Observers Observed: The Ethnographer in Silicon Valley
In a contribution to a series of essays on Silicon Valley for the venerable academic blog Crooked Timber, Tamara Kneese writes about being an ethnographer in the world of tech:
What do the stories of the many generations of ethnographic researchers who joined and sometimes left the tech industry have to tell us about how Silicon Valley ideologies are taken up, embedded, and contested in workflows and products? How do the collected personal stories, or oral histories, of UX researchers interface with those of tech campus janitors and engineers? And is there something valuable that can be learned from their varied experiences about the sometimes ambivalent relationships between research, work, and collective action?
The introductory post to the series (with links to all contributions) penned by Henry Farrell can be found here.