Performance Ethnography (TPS-0264)

Spring 2025 · TPS 0264 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

Performance ethnography is a critical research method that takes seriously the role of the body in doing qualitative research. The sensuous and performing body becomes a central tool in ethically encountering others, and can also function as an interpretive tool to translate research back into the world. Centering the body also means considering the ways the body is read in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and how those differences elicit particular kinds of data. Taking fieldwork as performance, this method also considers the contingency, context, and aesthetics of interactions in the field and of quotidian life. In this class, students will learn of the emergence of performance ethnography; consider the ethics of ethnographic research; try on fieldwork, participant observation, interview, oral history; and explore ethnographies that center performance as method and object of analysis. Participants will locate a field site in the area of focus their study, and will produce both a final essay and performance based on their fieldwork.

Course codes: TPS-0264, TPS 0264, TPS0264, TPS-264, TPS 264, TPS264

Course Discovery