Paul Atkinson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. Recent publications include For Ethnography (SAGE 2014) and Thinking Ethnographically (SAGE 2017). The fourth book in his quartet will be Crafting Ethnography, also for SAGE. The fourth edition of Hammersley and Atkinson Ethnography: Principles in Practice was published by Routledge in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Learned Society of Wales.
In this volume, Paul Atkinson presents useful advice on how to read, and therefore how to write, ethnography. He examines how ethnographers create field notes and how they do interview transcriptions, inevitably revealing the author's hand. He outlines various literary conventions used in ethnographic writing and points out some of the recent experiments that have departed from traditional ethnographic style. He links these to an analysis of the contributions of postmodernist theory to ethnographic work.
