Catherine Trundle and Tarryn Phillips are holding a workshop in Melbourne in August 2024, to develop An ethnographic manifesto for health science journal editors and funders

The contributions that ethnography can make to heath research is well established. Yet mainstream models of publishing and funding within the health sciences are often at odds with ethnography’s logics. Ethnography’s thickly descriptive style of writing, its open ended and explorative approach to research questions, and its challenges to established definitions and parameters of health and wellbeing, are sometimes illegible and at odds with mainstream health science approaches to research, to health journal writing conventions, and to the logics of health funding institutions.

Rather than asking how ethnographers might adapt to fit better with the logics of mainstream health science, we set out in this workshop to draft a set of recommendations for health science journal editors and funding bodies. How might they change, tweak of evolve their own practices to allow greater inclusion for ethnographic approaches, and to better leverage ethnographies insight and impact in order to address our pressing health challenges? What small and immediate changes can be made, and what larger systemic changes are required?