Research Guides: ARC 2017: Research Methods: Ethnography

Resources for Ethnographic Research

When conducting ethnographic research, you may find resources outside of the discipline of architecture helpful. Start with a multidisciplinary database and search for databases on other topics here. A few general databases are highlighted below.

ProQuest - multidisciplinary search engine of academic journals, newspapers, ebooks, and more
GEOBASE - database for physical and human geography, earth and environmental sciences, ecology, and related disciplines, focusing on the human and social impacts on both
Gender Studies Database - provides interdisciplinary coverage of gender-related topics including women's studies, men's studies, ethnic studies, health issues, and sexual diversity

Books on Urban and Social Design

Design Like You Give a Damn by Kate Stohr (Editor); Cameron Sinclair (Editor); Architecture for Architecture for Humanity
Design Like You Give a Damn is a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives. It offers a history of the movement toward socially conscious design, and showcases more than 80 contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, healthcare, education and access to clean water, energy and sanitation.
Design Like You Give a Damn [2] by Architecture for Humanity
Following the success of their first book, Architecture for Humanity brings readers the next edition, with more than 100 projects from around the world. Packed with practical and ingenious design solutions, this book addresses the need for basic shelter, housing, education, health care, clean water, and renewable energy. One-on-one interviews and provocative case studies demonstrate how innovative design is reimagining community and uplifting lives.
Expanding Architecture: Design As Activism by Roberta Feldman (Text by); Sergio Palleroni (Text by); John Peterson (Text by); Katie Swenson (Text by); Bryan Bell (Editor); Katie Wakeford (Editor); Thomas Fisher (Foreword by); Steve Badanes (Text by)
Expanding Architecture presents a new generation of creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good. Questioning how design can improve daily lives, editors Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford map an emerging geography of architectural activism - or 'public-interest architecture' - that might function akin to public interest law or medicine by expanding architecture's all-too-often elite client base.
Suffragette City by Nathaniel R. Walker (Editor); Elizabeth Darling (Editor)
Suffragette City brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring and analysing cases in which women have resourcefully leveraged or defied the politics of gender to form and reform architecture and urbanism. Suffragette City draws on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural case studies from the English-speaking world, including the USA, South Africa, Scotland, India and England, to examine places and moments when women stepped into the centre of public life and claimed opportunities to shape the fabrics of their communities.
Architecture Is Participation by Susanne Hofmann (Text by)
With realized pilot projects and practical guidelines, this volume presents examples of successful community, administration and city-dweller participation in the architectural process.
Good Deeds, Good Design by Bryan Bell
Good Deeds, Good Design presents the best new thoughts and practices in this emerging movement toward an architecture that serves a broader population. In this book, architecture firms, community design centers, design/build programs, and service-based organizations offer their plans for buildings for the other ninety-eight percent. Twenty-eight essays and case studies illustrate successes and failures and raise both design and social issues.
Rural Studio by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean; Lawrence Chua (Contribution by); Timothy Hursley (Photographer)
For almost ten years, Samuel Mockbee, a recent MacArthur Grant recipient, and his architecture students at Auburn University have been designing and building striking houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama's Hale County. Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, and old license plates, they create inexpensive buildings that bear the trademark of Mockbee's work, which he describes as "contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture.

Research Guides

ARC 2017: Research Methods

Resources for Ethnographic Research

Books on Urban and Social Design

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