A Serial Ethnographer. An Interview with Gary Alan Fine

This conversation between Roberta Sassatelli and Gary Alan Fine reflects on ethnography as a distinctive yet systematic mode of sociological inquiry. Taking Fine’s extensive ethnographic work as a point of departure, the conversation explores the tension between the uniqueness of ethnographic encounters and the systematicity required to turn situated experiences into sociological knowledge. Fine’s practice of moving across a series of empirical settings provides an opportunity to consider what it means to be a “serial ethnographer”: how repeated engagement with different fields shapes the ethnographer’s sensibility, methodological repertoire and understanding of social life. The conversation addresses questions of access, immersion, observation and writing, while also considering the relationship between personal involvement and analytical distance. Rather than treating ethnography as an exceptional form of inquiry grounded solely in prolonged immersion in a single field, the discussion highlights its cumulative and comparative potential. Seriality thus emerges not simply as a feature of Fine’s research trajectory, but as a methodological resource through which the particularity of ethnographic experience can be connected to broader sociological questions, while preserving the situated character of ethnographic knowledge.