A Case for Activist Ethnography in Political Science

Recently, political scientists have marshaled an impressive methodological discussion of political ethnography. However, this discussion has yielded little debate about the potential for an activist turn in political ethnography. In order to promote such a turn, this paper takes on four tasks. First, I characterize activist ethnography as collaborating with research subjects in order to rethink local understandings of social problems and possibilities for political action. Second, I address two potential concerns about applying activist ethnography in political science: 1) an interpretive concern that it may juxtapose so-called misunderstandings of local politics to the expertise of the activist ethnographer; and 2) a neopositive concern that it invalidates hypothesis tests by actively mobilizing observations. I argue that these concerns, in fact, point towards activist ethnography's relative strengths – namely, its requirement that ethnographers' expert understandings be challenged within subjects' local contexts and its capacity for testing hypotheses in the field through the mobilization of alternative possibilities. Third, to illustrate these strengths, I present a case taken from my research on anti-poverty activism and settlement in the US. In this case, I engage the 'color blind' understandings of poverty circulating through two activist organizations. Finally, I discuss the limits of an activist turn stemming from the precariousness of political ethnography