Heaving a sigh and sprawling across the wooden behemoth of a desk, dotting my dress with pencil shavings, I reached for the eraser to revise the hen scratch of my vision for the umpteenth time. A wizened hand closed over mine to stay my outreached grasp as he intoned, “Y’know what they say, kid: ‘good, fast, cheap: pick two’.”
Project after project, these simple words continually find resonance. Regardless of scale, the old adage of “good, fast, cheap: pick two” speaks to the idea that in any given balance of quality, only two of the three can be prioritized. This is never more apparent than with inquiries into complexities and pressing social problems. This is glaring when employing methods and tools of qualitative research to address them.
At my first stumble upon the term “rapid ethnography” some years ago—deep in a proverbial research rabbit hole as an ethnographically oriented graduate...
University of California Press