Ethnography Symposium

18th Annual Ethnography Symposium (online only), Living with failure all around: hope in the midst of despair?

27 — 29 August 2025

All around us, we find failure. Most immediately, higher education is in crisis. We are beset by financial crises as models for funding tertiary education come under intense strain in the UK, France, The Netherlands and beyond. Free speech debates have emerged as liberal traditions of tolerance come under scrutiny. For some, the very purpose and value of university education are in doubt.

Beyond the ivy-covered walls of the academy, other liberal institutions are failing too. Democracy has come under sustained attack, whether from malicious social media campaigns or the physical assaults of January 6th, 2020. Police and other authorities are no longer trusted by large parts of the population following the murder of George Floyd in the US and evidence of toxic cultures in the UK and elsewhere. The international order now also appears to be failing to stand up to the actions of autocratic regimes. Whether it be Gaza, war in the Ukraine, or threats to trade, peace and security now emerging from Washington, institutions that have sought to regularize and resolve disputes appear more impotent than ever before.

Public service infrastructure has been undermined by years of austerity. Schools are crumbling in the UK and highways in the US. Gaps between rich and poor, both nationally and internationally, are ever widening. As if this were not enough, you could almost forget that this all takes place against a global climate crisis that seems to have almost faded into the margins of the news amidst all the other ‘madness.’ In insecure times, we need critical and open conversations about failure in society. The Journal of Organizational Ethnography has recently been seeking sustained in-depth reflection on role of failure in ethnographic research. A dedicated recurrent section now invites ethnographers to explore the integral role of failure in ethnographic methodology and challenging dominant success narratives.

But we need to go further and to make failure the object of our research. Can we live, individually and collectively, with so many failures all around us, on so many levels and in such all-pervasive ways? In our attempts to ‘live with it’ and accept that we are implicated, could that paradoxically, in itself, offer hope in despair? The hope that we must carry on and keep on standing for what we believe in. 

Format

In response to the current crisis in higher education, the Ethnography Symposium will be online in 2025. We took this decision early to open the event up to the many who, this year in particular, will struggle to secure funding from their institutions. In our experience, during the pandemic, simply retaining the standard symposium format did not work well online. It demands too much of the audience and offers little space to engage with speakers. So, this year, we will adapt the format we tried in 2020. We ask for briefer presentations and will open up the timetable to allow breaks between panels in which participants can interact. The timetable will include:

Panel Sessions – no more than one hour long. In each session, there will be up to four papers presented.

Paper Presentations will be no more than 10 minutes in length. This will allow 5 minutes for questions and will ensure that the tempo of the presentations engages the audience’s attention.

Intervals between all sessions will be of one hour. This will allow the audience to take a break from the screen and to get water/tea/coffee or whatever else sustains them.

Social Spaces will be open during the intervals for speakers and the audience to continue conversations started in the more formal space of the Panel Sessions. These Social Spaces will be open for the hour in between Panel Sessions.

Submissions

We welcome papers from any disciplinary background on any theme, provided ethnography is invoked.

Submission Details

Abstracts (up to 500 words), should be submitted to ethnog@leicester.ac.uk, saved as the author’s surname followed by the paper title by Friday 23 May, 2025. Decisions on acceptance of papers, subject to external refereeing, will be provided by e-mail. All abstracts and full papers received prior to the conference, and no later than Friday 8 August 2025, will be circulated electronically to delegates.

Best Paper Award

This year, the Symposium will again be running a Best Paper Award, co-sponsored by Emerald Publishing, the publisher of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography with which this conference is affiliated. This award will be made at the Symposium to a paper selected from among the full papers submitted. When submitting a full paper, please indicate whether you wish your paper to be considered for the Best Paper Award. Submission for the Best Paper Award should be via ethnog@leicester.ac.uk by Friday 8 August 2025. A submission to the Best Paper Award will be treated as an intention to publish the paper in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

Symposium attendance fees, accommodation and registration

There will be no attendance fee for the symposium this year. 

Enquiries

Queries regarding this conference can be made to ethnog@leicester.ac.uk. All information will be regularly updated on the University if Leicester’s website: le.ac.uk/school-of-business/research/research-events. We look forward to seeing you online in August 2025!