney Bowes, Shelton, CT. LiAnne Yu, Strategic Director, China InSights Group, Cheskin, Redwood City, CA. Working the Process: Anthropological Approaches to Designing and Evaluating Organizational Work Processes Workshop Facilitators: Julia Gluesing, Pamela Crespin, Christine Miller, Tara Eaton, Amy Goldmacher Wayne State University The overall goal of this workshop is to create awareness of existing and newly forming anthropological approaches to the challenges of investigating work processes that are socially embedded in increasingly complex work settings that span organizational, geographic and societal boundaries. We seek to create a dialogue and flow of ideas among business anthropologists to evolve the practice of anthropology in modern organizations. The question we will explore in the workshop is what do we know and what can we learn about the sociality in which processes are embedded, and the implications of this sociality for process design/re-design and implementation in increasingly complex settings? Workshop participants will have the opportunity to share approaches to design and fieldwork issues and problems and to initiate relationships with one another for further exploration of the issues and for collaboration in future research. They will also learn about practical approaches and tools they can use in their own work. Participants will be asked to complete three activities prior to the workshop: 1) read two or three articles, 2) complete a short web-based survey and 3) come prepared to discuss examples and pressing questions or issues from their own work. The workshop will include poster presentations showcasing different perspectives and examples from recent research projects at Wayne State University to spark a full group discussion of sociality and work processes as well as focused small-group roundtable work targeting specific topics of interest. Maximum number of participants: 20. Pre-registration required. Holy Hanging Out: Exploring Spirituality and Religion in the Corporate Environment Workshop Facilitators: Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye & Genevieve Bell In "Holy Hanging Out: Exploring Spirituality and Religion in the Corporate Environment", we intend to explore matters related to the corporate ethnographic study of religion or spirituality -- with or without technology - as well as notes from the field, applications of a religious or spiritual nature, problems inherent in religious research in a corporate environment, and studies of individual or multiple sites of spiritual, religious or technospiritual practice. Participants are to prepare a five-to-ten minute presentation about a pilgrimage or epiphany they have had as an introduction to themselves and their work. The workshop will focus on discussion of these presentations and take appropriate steps for building a community of researchers. Maximum number of participants: 12 Framing Ethnographic Praxis for Innovation Workshop Facilitator: Patricia Sachs, Social Solutions, Inc. This two-and-a-half hour, interactive workshop presents a framework for shaping ethnographic praxis toward innovation and invites participants to engage in discussing, co-shaping, and articulating the framework itself, as well as developing implications for projects that would further the framework. The workshop will be conducted in two parts. Part I: Framework: Innovation Companies today are concerned about maintaining an innovative edge. Shifts in global population, aging, and health, alongside broader participation in the global work force, the global silicon network, and stark global divisions of labor have created a context in which sustainability and strategy are imperative for survival. Innovation, in this context, takes on new meaning. What is the role of professional anthropology and ethnographic praxis for understanding and participating in the dynamics of innovation? How is it meaningful to think about sociality in relation to innovation given this context? What are the implications for integrating anthropological insight and analytic practice into decisions and strategy? We ask participants in this workshop to consider their own work in light of this perspective toward innovation. How would you:
Part II: Projects As researchers, what do we imagine would enable the use, validity, and expansion of the framework? We ask participants to generate the kinds of projects that would further the framework. We will assess whether there are "next steps" that will enhance the practice of anthropology and the power of its impact through action. Maximum number of participants: 20 Collaborating across social, organizational and disciplinary distances Workshop Facilitator: Melissa Cefkin, IBM Almaden Research Center, together with Jens Pedersen and Joachim Halse, IT University of Copenhagen and Elizabeth Churchill and Jack Whalen, PARC Almost by definition, corporate ethnographers have been faced with the opportunities and challenges of engaging the boundary-crossing promise of ethnographic work. What particular challenges do corporate ethnographers face? What new insights and developments have come from these experiences? Bringing a rich mix of collaborations in different settings, both local and distributed, national and international, and within and among people in various kinds of roles-among ethnographers, with researchers of other disciplines, with project team members from other divisions or units, and with stakeholders, customers and research participants-we will facilitate an exploration of two key dimensions of collaborative work engaged by corporate ethnographers: (1) framing and negotiating expectations of the purpose and expected results of the work and thus the design of the work to be done, and (2) interpreting and negotiating representations of the work as it unfolds. We will focus our exploration and discussion on such questions as: How do we aim to position our work and what challenges do we face initially in designing the work to be conducted? How is the goal of 'change' understood and invested in by parties in differing positions? And