You will choose a familiar place (retail space, coffee shop, restaurant, or office space) to do your “participant observation” for about one hour.
In your essay: start by stating the place you observed, when you did it, for how long, why you chose that place, and what you hoped to learn before you started the observation, then, write up a detailed descriiption of what you have observed and how you have participated but it might be preferable to just watch. Explain what you talked about and how that helped, or not, you to understand what you were observing). Make sure you don’t’ jump to a conclusion when you describe. You don’t have to talk to people, but it might come naturally, for instance, when you order a sandwich
Example of high quality/low quality Descriiptions:
Be careful that your descriiption does not jump from data to conclusions.
Pay attention to your assumptions when you describe something. Imagine you are trying to explain things that are happening to a little green Martian (my apologies to all Martians for my assumptions on their general height and color) or a person from a different country who is absolutely unfamiliar with the environment you are trying to describe.
For instance, don’t write something like, “The street is filled with millennials bustling off to work.”
Do not assume that person knows what “millennials” or “bustling” or “work” and “going to work.” is all about.
Instead, you might write: “Men and women wearing suits, pressed shirts, clean double-breasted overcoats, carrying attaches which looked like they were made of leather, walked down the block. I watched several of these people enter the large building. I did not see any of them speak to each other.”
Yes, I know that this can get super granular. However: you will be making assumptions of common knowledge at some point, so using the words’ suit’ and ‘pressed’ and ‘men and women’ is permitted.
What you are de-familiarizing for this exercise are the cultural signifiers.
Provide an analysis of the experience, drawing insights from readings and lectures
1) explain what “de-familiarizing the familiar” means, and why adopt this technique?
2) what were the main things you learned by employing the technique of “de-familiarizing the familiar” in your participant observation?
3) what were some unexpected questions that came out from this experience?
4) how do you make sense of these findings & questions? What readings/lectures/class
discussions can you draw from to make sense of your participant observation?
5) how would you evaluate your “de-familiarizing the familiar” experience? Was it different from what you had expected? How so? (i.e., what new insights did you gain from this experience)
EXPLAIN to your reader the things you observed and why you find these observations interesting. (just saying it was interesting does not count).
