Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

It's been a long few weeks with a fair amount of travel. I'm just home from the fourth trip in the last month or so. I can't believe that there are still large numbers of people who don't know you have to take your shoes off when you go through airport security. So why (more…)

In February we gave the first paper from the UNM ecology project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in San Diego. My favorite part of the day was the poster session for high school kids in the main exhibition hall. There may be hope for the future.

Here's the press (more…)

A while back some drug colleagues put together a special issue of a journal, Substance Use and Misuse. They asked me (and some other old druggies) to do a brief comment on our favorite qualitative issue of the day. The title is the title of the whole section.


Unresolved Issues in Qualitative Research

MICHAEL (more…)

The grad students at the University of Maryland are sponsoring a DC area conference in March, http://sites.google.com/site/anthroplusconference/. I'm honored that they invited me to give the keynote lecture. We emailed some and landed in themes of integrating theory and practice and thinking of anthropology as an open rather than (more…)

The conference was held a year ago and the organizers are now making the files available so I might as well post it here.

DRAFT FOR WORKSHOP DISCUSSION, NOT FOR CIRCULATION OR QUOTATION WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR.


In my workshop presentation, I’d like to think about my past work and consider what the (more…)

What If We Called It “Qualia”-tative And Already Knew That Methods Were Mixed?

Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC, Eldorado NM
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology, University of Maryland
www.ethknoworks.com

Two key arguments drive this presentation. The first holds that the "qualitative boom" actually reinterprets the centuries-old argument that human social research (more…)

The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research conference in Banff this October was an interesting two days. Only a couple of people fell asleep during my plenary talk. A couple of quick comments. First of all, any of you out there who are doing applied research with social services, the metaphors of "knowledge transfer" (more…)

I'm realizing all of a sudden that a blog is like fieldnotes, and fieldnotes always remind me of the Tristram Shandy paradox, which means that it takes longer to write about experience than it does to live it, which means the more you write about what you do the less time you have to (more…)

A talk for the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research from 2009

A Little Knowledge Transfer Can Be a Dangerous Thing
Dr. Michael Agar

"Knowledge transfer" means many things to many people; some say it is not clear what it means at all. But in another sense, like the famous Moliere character who claimed that he'd been speaking prose all his life, it isn't such an (more…)

Trying to Get Clear on Intentionality

Mike Agar


In April of 2009 I participated in a meeting of biological ecologists. They wanted to integrate "social science" into a five-site comparative study of urban land fragmentation. It was—and continues to be—a pleasure to work with them. At that first meeting, I gave a standard (more…)