About the Lab

The Stanford Ethnography Lab provides students and faculty with the resources, training, and intellectual community for generating cutting-edge ethnographic and fieldwork research. 

The Lab provides support through a number of programs and events:

• Graduate Fellowship Program. Every year, the Lab offers a number of fellowships for Stanford graduate students. Each fellow identifies and invites a senior scholar from beyond the university to travel to Stanford to meet, provide feedback on the fellow's in-progress work, and facilitate a seminar dedicated to the fellow's project. Fellowships also provide stipends for research expenses, such as travel and transcriptions. Additional information on the fellowship, as well as application information can be found here.
• Qualitative and Fieldwork Methods Workshop. Every week, the Lab gathers faculty and students to share in-progress research and provide feedback. Each year, graduate students publish papers following their participation in the workshop. Recent examples include:
  • Gleit, Rebecca D. 2023. "Brokers and Boundary Managers: School Expulsions Amid the Non-Punitive Turn." Social Problems. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spad025.
  • Zheng, Wenjuan. 2023. "Converting Donation to Transaction: How Platform Capitalism Exploits Relational Labor in Non-Profit Fundraising." Socio-Economic Review 21(4): 1897-1916.
  • Guluma, Beka. 2023. "I'm Not Habesha, I'm Oromo: Immigration, Ethnic Identity, and the Transnationality of Blackness." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. 9(4) 486-501.
  • Sirois, Catherine. 2023. "Contested by the State: Institutional Offloading in the Case of Crossover Youth." American Sociological Review 88(2): 350–377.
  • Loder, Kimya, and Forrest Stuart. 2023. "Displacement Frames: How Residents Perceive, Explain and Respond to Un-Homing in Black San Francisco." Urban Studies 60(6):1013-30.
  • Zhang, Adela. 2022. "Populist Infrastructures: The Aesthetics and Semiotics of How Obras Do Politics in Lima, Peru." Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 27(45): 587-600. 
  • Carian, Emily, and Amy Johnson. 2022. "The Agency Myth: Persistence in Individual Explanations for Gender Inequality." Social Problems 69(1):123-142.
  • Hart, Chloe Grace. 2021. "Trajectory Guarding: Managing Unwanted, Ambiguously Sexual Interactions at Work." American Sociological Review 86(2): 256-278.
  • Sheng, Jeff T, and Sanjay R. Kairam. 2020. "From Virtual Strangers to IRL Friends: Relationship Development in Livestreaming Communities on Twitch." Proceedings of the ACM for Human-Computer Interaction 4(2): 10.1145/3415165.
  • Sheng, Jeff T. 2020. "Ethnographic Uncovering: Hidden Communities." Contexts 19(2): 46-53.
• Book Author Series. Once per quarter, the Lab invites authors of recently published books to visit Stanford for seminars and informal conversations about substantive findings, research methodology, and “tales from the field.” The Lab provides complementary copies of books beforehand to facilitate rich conversations with authors. Recent authors include:
  • Matthew Clair, author of Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court.
  • Angèle Christin, author of Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms.
  • Matthew Rafalow, author of Digital Divisions: How School s Create Inequality in the Tech Era.
  • Esther Sullivan, author of Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and America's Tenuous Right to Place.​
  • Angela García, author of Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law.
  • Brooke Erin Duffy, author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work.
• Collaborative Projects. The Lab provides resources and support for a number of collaborative research projects and team ethnographies. Additional information on the Lab's projects can be found here.
• Conferences/Symposia/Seminars. The Lab hosts a number of events featuring cutting-edge, in-progress work by ethnographers and qualitative researchers located across the world. Some recent conferences include:
  • ​"Platformed Creation: The World of Influencers, Content Creators, and Microcelebrities" (October 16, 2020). A video of the remote symposium can be accessed here.
• Methodological Classes and Training. The Lab facilitates practicum classes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels for students interested in learning the method and conducting their own fieldwork projects. The Lab also offers instructional sessions on qualitative data analysis (QDA) software and other research tools.
• “Write-in” Sessions. In order to encourage daily writing practices and boost research productivity, the Lab regularly convenes students and faculty to work on their papers, articles, and dissertations free of the everyday distractions of cell phones, social media, and email.

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