Assignment 2: Care Manuals for Ethnography

Due date : May 17 (end of day)

Working in groups of up to four students, you will design and produce a care, maintenance or repair manual for ethnographic research. This assignment encourages you to use your creativity and to experiment with ways of presenting and explaining concepts touched on in this course for a wider public.

The manuals are intended to be public-facing resources for other ethnographers, so you will create your manual in such a way that it will be useful to others like you wondering what kinds of practices they can adopt in the course of ethnographic research to respond to emerging dilemmas, protect themselves and research participants, secure data, and otherwise ensure that their research is ethical. We will discuss possible topics during tutorials in week 3.

After you have created your manual, you will choose a Creative Commons license under which to release your work to the public. Submit your assignment, preferably as a single PDF, through Brightspace. Making hard copies to distribute to your friends is optional but encouraged!

Resources

Care, maintenance or repair manuals come in all kinds of formats. Aside from basic information about the thing being cared for, common elements include:

• bulleted lists
• checklists
• flowcharts
• diagrams
• step-by-step instructions
• recommendations for tools and instructions for their use

Manuals combine technical communication with intercultural awareness of the needs of the audience. They have to find a balance between, on the one hand, providing enough information to be helpful (or else risk knowledge gaps) and, on the other hand, maximalism (which may be overwhelming, lead to resignation, and create a hierarchy between the more or less technically competent). Will your group be able to find the right balance?

For inspiration regarding the form of your manual, consult the following projects:

• Manuals + Guides
• The Manual Library
• Step by Step: Thinking Through and Beyond the Repair Manual
• Academic Repair Manual
• Debt Resistor's Manual
• Dish of the Day: Digital Care Meal (Prato do Dia)
• Read the Feminist Manual
• A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance
• Bicycle Maintenance Zine
• How to Darn Your Clothes
• iFixit Repair Guides

You can consult work by preceding cohorts of students in this course for inspiration regarding the content of your manual:

• Zines by former ECER students
• Zines and other resources by former ECER students