In October 2015, as part of a two-day workshop on experimental approaches to ethnography held at UC Irvine, we (Christina Aushana and Yelena Gluzman, in collaboration with Katie Cox and the Community Knowledge Project) used FTT to think about the histories of ethnographic innovation. Specifically, we invited the faculty and graduate students assembled to use FTT methods to read texts about The Farm, a 1968 initiative at UC Irvine that “brought indigenous people from Guatemala, Mexico, and Samoa to an undeveloped plot on campus known as the Social Sciences Farm, a space for these visitors to demonstrate their crafts, as well as a laboratory for new methods in education and research.” We were curious what this early innovation in “learning by doing” could teach us about our own experiments in ethnography, and how they might sensitize us to the more complex and potentially harmful aspects of our well-intentioned initiatives. See the workshop instructions and some images below.

Reflections on this workshop by Cox et al. can be accessed on the blog of the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLed), the UC-funded consortium of ethnographers who hosted the Formal Play workshop at UC Irvine,.