I’m a 2nd year Sociology & Social Anthropology student studying at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve joined this forum as myself and some of my colleagues are interested in learning about what various participants in the EA ‘movement’ think about ‘effectiveness’ and the organisation as a whole.
We’re doing ethnographic research, which means taking part in some activities alongside you, while talking to you directly in events, on forums, and in interviews. If you’d be interested in talking to me about your experiences and thoughts about effective altruism, please feel free to send me a private message and we can find a time to chat!
Hi Kate, welcome to the forum! Great to see someone with a sociology background in EA—there’s relatively few of you in the movement. I’m glad that you’re doing ethnographic research on people in the movement. I was a UI/UX designer before so I’ve done some user research / qualitative interviews before.
Another EA, Vaidehi Agarwalla, did something similar to you before where she interviewed people in EA, particularly those who were looking to make a career transition or had just made a career transition. Her undergraduate degree was also in sociology. You may be interested to read her sequence on “Towards A Sociological Model of EA Movement Building”, which I think is unfinished yet, but already has 2 articles in it.
I was wondering if you were planning on focusing on a specific topic or demographic within EA for your ethnographic research? That might be good to do, since people in EA and their interests can be quite varied, so it might be worth scoping the research down rather than just asking to interview anyone in the movement. Just my two cents!
Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, 80,000 Hours has a list here of research topics that people with a background in sociology can research on. You could consider researching on one of these topics as a side project or uni project in the future.
Hello everyone!
I’m a 2nd year Sociology & Social Anthropology student studying at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve joined this forum as myself and some of my colleagues are interested in learning about what various participants in the EA ‘movement’ think about ‘effectiveness’ and the organisation as a whole.
We’re doing ethnographic research, which means taking part in some activities alongside you, while talking to you directly in events, on forums, and in interviews. If you’d be interested in talking to me about your experiences and thoughts about effective altruism, please feel free to send me a private message and we can find a time to chat!
Hi Kate, welcome to the forum! Great to see someone with a sociology background in EA—there’s relatively few of you in the movement. I’m glad that you’re doing ethnographic research on people in the movement. I was a UI/UX designer before so I’ve done some user research / qualitative interviews before.
Another EA, Vaidehi Agarwalla, did something similar to you before where she interviewed people in EA, particularly those who were looking to make a career transition or had just made a career transition. Her undergraduate degree was also in sociology. You may be interested to read her sequence on “Towards A Sociological Model of EA Movement Building”, which I think is unfinished yet, but already has 2 articles in it.
I was wondering if you were planning on focusing on a specific topic or demographic within EA for your ethnographic research? That might be good to do, since people in EA and their interests can be quite varied, so it might be worth scoping the research down rather than just asking to interview anyone in the movement. Just my two cents!
Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, 80,000 Hours has a list here of research topics that people with a background in sociology can research on. You could consider researching on one of these topics as a side project or uni project in the future.
Also, if you’re interested in biosecurity, David Manheim had some biosecurity project ideas for people with a sociology/anthropology background. :)