ABSTRACT
I have spent the better part of the past twenty years entrenched in one ethnographic research setting or another. My lengthy field experiences do not automatically qualify me as an expert on ethnography, as much as they connote my deep commitment to ethnographic epistemologies. From the very moment I learned about ethnography in an undergraduate lecture hall, I could hardly believe a university would actually pay someone to hang around with people as a legitimate vocation. In my undergraduate days, ethnography generally meant participant observation or fieldwork in the anthropological sense; or simply, deep immersion in the everyday life practices of other people as a means of learning, knowing, and representing them accurately.
