In Deborah Thomas’s essay, she examines violence concerning Jamaican citizenship. Violence is typically the last resort of Jamaican people being denied citizenship wrongfully. She also looks at various other forces pushing Jamaicans towards violence, such as international forces and global media depictions of Jamaican governments.
Some methods I gathered from her work were participant observation, interviews, research of existing historical documents, and analysis of visual mediums such as news footage. Analysis of her methods gives me a good understanding of how on-site ethnographic research methods could look. Most notably, her time spent in Jamaica taking notes during church services, political rallies, and other events gave me insight into how she could gain a deeper understanding of Jamaica’s political and cultural struggles.
The main question I gathered from her reading was, “How did she break cultural barriers in her interviews to get her participants to open up about aspects of their experience she would not know to ask about?”