How do cultural theorists “craft” their knowledge? How do they design, strategize, and conduct their research activities? What do they concretely do during so-called “fieldwork” research and what is unique about their methodological approach toward vastly diverse cultures and societies? What are the ethical limits of cultural research, and how such limits can be effectively addressed and challenged through ad hoc methods? This course is designed for Ph.D. Candidates who have intentions to conduct ethnographic research in the humanities, cultural studies, and the social sciences, or who are interested in deepening their understanding of the skills and methods required to produce rigorous and ethically sustainable cultural theories. In so doing, the course will provide a basic toolkit of ethnographic research methods, while stressing their implications in terms of knowledge production, risk assessment, and ethics. As such, this course will not focus on research methods from a theoretical standpoint only. It will also require its participants to experientially apply such methods through take-home exercises concerning the reflexive planning of ethnographic activities to be conducted in the contexts of their already established doctoral projects after the end of the course.