Marjorie Faulstich Orellana: On ‘Mindful Ethnography’
“Ethnography, with all its limitations, has as its strongest impulse the quest to see and understand “others” on their own terms and to step out of our own viewpoints in order to do so. Conjoining ethnography with mindfulness, this book aims to support the best aspects of ethnography by enhancing the capacity to listen more deeply, see more expansively, keep a check on our biases and connect more compassionately with others.”
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Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2020) is a new publication from Marjorie Faulstich Orellana which addresses major questions in ethnography and applies principles of mindfulness to the practise of ethnography. It examines how mindfulness may be integrated into the perception, including listening and seeing, of subjects in the field.
“Mindful Ethnography addresses a central dilemma of ethnography: the relationship of self and other. ”
Mindful Ethnography addresses a central dilemma of ethnography: the relationship of self and other. It suggests ways of viewing the world from different perspectives, getting beyond the categories of our culture and working with our own thoughts and feelings even as we aim to understand those of our participants.”
The readings are accompanied by original compositions from her son Andrés Orellana (Abstract Apathy on Spotify) and visual artwork from her daughter Elisa Noemí, a multidisciplinary artist and performer.
Introduction: “In this recording I share my motivations for writing Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2020)”
The below reading is from Chapter 1, summarizes 14 points ‘towards a non-dualistic approach to mindful ethnography’, and concludes with a short guided meditation for ethnographers.
From Chapter 1: “In this recording I read a few excerpts from the first chapter of Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2020)”
Marjorie Faulstich Orellana is a professor and researcher at UCLA in the School of Education and Information Studies. Her teaching and research interests include “the experiences of the children of immigrants in urban schools and communities, with a focus on their work as language and cultural brokers,” and her areas of expertise cover Language, Literacy, and Bilingual Education.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Orellana taught as a bilingual classroom teacher in a new immigrant community in Los Angeles and was also active in the Central American Solidarity Movement.
Beyond Mindful Ethnography, Orellana’s publications available via Amazon include: Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning, and Love (2016); Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language and Culture (2009); Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups (editor, along with Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez); among others.
More recent ethnographic work with UCLA graduate students includes a study following the experiences of 33 families across the U.S., who have diverse transnational familial ties, throughout the global COVID-19 pandemic. This project is discussed on the Fact-COVID blog, a research project led by University College London, UK.
View more at www.marjoriefaulstichorellana.com
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Below: in this talk at Fairhaven College (Washington State, USA), Orellana explores “how society benefits from the largely invisible [and unremunerated] work that the children of immigrants do as language and culture brokers” and looks at illustrations from ethnographic data in three immigrant communities over a decade.
