Engaged Ethnography Lab (EEL)

The Engaged Ethnography Lab (EEL) supports the applied scholarship of faculty and students within the Department of Anthropology. EEL’s approach to research includes scholarship that is community-based, participatory, and/or applied in nature, prioritizing analyses and outcomes that frame research within tangible impacts.

EEL includes the work of students in courses, graduate projects, and interdisciplinary faculty research, each with a shared grounding in seeing research’s impacts upon everyday experiences, practices, knowledge production, and policy.

Research Projects

Campus Sustainability, Community Context

Participatory research started in Spring 2021, with PI Dr. Angela Storey, explores the work of students, staff, and faculty in on-campus sustainability efforts. In conjunction with UofL Sustainability Initiatives and the Partnership for a Green City, and funded by the Collaborative Consortium for Transdisciplinary Social Justice research, this research has included the work of the following student research interns: graduate student Bevin Hardy (SUST MS) and undergraduate students TJ Miles (ANTH, SUST), Megan Husted (SUST), Maria Cora (ANTH, SUST), Josh Cagle (SUST), Lexi Lilly (ANTH, SUST), and Henny Ransdell (ANTH, SUST, ENGL). For further information about the project, an early funding report can be found on this CCTSJR Spotlight from May 2021. Student research interns also created podcasts to highlight the impact of campus sustainability efforts; one podcast was shared on Forward Radio and can be heard here.

 Learning How the Community Leads

This applied research project, with PI Dr. Angela Storey, was conducted in collaboration with Louisville Metro and funded by the Collaborative Consortium for Transdisciplinary Social Justice Research. This project includes the participation of faculty within four departments and has incorporated research assistance from ten undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students across eight departments. This project asks how local government engages varied urban residents through participatory spaces, assessing who attends Metro engagement events and how those events are perceived, and providing feedback to Metro in order to inform future outreach. The project included participant observation and survey data collected between 2017-2019 at over 30 public meetings in Louisville, along with supporting interviews and focus groups; data analysis is on-going. See below for photos from our research team, including some of our wonderful student researchers.

 Members of the Metro research team collect data at a city event, April 2017 – (L-R) Dr. Storey, graduate researcher Chris Wales, undergraduate researcher Jeremy Jackson, Dr. Johnson.

Post-graduate researcher Laura Valentine on the Metro research team presents findings at a local conference on public health, April 2019.

A community member engages in a Metro outreach event, June 2017. Image source: University of Louisville.