Editor’s Introduction - Issue #1: Ethnography in Action
Thurka Sangaramoorthy is the Editor-in-Chief of Semi-Structured and the Founder and Director the Public Ethnography Lab. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist and global health researcher with expertise in community-engaged ethnographic research, including rapid assessments, among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean. She conducts research in the areas of global health and migration, HIV/STD, and environmental health disparities. Dr. Sangaramoorthy is the author of numerous publications including three books. Currently, she is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at American University and Affiliate Professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.
Welcome to Semi-Structured
We are thrilled to present the inaugural issue of Semi-Structured, an open-access journal from the Public Ethnography Lab dedicated to showcasing ethnography as it unfolds in the world. This journal exists because we believe ethnographic work matters beyond the academy—that the insights generated through sustained engagement with communities, organizations, and institutions can and should inform decisions, shape practices, and drive meaningful change.
The title Semi-Structured reflects both our methodological orientation and our editorial philosophy. Like the semi-structured interview that balances prepared questions with space for unexpected directions, this journal creates structure while remaining open to the diverse forms ethnographic practice takes in the world. We seek pieces that are rigorous yet accessible, analytical yet compelling—writing that honors the complexity of ethnographic work while remaining legible to broad audiences.
This inaugural issue asks: What does ethnography in action look like? The six pieces gathered here answer this question from strikingly different contexts—from sweatshops in Argentina to displacement camps in Ethiopia, from migrant mutual aid in Maryland to Indigenous communities in Mexico, from a maritime museum in Connecticut to courtrooms in Costa Rica. Together, they reveal ethnography not as a passive recording of social life but as an active practice of listening, translating, advocating, and collaborating across lines of power, geography, and institutional mandate.
Listening as Method, Listening as Justice
A powerful through-line connects these diverse projects: the practice of listening across asymmetries. Each author demonstrates that ethnographic listening is not merely a data-gathering technique but an ethical and political stance—a way of creating space for voices often excluded from decision-making processes.
In “Listening Across Worlds,” María Florencia Blanco Esmoris shows how ethnographic listening functioned as “relational justice” within a large-scale development project addressing labor exploitation in Argentina’s garment sector. Working at the intersection of global development agendas and local migrant realities, Blanco Esmoris reveals how sustained dialogue with Bolivian and Peruvian families enabled her to reframe abstract categories like “vulnerability” and “risk” through lived experience. Her account demonstrates that listening is slow, relational work—it happens through “shared stories, pauses, and silences rather than through linear milestones.”
Wario Wako’s “When Parents Speak, Practitioners Listen” extends this commitment to listening by creating a rare forum where Ethiopian pastoralist parents could directly critique the early childhood interventions targeting their communities. In a workshop that brought NGO practitioners face-to-face with displaced parents, Wako documents the productive discomfort that emerged when parents named what had long gone unspoken: “Our primary problem is hunger—not parenting.” The piece reveals that listening sometimes means hearing critiques of well-intentioned work, and that such discomfort can be generative if practitioners are willing to sit with it.
Challenging Top-Down Interventions
Several pieces explicitly challenge the extractive, top-down models that have historically characterized relationships between researchers, practitioners, and communities. These authors show what becomes possible when ethnographers relinquish the authority position and instead work in genuine partnership.
Payal Fadnis’s “Beyond IRB Approval” offers an unflinchingly honest account of learning this lesson as a graduate student. When a migrant mutual aid collective rejected the citizenship requirements Fadnis had built into her IRB-approved research design, she faced a choice: follow institutional protocols or follow community guidance. Her decision to submit an IRB amendment and adopt a truly collaborative methodology reveals the ongoing tension between institutional ethics and community ethics—and her conviction that accountability to communities must take precedence.
Jean-Yves Taranger’s photo essay, “Visual Sovereignty in the River of the Nahual,” demonstrates a similar pivot. Funded to study early childhood education in Oaxaca, Taranger listened when community members expressed a different priority: protecting their textile traditions from cultural appropriation. His decision to organize a six-month weaving workshop instead of his planned intervention exemplifies responsive ethnography—the willingness to “put the research script aside” when communities articulate other needs. The piece culminates in documenting the community's brilliant legal strategy to protect their Xiki Xini Iñu (traditional huipil) by linking it to protected intangible cultural heritage, revealing Indigenous communities as sophisticated legal strategists rather than victims requiring rescue.
Ethnography Embedded in Institutions
Three pieces explore what happens when ethnographers work not in traditional “field sites” but embedded within institutions—bringing anthropological sensibilities to spaces typically governed by technical expertise, legal frameworks, or administrative logic.
