Multi-targeted ethnography and the Challenge of Engaging New Audiences and Publics

Abstract

This article focuses upon and problematizes the manner in which anthropologists and ethnologists have traditionally striven to communicate and share the knowledge they have gained through fieldwork. It does so by presenting and discussing the concept of multi-targeted ethnography, a move which implies a switch in perspectives that emphasizes distributive rather than accumulative modes of the ethnographic endeavor. In so doing, the objective of this text is to illuminate and discuss how multi-targeted ethnography might be understood, framed, and developed in relation to the broader array of audiences that ethnography is increasingly expected to engage. As part of this argument, the text points to a need to more actively reflect upon how scholars can engage the audiences their work is intended for, to not only establish understanding, answer questions, and deliver solutions to existing problems but even point to underlying questions that may elude clear-cut answers and be in need of open discussion and contestation.