By: Deve Persad on September 19, 2013
For the last five years we sent teams to El Salvador. Short term teams, 8 days, with the specific purpose of building homes for those who have been displaced by earthquakes and hurricanes. Each morning, as the sun climbs above the mountain peaks, our team heads to the worksite, excitement and anticipation always accompany us…
By: Sandy Bils on September 19, 2013
In his book „Good to great. Why some companies make the leap and others don’t“ Jim Collins presents the results of an intensive research process. Joined by a large team, Collins studied why some average companies become major leaders and others fail. He looked at a period of 15 years and compared his selected companies…
By: Garrick Roegner on September 19, 2013
In his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, business management researcher Jim Collins attempts to define what separates good organizations from great ones. By researching companies that have had strong success against those who have merely been good, or only had outstanding success for a season, or simply…
By: Liz Linssen on September 19, 2013
Pink’s book, Doing Sensory Ethnography, is a clever handbook for the traditional ethnographer who wishes to engage in new and additional multi-faceted methods of research. Or should I say, multisensory. For me, Pink exposes additional branches on the tree of research, which in turn provide the ethnographer with tools for producing greater fruit in one’s…
By: Chris Ellis on September 19, 2013
Good to Great examines what makes the difference between a good company and a great company. While I do think the church is not first and foremost a business, I do think there are many points that Collins touches on that can greatly help churches not necessarily be great but be faithful. For we are…
By: Phil Smart on September 18, 2013
After 8 years in the private sector I had returned to full-time ministry. One of the reasons I was excited about the church where I was going to serve was because of its professionalism – in other words, it was run like the business I had recently left. As part of our job descriptions, those…
By: Bill Dobrenen on September 18, 2013
Sarah Pink (2009) writes with emotion and humanness in her book Doing Sensory Ethnography. Her primary thesis is that to do ethnographic studies wisely, the ethnographer must be open to looking inside herself (reflexivity) as well as looking into the lives of others. Sensory Ethnography demands a commitment to hands-on research that dives beneath the…
By: Fred Fay on September 18, 2013
This last week I went to a conference called the Community Project presented by “the C4 group”. There practitioners who were involved with caring for their cities gave testimonials about how their efforts brought forth change for the good of their community. It began with a leader talking to us about the church being outward…
By: Telile Fikru Badecha on September 14, 2013
Reading Doing Visual Ethnography by Sarah Pink is an interesting whole new area that I am introduced to in this book. It is interesting to realize the impact that images have in our lives. I found it fascinating when Pink says, “Images are ‘everywhere’. They permeate our academic work, everyday lives, conversations, our imagination and…
By: Sam Stephens on September 14, 2013
In his book The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, David Morgan connects art and religion. Morgan’s vision is to extend the horizons of our perception of religion to include a consideration of the influence and impact of images. The first part of his work contains descriptions of the convergence of the…
By: Raphael Samuel on September 14, 2013
Posted by Raphael Samuel A picture is worth a thousand words, not sure who said this but it could very well be Sarah Pink. Her book “Doing Visual ethnography” challenges the reader to think of the importance of visual images in the communication of messages. Her insightful discourse on the subject, provides a deeper understanding on a practice…
By: gfesadmin on September 14, 2013
By: Stefania Tarasut on September 13, 2013
As I was reading through Doing Visual Ethnography, I was reminded of a picture that was taken of me in Honduras this past summer. The picture was posted in a slide show, which was later shown to our congregation. It wasn’t long after the pictures were posted that people started commenting on how hard…
By: John Woodward on September 13, 2013
About fifteen years ago my history professor asked our graduate history class asked a very strange and confusing question: “When we research a moment in history, do we believe we can actually capture some reality that is out there…or are we doing something else?” I was totally baffled by what this professor was getting at.…
By: Miriam Mendez on September 13, 2013
I have to confess that when I first flipped through the pages of, “Doing Visual Ethnography” by Sarah Pink, I wasn’t too impressed by the pictures. I thought it looked rather boring and I wondered why the author only used black and white pictures. My second confession is that I was not familiar with the…
By: Clint Baldwin on September 13, 2013
Sarah Pink’s Doing Visual Ethnography (2006, 2nd ed.) is a solidly researched and articulated text that offers an in-depth overview of utilizing the image – through various forms and methods – as viable research aid. The text does offer an overview, but it really is an overview offered for someone already decently versed in the…
By: Carol McLaughlin on September 13, 2013
My favorite television program to sit down and enjoy is NCIS. Reading Doing Visual Ethnography by Sarah Pink, I was reminded of an episode some years ago (yes there probably is a connection between writing this blog post and my desire to sit down, turn off my brain and watch a NCIS re-run). In this…
By: Cedrick Valrie on September 13, 2013
In years past, the word “help” was highly associated with geriatrics with particular attention on elderly men and women that had entered a stage in life where falling was a constant and often reality. One of the most iconic images was seeing a helpless woman home alone and lying on the bathroom floor with no…
By: Mark Steele on September 13, 2013
Two powerful images I remember growing up in the church were the painting Christ our Pilot and the Navigator Wheel tool that taught four principles to live a Christian life. These images helped me to rely on guidance from the Bible and the life of Jesus as to how to live my life. As I…
By: Bill Dobrenen on September 13, 2013
Ethnography. What a word – or is it more than mere words? In all honesty, this was a tough read for me, not because of the subject matter (I love cultural anthropology), but because of the highly academic style Pink uses in her text. It was like walking through quicksand for me at times, but…
