Ethnographies of Journalism

The latest issue of Ethnography (I should say, latest in my slow world, its from March of 2006) is a special issue (SAGE publications) on ethnography of Journalism, edited by Dominic Boyer and Ulf Hannerz. For those of you who long for a meatier analysis of contemporary journalism than “blogs are destroying conventional journalism” or “journalism is dead, long live journalism” then this might be it. One of the great virtues of it is that it has a wonderful mix of fieldsites across the various articles; it reads kind of like a SciFi World Cup 2012: Sweden v. India; Palestine vs. Ghana; EU vs. WTO.

Christopher Kelty does anthropological and historical research on science and technology, free and open source software, intellectual property and open access, the history of software, and the ethics and politics of nanotechnology. He also teaches classes about all of these things. From 2001 to 2008 he was assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, in Houston, TX. He know teaches at UCLA and splits his time between the Information Studies department, the Anthropology Department and the Center for Society and Genetics.