The Ethnographic Vignette as Innovative Tool in Intersectional Social Justice Activist Research

Abstract

This chapter leverages ethnographic narratives written during the author's year of nearly daily ‘walking tourism' in New York City on the heels of 9/11 as a vehicle to illustrate an innovative approach to community-based research for intersectional social justice purposes. Since the 1990s, the author has employed creatively crafted vignettes as an activist researcher working with alliances of racial, gender, queer, economic, and labor organizations that joined together to conduct progressive intersectional social justice interventions in a conservative Western US state. Here the author extracts pieces of her “New York Stories” for use as vignettes that could be employed in practice-based research as discussion prompts to foster restorative dialogue and participatory action research efforts in community groups and organizations committed to the work of intersectional social justice.