Coping with Messiness in Ethnography: Authority, Bias and Immersion in ethnographic Fieldwork in the non-Western World

ABSTRACTEthnography has firmly established its position in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Many studies have benefited from following ethnographic approaches to arrive at a grounded and comprehensive understanding of the respective research context. Applying that to the non-Western world, however, comes with challenges for researchers. Aside from ethical concerns which have been addressed in the past, we want to use this workshop to foster conversations and discussions on authority, bias and immersion when conducting ethnographic field work in the non-Western world – especially as a Western researcher. The main objective of this workshop is to exchange experiences and to identify common aspects and ways of overcoming, coping with or even embracing the messiness in ethnographic work and derive guidelines based on these discussions.