Colin Jerolmack

"As different as we all are in situations, needs, and views, we hold the world in common. In this brilliant ethnography, Colin Jerolmack vividly highlights this basic environmental conundrum with his compelling account of the local conflicts over fracking in the countryside around Williamsport, Pennsylvania"--

Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell

Shamus Khan

Approaches to Ethnography illustrates the various modes of representation and analysis that typify participant observation research. In contrast to the multitude of ethnographic textbooks, handbooks, and readers on the market, this book is neither a "how-to" guide nor a catalogue of substantive themes such as race, community, or space; it also avoids re-hashing epistemological debates, such as grounded theory versus the extended case method. Instead, this volume concisely lays out the predominant analytic lenses that ethnographers use to explain social action--for instance, whether they privilege micro-interaction or social structure, people and places or social processes, internal dispositions or situational contingencies. Each chapter features a prominent ethnographer delineating a distinct approach to the study of everyday life and reflecting on how their approach shapes the way they analyze and represent the field. Taken together, the collection is a practical guide that spells out how different styles of ethnography illuminate different dimensions of everyday social life. As such, Approaches to Ethnography complements and augments--but not duplicate--existing ethnographic methods and logic of inquiry texts for undergraduate and graduate courses on qualitative research methods.

Analysis and Representation in Participant Observation

Approaches to Ethnography

A riveting portrait of a rural Pennsylvania town at the center of the fracking controversy Shale gas extraction—commonly known as fracking—is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet—whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet—is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend "up to heaven and down to hell," which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America’s ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors’ liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all.

Christopher Schlottmann

Anne Rademacher

Environment and Society connects the core themes of environmental studies to the urgent issues and debates of the twenty-first century. In an era marked by climate change, rapid urbanization, and resource scarcity, environmental studies has emerged as a crucial arena of study. Assembling canonical and contemporary texts, this volume presents a systematic survey of concepts and issues central to the environment in society, such as: social mobilization on behalf of environmental objectives; the relationships between human population, economic growth and stresses on the planet’s natural resources; debates about the relative effects of collective and individual action; and unequal distribution of the social costs of environmental degradation. Organized around key themes, with each section featuring questions for debate and suggestions for further reading, the book introduces students to the history of environmental studies, and demonstrates how the field’s interdisciplinary approach uniquely engages the essential issues of the present. Instructor's Guide

A Reader

Environment and Society

The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance—if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the “pigeon wars” waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa. Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco and London’s Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls “the social experience of animals,” Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.

Colin Jerolmack

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