how are understandings / knowledge / data / perspectives shared and interpreted within the doing of the work? Participants will be introduced to a "design game" derived from visual data collection as a part of the workshop. We ask that participants come prepared having reflected on the challenges and insights they've experienced in working collaboratively particularly in the areas of establishing the aims of the work and in facilitating interpretation of research material. Maximum number of participants: 20 Studying Distributed Sociality - Online and/or Offline? Workshop Facilitator: Brigitte Jordan (PARC) with panelists Kris Cohen (University of Chicago + INCITE, Surrey) and Daniel Neyland (Oxford University) Sociality has exploded into virtual space. In this interactive workshop we intend to generate a productive discussion about the transformation of "conventional" ethnographic methods as we increasingly do research in the virtual world. By "virtual" we most broadly mean to refer to those situations where the researcher is not, or only occasionally, physically co-present with the people whose working and domestic lives we are studying. In the course of our conversations, we will consider the circumstances within which early ethnographers did their work and think about the historical, material/spatial conditions in which ethnography was originally formulated as a method. We then intend to consider the implications of the commercial/global-industrial conditions under which ethnography is currently redefining itself. These trajectories raise major methodological and epistemological questions. And so we wonder: What about the Online and Offline domains that constitute the constituent backdrops of our society? In other words, to what extent does ethnographic work in such hybrid environments need to look at what happens on the screen as well as what the person-at-the-keyboard is doing? How are the lives of these people and their families transformed? Or: What becomes of "participant observation", the mainstay of conventional ethnography when we never lay eyes on the people whose lives we are investigating or experience the settings in which they operate? What does it mean to "participate" or to "observe" in this world? How do we now reconceptualize the notion of "fieldsite", when traditionally our claims to authoritative knowledge were based on intimate co-experience of localized sociality? What happens to "informed consent" when the thing we are studying is an avatar? How do we understand the sociality of avatars? How do we make sense of those seductive machine-based data (like logs, video feeds, blog archives) that seem to do a major part of our data collection for us? What analytic categories do they privilege and what new questions do they allow us to ask? As a final goal, we expect to move towards providing (more or less in the words of Kris Cohen) "the theoretical foundation and prototype for a new form of ethnographic research, which would be complementary to, but also inherently critical of conventional ethnographic methods." Here is what we expect from participants: We'd like you to think ahead of time about the ways in which your own work (done, planned or fantasized) is or could be illustrative of the issues we intend to raise here. Beyond that, please give some thought to what you would be willing to say at this point about general trends in the cybermethods arena. And finally, we'd like you to consider the question of what kinds of research could be exemplary in this new field. Maximum number of participants: 20 Object sociality. Researching living things Workshop Facilitators: Simon Roberts, Ideas Bazaar & Heinrich Schwarz, University of Colorado at Boulder In this workshop we want to push our thinking about objects beyond the traditional understanding of objects as tools or infrastructure or even social facilitators. Instead we will explore what it means for us as ethnographic researchers to take things seriously as central participants in personal relationships, communities or social networks - as 'companion species' not just supporting actors. We will approach such a concept of object sociality on a theoretical and practical, and a personal and professional level. We will discuss frameworks from sociology (object centred sociality), anthropology (the social life of things), and science and technology studies (actor-network theory), examining how these disciplines approach or construct objects. We will also reflect on our own rich experience of living with, and studying, objects to find thick descriptions of things that can restore objects to the centre of ethnographic accounts. Finally, we will examine what such a perspective on objects could and should mean for our ethnographic research. What would such an ethnography of objects look like? How can we make 'voiceless' things speak? We ask participants to come prepared with two stories: one about an object important in their own personal lives; the other about an object that turned out to play a central role in one of their research projects. Maximum number of participants: 12 -THIS WORKSHOP IS FULL- The Sociality of Fieldwork (or Personal Experiences with Interpersonal Connections) Workshop Facilitator: Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting In the activity of fieldwork, the ethnographer creates and facilitates a series of powerful interpersonal connections including (but not limited to):
Through the workshop we will share our respective experiences, looking both for common themes that emerge, but also unique perspectives that the workshop participants may have, drawing those out and ideally building specific techniques that we can employ in the future, looking towards fieldwork that is more stimulating, impactful, and satisfying for each of the different stakeholders. What to bring: We ask participants to come prepared with a 5-minute (or less) story (or set of stories) describing their own notable experiences (success, failure, or other). Maximum number of participants: 12 |
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