Jacobsen signs pre-completion contract for “The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook”
(co-authored with Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor) a book for artists, ethnographers and qualitative researchers.
How and when do anthropologists, educators, sociologists and other social scientists innovate with the arts and ethnography? How does one get started to think, write, draw, sing, photograph or perform with data? What is the result of these innovations? Ethnographers are often trained to understand theory, document keen observations and make sense of human patterns, yet they are not often trained in the arts of representation. Creative practices are usually left up to each individual social scientist who may be lucky enough to have an artistic practice they keep silent or on the side of more official work. Yet these practices can make felt differences in the impact, depth, and reception of a piece of scholarship. We believe that if more of the most creative ethnographers shared their tips, prompts, and artistic exercises, social science work might have more meaning for the individual scholar, the field of inquiry, and the public.
With contributions by emerging scholars as well as leading creative ethnographers working in various social science fields (e.g. anthropologists, educators, ethnomusicologists, political scientists, geographers, artists, and others), this volume offers readers a variety of creative exercises that ethnographers have used in their own work and classrooms to deepen their ethnographic practice. The contributions foreground different approaches in creative practice, broadening the tools of multimodal ethnography as one designs a study, works with collaborators and landscapes, and renders ethnographic findings.
Title: The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook: Exercises for Writing, Visualizing, Sounding and Performing Data
Contracted Book Proposal with Routledge Press August, 2022
Editors: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, www.melisacahnmanntaylor.com and Kristina Jacobsen, www.kristinajacobsenmusic.com
About the Editors:
Kristina Jacobsen is an ethnographer, singer-songwriter, and cultural anthropologist. An Associate professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology (Ethnology) at the University of New Mexico, her research focuses on language reclamation, expressive culture, popular music, and arts-based research methodologies. Her first book, The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (UNC Press, 2017), was the winner of the 2018 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award for most outstanding book on popular music. Jacobsen is a touring singer-songwriter, a Fulbright Scholar (US-Italy, 2019-2020), and fronts the all-female honky-tonk band Merlettes. She is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble, the Songwriting Focus Area, and the Prison Song Project at the University of New Mexico.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, a U.S. Fulbright Scholar Ambassador, is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. She’s authored five books addressing intersections between language education and the literary, visual and performing arts including one book of poems, Imperfect Tense, and her newest book, Enlivening Instruction with Drama and Improv. Supported by grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, and Beckman Award for Professors Who Inspire, her work narrates the heartache and joy of teaching and learning language. She lives in Athens, GA with her husband and two children and their rescue dog, Bagel.