IF: InterView Forum
an emergent leader in new and alternative ways to think and do ethnography — from fieldwork to reporting. Will begin publication in the spring 2005.
A new journal that publishes firsthand materials from ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, field notes, narratives, as well as audio and visual materials, that provoke critical questions, debates, thoughtful interrogation of assumptions and that evoke new ways of thinking and doing ethnography. For more information, email Peter Benson.
IF: InterView Forum is a pioneer journal in the exploration of new technologies for the dissemination of knowledges produced in fieldwork to diverse audiences of students, researchers, teachers, and other publics. The journal comes at an opportune time, when the standard dissemination of anthropological and other scholarly findings are turning away from traditional print media and moving toward online publications.
Founding Editorial Collective
Peter Benson (Harvard University)
Quetzil Castañeda (Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology)
Edward F. Fischer (Vanderbilt University)
Call for Papers
IF: InterView Forum publications are peer-reviewed journal articles. IF: InterView Forum is accepting submissions during the fall 2004 for the inaugural volume, which is scheduled for 2005. Please send submissions to the editor, Peter Benson. Submissions must follow the manuscript guidelines. We welcome manuscripts from a wide array of text and image-based genres, ranging from standard interviews and field note narratives, to diary entries, letters or postcard-style formats, and photo essays.
A View Between Views
The concept of interview frames the mission of the journal. Interview does not only refer to the standard one-on-one, question and answer genre of dialogue. While the journal does solicit this type of manuscript submissions, the notion of interview is expanded to connote a view between views.
The journal forum is therefore a middle view of the ethnographic process, between the first hand observations, inscriptions, data collection, and knowledge production of fieldwork and the secondary elaborations, translations, and analyses of the published ethnographic report.
IF: InterView Forum presents firsthand materials from ethnographic fieldwork — more immediately and less mediated. Field notes and interviews are not for the jaded, and IF remains somewhat naïve to the ongoing mediation of knowledge in today’s transcultural flows — naïve in an open-minded sense of the word, referring to lack of pretense, artlessness, and a kind of experimentation that eschews sophisticated techniques.
IF: InterView Forum changes the way that ethnography is done. The traditional distinction between doing fieldwork and "writing up" breaks down, since one of the advantages of IF is that researchers can submit field notes and other materials to be viewed by a public audience while still in the field. Commentaries can be amended as contexts, insights and problems change throughout the course of fieldwork. Alternatively, researchers can comment on the published materials of others in light of what they are finding in the field. In many ways, then, IF pushes us to reconsider notions of "field" and "report" altogether, as these moments are interactive and can bear more directly on each other.
Method/Means
In this conception, the question and answer dialectic remains open and becomes a space for continued dialogic and interpretive intervention by diverse readers and emergent audiences. Following an anonymous review process, accepted materials are posted on the IF: InterView Forum website, along with hyperlinks to Commentaries and Provocations (2000-3000 words) from the two to three reviewers.
The authors, ethnographer(s), interviewee(s) and other collaborators as well as readers are also able to re-respond to these reviews. The online journal has a mandate to present, where applicable and possible, critical responses and commentaries from those who have been interviewed or have been traditionally considered the subject of ethnographic research.
Ethnography in the Classroom
IF: InterView is a pedagogical tool. It delivers ethnographic materials directly into classrooms. Because published materials are only loosely mediated, IF is an interactive forum in which students and educators can work firsthand with ethnographic materials and produce original interpretations and commentaries.