Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science

In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García-two local immigrant workers from Latin America-joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.

Author: Carolina Alonso Bejarano
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 05/10/2019
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781478003953
ISBN10: 1478003952
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Social Science | Emigration & Immigration
- Social Science | Sociology | General

About the Author
Carolina Alonso Bejarano is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. She is also a DJ and a cartoonist.

Lucia López Juárez is an activist who fights for equal rights for all people, a domestic worker, and a mother who cares for her home.

Mirian A. Mijangos García is a singer, songwriter, and naturopath. She is also a mother, an ethnographer, and an immigrants' rights activist.

Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City, also published by Duke University Press.