Assignments

CLASS REQUIREMENTS & EVALUATION SCHEME

This is a seminar style class, and your participation will make or break the class! You will be expected to show up in class having done the readings assigned (if you are an MS/PhD student, this includes the ‘Additional Readings’). Your participation grade will be based on the extent to which you engage with the material in our discussions in class and on the LMS (see ‘Reading Response and class participation’ below) – trust me, you will find it very hard to do either if you have not read the material for class.

Leading class: 10%

Twice in the semester, you will be required to lead the seminar (in the first 15-20 minutes of class). In the weeks you choose to lead class, you will need to do both the mandatory and additional readings. You may choose how you lead the class: summarize and challenge the main arguments of the readings for the week in a presentation; engage your classmates in an exercise based on the readings for the week or on their responses to those readings (see below); examine research reported in mainstream media along the dimension of method discussed in the readings for the week etc.

Reading responses and Class Participation: 10%

You will be required to submit written responses to your readings every week other than the weeks you are leading class. In your response, you will engage with the primary argument of one of your readings for the week (no more than a page please). Post the mid-term, your fieldwork should guide your responses to readings. While each response will not be individually graded, your submissions are mandatory and will count towards class participation since they are expected to shape class discussions. Please submit your responses on the LMS as a blog by midnight the day prior to class (i.e. Sunday midnight) so that your classmates have a chance to read your responses.

Ethnography response: 15% (Midterm submission due Oct 17)

You will need to submit a 5 page response (no more than 2000 words) to an ethnography you will all read as a class during your midterm break. Your submission will summarize how the ethnography you read responds (or doesn’t) to some of the critiques leveraged at the ethnographic approach (covered in previous weeks), and how it will shape your own ethnographic fieldwork in the next weeks (by pointing to literature, pre-empting unique challenges on the field or in your analysis, or in any other way you find useful).

The ethnography response should be submitted to janaki dot srinivasan at iiitb dot ac dot in. Your submissions should be in pdf format, and named ‘LastName-EthnographyResponse-2016’. The email subject line should read ‘EthnographyResponse-AQM-2016’.

Research project: 65%

This course will be organized around a mini research project involving the study of technology users. You will arrive at a topic and design a research study based on it. You will decide on research methods to use and why those methods fit your study. This will be followed by practical exercises where you will deploy these methods to gather data. Finally, you will analyse the data you have gathered using multiple methods to write a final paper.

Each of these components of the research process will be associated with an assignment that you may use to build your final paper. In general, you will need to start planning out this schedule much ahead of the deadline since you need to complete and submit assignments based on your fieldwork by the deadline indicated below.

The various project components should be submitted to janaki dot srinivasan at iiitb dot ac dot in. Your submissions should be in pdf format, and named ‘LastName-AssignmentTitle-2016’ (for eg., my submission for interview2 would be Srinivasan-Interview2-2016.pdf). The email subject line should read ‘AssignmentTitle-AQM-2016’.

Framing a research question: 5% (Due Sep 5)

Submit the research question that will direct your research project for this class. Make your question as broad or narrow as you wish at this stage – as long as it pertains to the site you have decided to study. Sub-questions are discouraged at this stage, but if you must have them, no more than three please! If (and only if) you have claims or hypotheses implicitly associated with your question, make them explicit in your submission (“I believe I will find that …”).

The readings for this week, especially Hackett Fisher’s – as well as prior readings for class on ontology and epistemology – should help you decide what makes for an acceptable, interesting  and/or feasible research question, and why an ethnographic approach will/won’t help you answer it!

Needless to say, your question will evolve through the course of the class and your fieldwork – so don’t worry about whether your question is the ‘right’ one to ask. That said, do think through your question and whether or not it will allow you to explore the key phenomena you are currently interested in.

Crafting an ethnographic research design: 10% (Due Sep 26)

You now have a research question to work with. Your ethnographic research design will tell us what your “field” is (and what it is a case of, where relevant); whether it is single or multi-sited; what population you will be working with; how you will leverage different methods (mainly participant observation and interviews) towards answering your research question and what ethical issues you expect to encounter during your research. Please attempt this in a page or less (300-400 words).

Now identify a relevant ethnography on which you plan to draw for your project. Ideally, a comprehensive “literature review” would have informed your research question. Since the constraints of a class and a semester do not allow for that, this ethnography will act as your mini literature review for the purposes of this project. Needless to say, you may read more to broaden your review! A few potential ethnographies are listed at the end of the syllabus.

