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Meeting Ethnography Meeting Ethnography This volume asks and addresses elusive ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions about meetings. What are meetings? What sort of knowledge, identities, and power relationships are produced, performed, communicated, and legitimized through meetings? How do—and how might—ethnographers study meetings as objects, and how might they best conduct research in meetings as particular elements of their field sites? Through contributions from an international group of ethnographers who have conducted “meeting ethnography” in diverse field sites, this volume offers both theoretical insight and methodological guidance into the study of this most ubiquitous ritual. Jen Sandler is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the Univer- sity of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Renita Thedvall is a researcher at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research at Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. Routledge Studies in Anthropology For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 33 Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Edited by Farida Fozdar and Kirsten McGavin 34 Freedom in Practice Edited by Moises Lino e Silva and Huon Wardle 35 Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities Dancing on Empire’s Stage Sitara Thobani 36 Truth, Intentionality and Evidence Anthropological Approaches to Crime Edited by Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den 37 Meeting Ethnography Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance Edited by Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall 38 Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound Edited by Christine Guillebaud 39 On Knowing Humanity Insights from Theology for Anthropology Edited by Eloise Meneses and David Bronkema 40 Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal Laura L. Cochrane 41 Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South The Human Consequences of Piracy in China and Brazil Rosana Pinheiro-Machado Meeting Ethnography Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance Edited by Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-67769-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-55940-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Exploring the Boring – An Introduction to Meeting Ethnography 1 JEN SANDLER AND RENITA THEDVALL 1 Mapping International Development Relations through Meeting Ethnography 24 NANCY KENDALL AND RACHEL SILVER 2 Learning to Meet (or How to Talk to Chairs) 46 SIMONE ABRAM 3 Argentinean Asamblea Meetings as Assemblage: Presence in Emergence 69 SUSANN BAEZ ULLBERG AND KARIN SKILL 4 How to Avoid Getting Stuck in Meetings: On the Value of Recognizing the Limits of Meeting Ethnography for Community Studies 88 JAPONICA BROWN-SARACINO AND MEAGHAN STIMAN 5 Meetings All the Way Through: United States Broad-based Reform Coalitions and the Thickening of American Democracy 106 JEN SANDLER 6 Small Places, Big Stakes: Meetings as Moments of Ethnographic Momentum 126 CHRISTINA GARSTEN AND ADRIENNE SÖRBOM vi Contents 7 Meeting to Improve: Lean[ing] Swedish Public Preschools 143 RENITA THEDVALL Conclusion: The Meeting and the Mirror 158 HELEN B. SCHWARTZMAN Notes on Contributors 179 Index 183 Acknowledgements This volume has been a collaborative project not only between an organi- zational anthropologist from Sweden (Thedvall) and an activist anthropol- ogist from the United States (Sandler), but also with the many participants in the three workshops we organized between 2013 and 2015. We extend them our sincere gratitude, and have attempted to acknowledge each of their contributions to this volume more specifically through the Introduc- tion. Of the participants not represented in this volume, we especially would like to thank Don Brenneis, whose support for the project has been invaluable. We also would like to thank two external reviewers for the project, whose insights improved our thinking and contributed greatly to the final product. The volume would not have been possible without the people in the work- shops. We are extremely grateful for the financial support that enabled these workshops to take place. Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (Score), Stockholm University, and Stockholm School of Economics and the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University funded the first workshop in June 2013. The second workshop in June 2014 was made possible by the generous support of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The third workshop was a larger event that took place over the course of three days, and it was made possible by the generous support of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science, with support from the Institute for Social Science Research and the Department of Anthropol- ogy at UMass Amherst. Finally, we would like to thank Helen B. Schwartzman, both as a person for her extraordinary support of this project and for her book, The Meeting, which brought us together. Introduction: Exploring the Boring An Introduction to Meeting Ethnography Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall1 Introduction: Meetings as the Doxa of Everyday Life The meeting is arguably the most important and under-theorized phenome- non that ethnographers encounter. Whether in policy organizations or local communities, labor halls or religious institutions, schools or corporations, among activists or social workers or anarchists, ethnographers often find that meetings are where the action is. In meetings power is produced and enacted, dynamics of identity and hierarchy are negotiated, and organiza- tion is produced, determined, and challenged. Meetings are a ubiquitous part of many contemporary contexts, and what takes place in meetings mat- ters for many more. Yet, there has, for a long time, been little sustained critical ethnographic inquiry into the meeting itself. Helen Schwartzman’s seminal work, The Meet- ing (1989), in which she called attention to the taken-for-grantedness of meetings in ethnographic writing, has remained a notable exception. Meet- ings are part of the doxa of everyday life; we take them for granted to the point that there has been insufficient concerted effort to theorize them or to strategize fieldwork within and around them. Of course, this is precisely the province of anthropology: to interrogate the familiar, to learn from the richness of everyday experience. Why have meetings largely been ignored by the scholars whose role it is to make the “familiar strange”? Some possible obstacles to taking meetings seriously as objects of ethnographic inquiry have likely been the personal aversion to anticipated tedium, the dread and loathing of meetings that so many academics experience in their own day-to-day lives, and an internalization of the popular trope of meetings as a waste of time or a distraction from “real work.” Hence, ethnographers have reported on meetings as simply a naturalized setting of fieldwork, some- times affording them uninterrogated status and other times avoiding thick description of them entirely. The purpose of this volume is to explore meetings as both ethnographic objects in themselves and as sites of ethnographic inquiry of diverse issues and practices—what we have called meeting ethnography. 2 Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall It is high time that ethnographers give meetings focused attention. When we began this project, we set out to ask and address elusive ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions: What are meetings? What sorts of knowledge, identities, and power relationships are produced, per- formed, communicated, and legitimized through meetings? How do—and how might—ethnographers study meetings? But the process of collabora- tion of which this book is an artifact has led to more productive insights than we expected. Examining meetings as tools for both ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological thought has enabled us, along with our col- laborators in this volume and beyond, to see myriad contemporary shifts in global and local governance, development, and resistance in new ways, through their everyday manifestations in and around the meetings of activ- ists, bureaucrats,
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