This book takes the reader into a wonderfully complex, multivocal conversation on ethnographic practice. The new edition successfully extends these conversations into the ever more 'ethnographically thick' realm of online socialisation and subjectivation. It provides guidance and insights which are edifying and superbly didactic for beginners while profoundly inspiring for advanced scholars.
* Karel Arnaut, KU Leuven, Belgium *
This book provides a precise and practical approach to linguistic fieldwork. It does so not only by reaffirming ethnography's core principles but also by updating this method to study communicative practices in the online-offline nexus. Blommaert and Dong provide a welcome reframing of the discipline, in which theoretical reasoning equals practical problem-solving and 'subjectivity' is an indispensable and crucial tool.
* Marco Jacquemet, University of San Francisco, USA *
This is a beautiful book. It presents a highly readable and insightful account of how doing ethnography helps us build theories of language in social life. For novices, it offers rich accounts that model and exemplify the doing of ethnography. For more experienced researchers, this second edition illuminates the challenges and rewards of exploring the online-offline nexus.
* Zane Goebel, The University of Queensland, Australia *
The authors have created a humorous, honest, reassuring, and heartfelt book that can help us to remember the true reasons we conduct research: our curiosity to understand and analyze complex interactions.
* Manuela Vida-Mannl, Technische Universitat Dortmund, Germany, LINGUIST List 32.2373 *
Jan Blommaert & Dong Jie's book is an easy-to-use, practical guide for students and researchers who want to use ethnography as a research method [...] In this second edition, the authors further a vivid discussion of ethnographic practice in both offline and online contexts. To do so, they track the theoretical and methodological changes that emerged since the book was first published ten years ago [...] An important advance of the book is its focus on the inseparability of life offline and online. The authors highlight the affordances and difficulties this
nexus presents for ethnographers.
* Carlos Henrique Bem Goncalves, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Language in Society 50 (2021) *