ABOUT
There are many internet resources on ethnography. So why another one now? First and foremost, I wanted to promote ethnographic thinking to a broader audience beyond the academia, including teachers looking for a way to nurture critical thinking, decision-makers who are not satisfied with surveys and want an alternative way of gathering evidence, and anyone who is interested in understanding human cultural and social behavior in depth.
This site is also for my current students. In this website, they will find a repository of material that they can draw on to succeed in their academic endeavors in my courses and beyond.
Finally, this is a way for me to showcase my professional work in an integrated, synergistic way. After 20 years as a college faculty, my teaching, research as service are coming together around the idea of ThinkEthnography, demanding a new way of sharing my thinking.
Sawa Kurotani is an anthropologist, writer and educator, with over 20 years of classroom experience at four different institutions of higher education in the United States, and also corporate training programs.
Her earlier ethnographic work centered on the stories of Japanese women's lives as they are touched by global forces. Her book Home Away from Home focused on expatriate Japanese wives and their domestic responsibilities during their husband’s overseas assignment.
Most recently Sawa's scholarly interests have shifted toward student-centered curricular design and the application of ethnographic thinking as a critical-thinking tool in a variety of pedagogical settings, which prompted her to start this website as part of her outreach effort.
Writing for the public audience is an integral part of her scholarship and teaching. Based on her 14 years of experience as a columnist for Japan News, an English-language daily published in Tokyo, she has designed and taught a public-writing course for undergraduate students.
Sawa received her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently a professor of anthropology at the University of Redlands in Southern California. She thinks ethnography everyday, everywhere she goes - while eating lunch, sweating through the graduation ceremony in academic regalia, and even running after the fuzzy yellow ball under Southern California sun.