Creative Teamwork Developing Rapid, Site-Switching Ethnography

Creative Team Work describes a new way of doing rapid ethnography to capture the rich complexity and contradictions of social relations. It is about the imagination, stimulation, and reflection that can come with international, interdisciplinary teams sharing the development, application, analysis, and dissemination of research. Although the book is based on a large, seven-year project studying care homes to search for promising practices and is guided by feminist political economy, the lessons we have learned are relevant for everyone undertaking empirical investigation. All research needs to consider theory -- the organization of information, ethics, and dissemination, for example. The specific techniques and approaches the authors discuss can be applied to a wide range of qualitative methods and are not exclusive to this kind of ethnography. By dissecting experiences and uniting chapters through the theme of creative, reflexive team work, the book considers issues and methods of interest to all those struggling through the research process, with or without team support.

Pat Armstrong, PhD, MA, is Professor of Sociology and of Women's Studies at York University, Toronto. She held a Canada Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institute of Health Research Chair in Health Services, is a Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Focusing on the fields of social policy, of women, work, feminist theory and the health and social services, she has published widely, co-authoring more than a dozen books and co-editing another dozen. For over a decade, she was Chair of Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded by Health Canada, Her current research is focused on reimagining long-term residential care, a Major Collaborative Research Project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Ruth Lowndes, DPhil, MN, is currently engaged full time in the "Re-magining Long-term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices" MCRI. Ruth's doctoral ethnographical study used observation and interviewing, methods which extend into this current project. She is also registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario and is a Certified Diabetes Educator.