Jake Culbertson, Bryanna Benicia, and Scott Cryer’s “Building Up” chronicles an 18-month participatory planning process at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum, where rising sea levels threaten both infrastructure and mission. Rather than delivering a technical solution, the authors’ Design Insight Group used iterative ethnographic methods—surveys, interviews, and a board game requiring difficult trade-offs—to build the museum staff’s capacity for collaborative adaptation. Their insight that “organizational resilience precedes infrastructural resilience” reframes climate adaptation as fundamentally a problem of institutional culture and collective imagination, not just engineering.
Leila Rodriguez’s “Training the State on Cultural Expertise” offers a different model of institutional ethnography: teaching Costa Rican prosecutors and detectives how to recognize when culture matters in legal proceedings. By developing workshops on anthropological forms of evidence, Rodriguez works to make legal systems more responsive to cultural diversity. Yet she remains reflexive about the tensions inherent in “training the state”—acknowledging that the frameworks she teaches could be deployed for surveillance as well as justice. Her piece raises crucial questions about complicity and control that all applied anthropologists must grapple with.
Methods That Matter
Beyond their empirical contributions, these pieces offer rich methodological lessons for anyone conducting ethnography in applied contexts:
On Collaboration: True collaboration requires willingness to be changed by the process. Fadnis’s IRB amendment, Taranger’s research pivot, and Wako’s uncomfortable workshop all demonstrate that collaborative work means relinquishing control over outcomes.
On Power: Ethnographers cannot eliminate structural inequalities, but we can make them “speakable”—visible to those with power to adjust strategies, as Blanco Esmoris demonstrates. Reflexivity about positionality is not academic navel-gazing but essential for understanding what we can and cannot see from our particular locations.
On Time: Ethnography requires navigating conflicting temporalities—donor cycles versus community rhythms, tight timelines versus trust-building. These pieces show ethnographers working within constraints (Wako’s one-day workshop, the museum’s 18-month process) while building in iteration and responsiveness. The lesson is not that ethnography requires more time, but adaptive approaches to timing—knowing when to move quickly and when processes need space to unfold.
On Tools: The pieces showcase diverse methodological tools—collaborative cartography (Blanco Esmoris), validation workshops (Wako), board games forcing trade-offs (Culbertson et al.), photography as evidence-making (Taranger), and training curricula (Rodriguez). Each tool was designed for context, not imported wholesale.
On Outcomes: Ethnography in action produces tangible results: laws passed (Taranger), IRB protocols amended (Fadnis), training curricula adopted (Rodriguez), institutional planning processes transformed (Culbertson et al.), and intervention approaches redesigned (Wako). Yet these authors are appropriately cautious about claiming too much—structural inequalities persist, power imbalances remain, and questions about sustainability linger.
Ethnography’s Publics
These pieces also raise important questions about ethnography’s audiences and obligations. Who is ethnographic work for? Traditional academic publishing privileges scholarly peers as primary audience, but applied ethnography often serves multiple publics simultaneously: the communities we work with, the institutions we advise, the practitioners we train, the policymakers we hope to influence, and yes, still our academic colleagues.
The authors navigate these multiple accountabilities with varying strategies. Rodriguez explicitly balances legal professionals’ desire for standardization against anthropology’s commitment to contextual interpretation. Culbertson and colleagues produce both actionable planning priorities for the museum and methodological insights for design anthropology. Fadnis prioritizes the mutual aid collective’s needs over her thesis requirements. Wako creates a forum where parents, practitioners, and academics can speak to each other rather than past each other.
This multiplicity of audiences and purposes is not a problem to solve but a feature of public ethnography. It requires us to write accessibly without sacrificing analytical depth, to engage institutions without being captured by them, and to remain accountable to communities while still contributing to scholarly conversations.
Looking Forward
The pieces in this inaugural issue demonstrate that ethnography in action takes many forms—none more authentic than others. It can be slow relationship-building in sweatshop neighborhoods or a one-day workshop challenging NGO assumptions. It can mean organizing a weaving class, facilitating a board game, or teaching prosecutors about kinship systems. It can involve submitting IRB amendments or legal briefs, writing reports for donors or policy recommendations for museums.
What unites these diverse practices is a commitment to listening without rushing to solutions, collaborating without dominating, and translating without distorting. These authors show that ethnographic sensibilities—attentiveness to power, comfort with complexity, patience with process, and respect for local knowledge—remain essential in a world increasingly governed by metrics, standardization, and technical rationality.
As we look toward future issues of Semi-Structured, we hope this collection inspires others to document their own practices of public ethnography. We want to hear from practitioners using ethnographic methods in unexpected places, from communities deploying ethnographic approaches to document their own experiences, and from researchers navigating the productive tensions between action and analysis, engagement and critique, solidarity and scholarship.
Welcome to Semi-Structured. Welcome to ethnography in action.
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
Editor-in-Chief, Semi-Structured
Public Ethnography Lab
December 2025