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Dr Catherine Trundle and Associate Professor Tarryn Phillips will present a seminar titled "From Paperwork to Paper Trails: Ethnographic Document Analysis as a Method for Qualitative Health Research"
Seminar details
Title: From Paperwork to Paper Trails: Ethnographic Document Analysis as a Method for Qualitative Health Research
Speaker: Dr Catherine Trundle and Associate Professor Tarryn Phillips
Date: 4th December 2025
Time: 11:00-12.00 UK time
Register: Via Eventbrite
Abstract
Documents are ubiquitous in health settings, from medical records to spreadsheets to policy reports. But how do we study them in ways that explore their diverse meanings, their agency, and their social impacts? In this presentation, we introduce a method we have been developing, ethnographic document analysis, or EDA. Complementing and expanding language-focused tools such as discourse and thematic analyses, EDA aims not only to analyse textual content, but to understand documents as social artefacts with social lives. Drawing on examples of documents that have become significant in our own work as medical anthropologists, from nuclear test sites to courtroom dramas to health clinics in the Pacific, we outline eight areas of focus to guide EDA. This includes examining voice, tone, mood, and silences, as well as the aesthetic and narrative dimensions of documents, and their 'careers' as they journey through diverse social spaces. EDA also emphasises researcher reflexivity and the often-contradictory meanings and effects of documents. Given how central documents are in most health-related fieldsites, we see EDA as a flexible and powerful addition to the qualitative health researcher’s toolkit. This paper emerges out of the Health Ethnographies Collaboratory in Australia, which aims to build resources and capacity for interdisciplinary ethnographic research in health.
Biography
Dr Catherine Trundle is a medial anthropologist in the Public Health Department of La Trobe University. Her research focuses on ethnographic and creative research methods, heat stress and climate justice, contested illness, and relational ethics. Her forthcoming book Injurious Law (Cambridge Univeristy Press) reveals how legal processes can exacerbate contested environmental injuries and generate cascading harms to the wellbeing of claimants and their families.
Tarryn Phillips is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor of Crime, Justice and Legal studies in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University. Drawing on ethnographic research methods, Tarryn's interdisciplinary research examines how structural inequalities shape health and wellbeing in Australia and the Pacific. Her ethnographic novel with Edward Narain, Sugar, is published through University of Toronto Press (2024).
