Thematic Sessions

These thematic sessions include three kinds of presentations:

• PechaKucha—short visual narratives that provoke or reflect on ethnographic practice
• Case Studies—lessons from ethnographic work that demonstrate impact on business challenges
• Catalysts—deep dives that synthesize, debate, and catalyze new frameworks and practices

Submissions are anonymously peer reviewed and selected by our independent program committee. Each session occurrs twice to enable global access to the program—find your region.

Challenging Bigger, Faster, Easier, Broader

In this session, we consider how ethnographic perspectives illuminate the importance of goals beside or alongside ‘bigger, faster, easier, broader’ and how we re-orient stakeholders to new goals while still creating business value. We’ll discuss shared challenges and strategies for building corporate models of scale that can speak to and learn from alternative goals and metrics.
Presentations

Trees and Forests

When should systems know us as people and not as just data? Who watches the watcher when abstractions and aggregated data are used to make decisions about our lives? The flow of information and data between human and machine systems are a source of both progress and anxiety. In this session, we consider how a change in perspective (scale) leads to shifts in how data is contextualized and understood. Implications are presented on the ethnographer’s role within these systems and as the watcher of them.
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Built to Scale: Space is Different from Place

Architecture isn’t just art; it physically shapes the ways in which we live and work. This session explores the intersections of vision and concrete building materials, thinking through the ways in which people and populations are affected by the built environment. In these ways, spaces are different from places. These works address the importance/centrality of different types of buildings (edifices) and the practices that they make possible.
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Humanizing Scale

In this session, we challenge assumptions of scale and explore what happens when we reject the notion that bigger is better and instead redefine scale to serve human values rather than corporate demands. How can scale be reconceptualized to address and meet community and human needs, first and foremost? We explore not only what scale is, but what should be scaled.
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Scaling Ethnography

In this session, we consider how ethnography takes root and grows in organizations. We’ll investigate the many models, meanings, and uses of ethnography developed and deployed, addressing their successes, failures, and ethical implications. This session focuses on the struggles we experience as we attempt to scale our practice in our organizations and industries.
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Transcending Time and Space

In this session we consider how ethnography and ethnographers journey across scales. We’ll consider how ethnography (and ethnographers) can escape the present to explore futures, and examine different ways of dealing with distance.
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Post-Human Scale

In this session we examine the interfaces of humans, software, data, and machines. We’ll consider how ethnography helps us understand beyond the human scale, how we need to adapt our practices to explore these relationships, and how ethnographic insights can be fed back into the more-than-human systems we build.
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Scaling Research

In this session we’ll play with scale in multiple senses. We’ll look at value and evaluation, sample size and team size, and consider how the impact of ethnography scales in different ways.
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Empathy Writ Small & Large

Ethnography as a tool to evoke empathy is often denoted as a good in itself. How might the process of building empathy at scale work for (or even against!) the impact of ethnography in organizations?
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Dissent at Scale

Dissent assumes a common ground, a common purpose. How do we push back against scaled-up discrimination and disinformation when they come from different cultural logics?
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Impact at Human Scale

Enacting change in the world is fraught with obstacles. How can individuals have a meaningful impact at a global scale? How do institutions, with their own decision-making logics and biases, impact individuals?
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Isolation and Connection

This session draws on experiences ranging from early ethnographic accounts of life on islands, COVID-19 hospital wards, and the International Space Station to explore how we work and live in a period of enforced distancing and isolation.
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Overcoming Scale

This session identifies three scale-related challenges for applying ethnography in business and distills practical lessons for overcoming these challenges.  First is the challenge of initializing and sustaining ethnographic practice in large scale organizations. Second are the organizational and cultural barriers to scaling ethnographic research within firms. Third is the challenge of resolving the scale differences between qualitative and quantitative research when trying to integrate the two methodologies.
Presentations