Performance ethnography as a method for the critical investigation of direct social work practice

Norman Denzin was a major force in developing performance ethnography as a critical, social justice-oriented form of qualitative inquiry worldwide. In this article, I illustrate and conceptualize how performance ethnography, as Denzin developed it, is an excellent fit for research and teaching on direct social work practice. The article revolves around a performance ethnography titled “Yuval, You Decide” that presents both the evolution and utilization of the performance and the performance itself—a detailed script of a high-risk crisis intervention of which I was part as a social work practitioner at a child protection community center. Based on the performative text, I present four contributions that performance ethnography can offer to research on direct social work practice: highlighting and conceptualizing the complexity of practice, evoking and producing experiential and embodied knowledge, accessing the micropolitics of practice, and opening a space for the coproduction of knowledge.