  • In identifying an ethnography, ensure that it speaks to your research question. Remember, this resonance may be for any of a variety of reasons: because the ethnography focuses on the same domain of activity as your research question, or it addresses the same geography, or it asks similar questions about technology, or its theoretical lens resembles your own and so forth.
  • Also bear in mind that you will eventually want to use the findings from your research project to build on the argument and insights of this ethnography: so,  pick an ethnography which has that potential!

Tell us what ethnography you picked and why (along the dimensions outlined above) in 100-200 words.

Fieldnotes from observation exercise: 10% (Due Oct 24)

For this assignment, you will submit two (single-spaced) pages (or about a half-hour’s worth of observations) from your fieldnotes (fleshed out, not jottings), accompanied by a page of analysis.

As you conduct your observation sessions, you will find yourself experimenting with different styles of jotting down notes and fleshing them out (inventing codes for quotes vs. paraphrasing; abbreviations for commonly encountered subjects, objects and actions; what you choose to describe or leave out; how you organize your observations and your analysis etc.) – for this assignment, we need just one such snippet and style! Your notes could be about your entry into the field, the establishment of rapport, a ‘routine’ day, or a ‘dramatic’ day. All I ask is that it involve a ‘thick’ description and analysis of your time in the field, and how these contribute to your research question and theme.

Analysis of interview 1 (where you took notes taken by hand): 10% (Due Oct 31)

For this assignment, you will submit two (single-spaced) pages (or about an half-hour’s worth of interviewing) of your interview transcript, accompanied by a page of analysis.

Your submission should include

  • a brief description of your interviewee (gender, age, role at fieldsite), your rationale for interviewing them, where the interview was conducted (can be masked, if required), and who else was present at the interview.
  • your interview guide (optional, but encouraged).  Note, this will likely be different in content and question sequence than what you eventually ended up asking the interviewee.
  • two pages worth of the interview itself. This must include your questions (as asked in the field, rather than from your interview guide) and your interviewee’s responses. You must also include interjections by people other than your interviewee where these took place.
  • a page of analysis of the interview, including challenges faced in conducting the interview and writing it up (for eg., in going from handwritten/typed notes to fleshing out the transcript), and how your interviewee’s responses contribute to your understanding of research question/theme.

Feel free to experiment with notations – how you include pauses, incomplete and trailing sentences, other actions around that appear to bear on the interviewee’s answers, and verbal interjections by others – in your interview transcript.

Analysis of interview 2 (which you recorded): 10% (Due Nov 7)

Much like for the previous assignment, you will submit two (single-spaced) pages (or about an half-hour’s worth of interviewing) of your interview transcript, accompanied by a page of analysis.

Once again, your submission should include

  • a brief description of your interviewee (gender, age, role at fieldsite), your rationale for interviewing them, where the interview was conducted (can be masked, if required), and who else was present at the interview.
  • your interview guide (optional, but encouraged).  Note, this will likely be different in content and question sequence than what you eventually ended up asking the interviewee.
  • two pages worth of the recorded interview itself. This must include your questions (as asked in the field, rather than from your interview guide) and your interviewee’s responses. You must also include interjections by people other than your interviewee where these took place.
  • a page of analysis of the interview, including challenges faced in conducting and writing up a recorded interview (vs. relying solely on handwritten notes)  and how your interviewee’s responses contribute to your understanding of research question/theme.

This time too, feel free to experiment with notations in your interview transcript.

Writing up: 20% (End Term submission due Dec 5 Dec 7, Wednesday, midnight – absolutely NO extensions possible, so please do not ask for any)

For the concluding assignment, you will submit a ‘mini-ethnography’  of 5000-7500 words (or between 10-15 single-spaced pages). This ethnography will be a culmination (or a first step!) of the fieldwork project you have designed and undertaken over the course of this semester. It will provide you an opportunity to pull together your multiple data sources and research themes into one coherent whole.

While it is up to you how you structure your ethnography, I do expect it to consist of the following sections (in no particular order) at minimum

  • Introduction (and argument!)
  • Reflection on your fieldsite and methods
  • Literature (at least the ethnography you picked)
  • Themes from your research
  • Conclusion (and contributions)

I will evaluate the ethnography for

  • methodological rigor, reflexivity and the appropriateness of methods to the topic/question at hand
  • a sound argument and your use of fieldwork data to substantiate that argument
  • the novelty of its claims and how you engage with existing claims in your chosen domain of study
  • clarity of writing

PLAGIARISM

This class has a zero-tolerance policy towards plagiarism. Every time you plagiarize (even if you argue that it is merely quoting someone without citing them), and starting from the first such instance, you will receive a zero for that assignment. Please clear any citation queries you may have ahead of time.