Dick Powis is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include men and childbirth, prenatal screening technologies, and reproductive health in urban settings in Senegal. Read more at dickpowis.com.
A recent conversation on #AcademicTwitter has been about the #HiddenCurriculum, that is, all the things that you’re expected to know but are never formally taught or the hidden tricks and hacks to help you succeed in academia. In anthropology, the #HiddenCurriculum is deep. Proposal writing, research methods, and data analysis are rarely taught as courses. …
+ Read More The #HiddenCurriculum of Applying to Graduate School (for Anthropology)
This series – #ROR2018 – has taken a backseat for several months. I’ve been mostly active on Twitter while I navigate state bureaucracies, assemble a research team, begin the process of data collection, management, and analysis, build a house, do my part to getting Footnotes off the ground, deal with #hautalk, fast for Ramadan, and …
Ethnographic research is difficult. It’s a challenge to find the right assistants, get access, recruit the right people, keep a schedule, make time for note-writing and transcription, and be self-motivated through it all. In Dakar, I depend on a number of mobile apps to help me keep the project together. Some of these apps may …
+ Read More Mobile Apps for Ethnographic Research – #RoR2018
After focusing my last couple weeks spending quality time with my loved ones, this week I have arrived in Dakar. This is my sixth time here and unquestionably my smoothest entry – the shiny new airport was easy to navigate, despite having just opened to great criticism in the middle of December. Seems like the …
Early on in college, I took a lot of inspiration from John Hawks’ article calling for researchers to be transparent and engaging with their research in combination with Tricia Wang’s article outlining “open ethnography.” To me, Wang’s methodology was an answer to Hawks’ call. Somehow, I would have to navigate ethics review boards which weren’t …
It would be interesting to sit down and look at the interview instruments from every year that I’ve been doing research in Senegal to see how they evolve. From 2012, my junior year in college, we would find leading questions or questions that otherwise confine respondents to certain answers. Some questions just didn’t make sense. …
Before I get started, I want to point out that this article is aimed at pre-field graduate students and undergraduates, and that the context is working with American funding agencies. YMMV. As I mentioned in my previous blog, my dissertation research is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSFGRFP) and the Fulbright-Hays …
I am about to depart for Dakar, Senegal to begin twelve months of dissertation research. I’m not sure when I’ll be leaving – the slog of uncoordinated bureaucratic machines keeps me from knowing just yet. For now, I’m just in that all-too-familiar mode of “hurry up and wait”: I was packed and ready to leave …
+ Read More An Ethnographic Liminality: The Hurry Up and Wait of Dissertation Research Predeparture