Are you an undergraduate student at Rice doing qualitative research for a class, major/minor, or other academic project? The Ethnography Studio offers specialized advising on designing, planning, and implementing qualitative and ethnographic research projects. Meet individually with Ethnography Studio Fellows, who are PhD candidates in Rice’s Anthropology Department and former Ethnography Studio Coordinators, to receive guidance in all parts of the process: 

• picking and narrowing a topic
• crafting a research question
• identifying relevant literatures
• designing a research methodology
• writing a research or grant proposal
• securing IRB approval
• carrying out your research 
• analyzing data
• and more!

This service is available to all Rice undergraduates in any class (not only anthropology students). Sign up for a meeting here!

Meet the Spring 2021 Ethnography Studio Fellows

Mel Ford‘s research is based in Guatemala City. She is particularly interested in questions concerning architecture, ecology, poverty, and urbanization. Some of her research methods include focus groups, structured and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and she has some experience with participatory mapping exercises. Throughout her fieldwork, she has given presentations to public institutions and non-profit organizations interested in research outcomes. She also uses ethnographic methods and insight as a guide for curating an upcoming art exhibition in Guatemala City based on her dissertation research and from collaborations with local artists. 

Kristin Gupta specializes in death and dying, queer theory, and medical anthropology. She is a former co-coordinator of the Ethnography Studio and currently serves as a Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Gebby Keny studies “data-driven” approaches to environmental governance and agricultural production. He’s interested in how farmers, ecologists, machines, and data specialists capture, store, and analyze various kinds of data in the interest of environmental sustainability. More specifically, his research focuses on how such engagements with data conceptually and physically remake ecosystems and political alliances throughout the region that have formed, in part, through histories of settler-colonial land dispossession, techno-scientific imagination, and crop commodification. Gebby is interested in exploring these topics through documentary film, animation, comics, museum installations, and digital mapping softwares, in addition to written forms.

Tim Quinn‘s research is based in Bangkok, Thailand where he studies the ways different groups, institutions, and actors experiment with and make use of HIV prevention drugs. His interests span medical anthropology; gender, sexuality, and queer theory; and science and technology studies (specifically biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and drugs). He has regional expertise and experience working in contexts across East and Southeast Asia.

Katie Ulrich studies how efforts to design and make plant-based, renewable fuels and materials forge new intersections between scientific knowledge production, biotech, and resource extraction. Her research interests are broadly situated within the anthropology of science, feminist science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and energy humanities.