num_pages: 208
description: 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 Lpez Jurez and Mirian A. Mijangos Garcatwo local immigrant workers from Latin Americajoined 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 Garca and Lpez Jurez 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.
language: English
title: Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science
publisher: Duke University Press Books