Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research

(CIQR -- "seeker")

NEXT MEETING: 

Thursday April 19, 2007, 4::00-5:30PM

552 College Hall, Duquesne University.

 

Presentation:

Dr. Douglas Harper

Chair, Department of Sociology, Duquesne University.

"Re-imagining an Ethnography: 

Good Company: A Tramp Life"

Abstract:.  On the occasion of the publication of a revised edition of his participatory and ethnographic study of the life of railroad tramps, Good Company: A Tramp Life, Professor Harper will discuss the process  of re-imagining an ethnography; recasting voice  and  imagery; actively remembering, reconsidering, questioning...  and  updating!  Ethnographies are  seldom "updated," but in this instance Harper found many issues that he had to resolve and also joy in doing so.
Professor Harper first published Good Company in 1988 with the University of Chicago Press and now in revised form as Good Company: A Tramp Life (Boulder: Paradigm).  The book has also been translated and published in Italian and in French.  Besides this volume, Harper has published Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won a Scholarly Achievement Award, North Central Sociological Association and Collier Award, Society for Visual Anthropology; Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (University of Chicago Press, 1987) and a paperback edition of the same work with University of California Press (1992).  Harper has also published a number of edited and co-edited books, in both English and Italian; two other jointly written books, one on postcolonials and another on food, are currently under review.

All interested faculty, graduate students, and other parties are invited.