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 at all familiar with using social media to disseminate information – and I did (which is a blog post for another time). Later, Samuel Collins and Matt Durington’s work helped me to refine my multimodal workflow, and with Harjant Gill’s help I was able to articulate my mission. As I’ve written there, here, and elsewhere, the overarching goal of publishing data in near-real-time across multiple platforms is to engage multiple audiences, i.e. my home public, a social media savvy Senegalese public, and academic scholars worldwide. Each entry written on a particular social network for a particular audience paints a larger picture when taken as a whole. Conversations with Kate Schneider, Matika Wilbur, and Jeffery Schonberg gave spirit to the ethical relationship between my photography and my photographic collaborators, extending as a fine analog to the relationship between the research and the research participants. I’ve played with some of these multimodal methods in the last five years and I’m about to begin the 12 months of my dissertation fieldwork, so I think it’s important for me to outline the vision of my open ethnography.

This is the ecosystem of my live fieldnotes.

• Facebook: Short texts, personal musings, and conversations about life and research, but also things that have nothing at all to do with research or Senegal. (Access to this account is limited.)
• Twitter (@dtpowis): Shortest texts and multilingual musings reaching the widest audience. While my home public looks on, this is the social media where I’m mostly like to engage with Senegalese interlocutors.
• Instagram (@dtpowis3): Snapshots of selfies, food, books, notes, Post-It Notes, mind maps, sketches, and other kinds of ethnographic marginalia.
• Instagram (@dickpowis): Street and portrait photography captured with digital or film cameras. (Yes, I am lugging darkroom equipment and chemistry to Dakar.)
• Anthrodendum: Long texts about my experiences preparing for and engaging in life and dissertation research (if there is a difference). I’ll use this space to fuse together the smaller components from other social media accounts and fieldnotes and talk about emergent themes. The subreddit r/Anthropology can sometimes serve as an extended comments section to discuss the content of my blog posts, because I’m doing that now since that I’ve had a change of heart.

I’m avoiding YouTube because I know too much about video editing and the time and effort required for that kind of project would completely consume the research project that I am there to do. (Data is very expensive, as well.) I won’t employ Snapchat in this ecosystem because I would like my notes to have some permanence. All materials will be united across all platforms with the hashtag #RoR2018 (i.e. Relations of Reproduction 2018). Am I missing anything? Is there anything else I should consider?

Dick

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.

www.dickpowis.com

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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 November 1. I am packed and ready to leave December 1. And given a recent hiccup in the process, it looks like I’ll be packed and ready to leave January 1, too. While in Dakar, I intend to blog about my experience (in addition to use my social media accounts) as I have in the past. In my current liminal time – pending approval from Fulbright-Hays, pending approval from an ethical review board – in which I fear committing to meetings, conferences, and dinners too far out because I just don’t know when I will leave, I suppose I can start blogging about it now.

Consider this the first in an ongoing series about my dissertation research. I will begin by giving some background as well as a primer on my research objectives, that way we have some context with which to ground the later blog posts.

Relations of Reproduction: Investigating Men, Masculinity, and Pregnancy in Dakar, Senegal

Since 2012, I’ve been researching medical plurality and competing bodies of healthcare knowledge in Dakar, Senegal which has led me to my dissertation research on men and pregnancy. My dissertation research is about expectant fathers, gendered spaces, and changing ideas and practices of masculinity more broadly in Dakar. In Senegal, as in much of West Africa, men are proscribed from spaces associated with women’s activities (or affaire u jigeen in Wolof, literally “women’s business”), meaning that even if men are open to engaging in that space, they risk flouting social decorum or may not be welcome. While some nongovernmental organizations (such as Tostan Senegal) aim to get men more involved with their pregnant partners with the idea that it will improve maternal and infant health outcomes, kin and local healthcare professionals through their use of space may actually be indirectly discouraging them from doing so. My dissertation research is an ethnographic exploration of (1) the shifting meanings, desires, and experiences of expectant fathers in Dakar, Senegal, (2) the ways in which men navigate gendered spaces while simultaneously balancing the tensions between their desires to be engaged in the continuum of reproduction with the social risk of transgressing notions local notions of masculinity and femininity, and (3) how men renegotiate their own masculinities as they transition into fatherhood in the context of locally-produced gender norms, changing forms of marriage, religious notions of parenting, and economic precarity.

Because pregnancy is not a regular topic of conversation among men or between men and women in Senegal, my research methods require careful and thoughtful community engagement. This means that in addition to undertaking participant observation in the homes of my interlocutors, I must work in closely coordinated partnership with healthcare professionals and college student researchers to recruit participants in clinics. Additionally, my commitment to public engagement means that my ongoing research is shared and accessible to both Senegalese and American laypeople through social media and blogging. Finally, as a visual ethnographer, I rely heavily upon digital and film photography to document the daily lives of my research participants. My research is supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship.

While I’m in Dakar, I’ll focus these blog posts on my experience, data, thoughts and themes, methodological challenges, and photography. Until I leave though (which is looking more and more like January 1 at this point), I’d like to write about my pre-departure preparations. First of all, I’m willing to take some requests. Should I write about my proposal writing process, or how I go about writing an interview instrument, or what I’m taking with me to Dakar? What else? Hopefully, such posts can get readers talking about similar issues in their own research, and ultimately I’d like this series to be a resource to undergraduates and other graduate students as a transparent case study in how one goes about doing dissertation research. What would be most helpful?

Second, for searchability, I’ll need a hashtag to attach to every post in this series, like #RoR2018 or something. Any suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

Dick

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.

www.dickpowis.com

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