Search

This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Axel Sommerfelt's paper for the symposium organized by Fredrik Barth ahead of the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries is given a broader readership in this issue. This biography provides some background to the perspectival differences between Axel Sommerfelt and Barth, that revolve around issues of political inequality, experience and historicity. Axel Sommerfelt shared Barth's anti-essentialist view on ethnicity, but did not fully embrace the instrumentalist underpinnings of Barth's perspective. He was theoretically influenced by the Manchester school, and directed attention to political domination from the point of view of the dominated, a focus that grew out of his ethnography from Ruwenzori in Uganda. Judicial institutions constituted an important arena for the negotiation of ethnic boundaries, and specifically, Toro-Konzo relations were partly shaped in judicial contexts that Toro controlled, under British protectorate supervision. His interest in resistance was also influenced by his upbringing in Norway during Nazi occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has issued a call for papers on the topic of ethnographies of infrastructure. The aim is to examine how infrastructure has been studied ethnographically, exploring its visible and invisible elements, material and non-material dimensions, geopolitical and economic implications, and its relationship to other structures. The special issue seeks papers that offer theoretical perspectives and methodological treatments of infrastructure, grounded in empirical case studies or critical reviews of existing ethnographies. The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2024. [Extracted from the article]

The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has issued a call for papers on the topic of ethnographies of infrastructure. This special issue aims to explore how infrastructure has been studied ethnographically, focusing on both visible and invisible elements, as well as their material and non-material dimensions. The goal is to understand the diverse perceptions, practices, and processes related to the planning, building, using, and repairing of infrastructure. The call for papers invites theoretical perspectives and methodological treatments grounded in empirical case studies or critical reviews of existing ethnographies. The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2024. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers the impact of the book People's Law and State Law: the Bellagio Papers, edited by Anthony Allott and Gordon Woodman, published in 1985. It sets out why I consider this publication to be a seminal text in establishing and developing the field of legal pluralism, which had a great impact on both the development of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and on my own development as a young legal scholar. In looking beyond the text, I consider the ways in which scholars have engaged with the book's call for legal and social science to "work from a new map". In doing so I explore a recent arena of scholarship involving international intervention. The article highlights the important contribution that empirical studies can make to research on legal pluralism, by moving beyond the binaries of state and non-state actors, as well as through pursuing how scholars are adopting a more integrated and relational approach to law, one that may involve breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I explore how concepts such as space and time contribute to a multi-dimensional, scalar perception of law at odds with a formalist, state-centred view of legal pluralism. This allows new insights to be generated into the operation of plural legal structures and constellations in which people operate allowing for a view of law that involves multiple networks of relations cutting across international, national and local boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on ideas from the history of the natural sciences—on "personae" and "paper technology"—to explain how the subculture of social anthropology emerged at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. It argues that the figure of the social anthropologist coalesced around a number of practices and symbols that Bronislaw Malinowski had done much to imbue with charisma and that his students attempted to reproduce in their own research. Historians have proposed that part of social anthropology's success lay in its practitioners' ability to foster a fictive individualism in their writing, cultivating an inward attitude of experience founded on acts of the self upon the self. This essay shows that the kind of knowledge produced in Malinowski's seminar was, in fact, a highly sociable, rather than an individualistic, affair. Social anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a mutually constitutive relationship of field and seminar. These were connected spaces, held together in the act of fieldwork—a practice that transcended and linked the geographical distance between the metropole and the periphery in the crucial years of the discipline's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I draw on two childhood ethnographies to ask basic questions about the foundation of child writing. The first question is, where does writing come from in young children's lives? Answering this question will lead us to childhood play as the foundation of writing. The second question is, how do educators negotiate an inclusive, playful classroom culture in racially divisive and neoliberal times? This question will lead to a critical consideration of forming an inclusive culture in a racially and culturally diverse classroom. In this time of uniform, mandated curricula, rampant in the United States and elsewhere, and of the dismissive attitude towards play and towards childhood diversity (e.g., in race, culture and socioeconomic class), it is worth revisiting basic questions about the beginnings of writing in childhoods. The questions are relevant whether a child is writing on paper, screen, slate, or sand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes some results of the author's Ph.D. thesis, an ethnography about Brazilian adults who lived without papers until the moment they sought their birth certificates, which were being offered as a free public service in downtown Rio de Janeiro. In a dialogue with the concept of the 'margins of the state' (Das and Poole in Anthropology in the margins of the state, School of American Research, New Mexico, 2004), the article shows how undocumented people disregard themselves as subjects and analyzes the birth certificate as an institutional rite (Bourdieu in A economia das trocas linguísticas, Edusp, São Paulo, 1996), demonstrating that the search for papers is also for rights and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection: By Jason M. Gibson. The collection in question in Gibson's study is that assembled by linguist and ethnographer T.G.H. ("Ted") Strehlow, now housed at the purpose-built Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. This brings me to the second innovation that Gibson makes in approaching Strehlow's archive: his decision to focus on the work that Strehlow did with the Anmatyerr. [Extracted from the article]

This paper revisits the Tunisian 2010–2011 uprising and its ensuing decade of agrarian contention as a crisis of social reproduction stemming from the combined effects of depletion and dispossession. It traces the lineages of the grievances that continue to animate the Tunisian countryside to the multiple and often enmeshed labours—both productive and reproductive—of peasant and rural women. In underscoring the interconnectedness between these labours and the ebb and flow of various contestations against depletion and dispossession, it recognises social reproduction as a site of deep exploitation as well as an arena of day‐to‐day struggle. Guided by social reproduction theorisations and leveraging a multi‐sited ethnography conducted during July and August 2023, this paper relies on participant observation/observant participation and unstructured interviews conducted with predominately landed and landless peasant women, the testimonies of whom serve as a conduit for an important dialogue between feminist materialist analyses of social reproduction and peasant movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the issue of creation of migrant networks in different contexts along the Eastern Mediterranean route and the Balkans. Drawing on 27 qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it uncovers the information about migration journeys and the ways how social capital is transferred among migrants. The paper sheds light on the role of social networks, their influence on strategies, behaviour patterns and resource allocation during migration. The findings underscore different benefits of using migrant networks, highlighting their role in providing crucial support as well as increasing safety and supporting migrants' well‐being. Moreover, the shared identity forged through these networks enhances migrants' resilience, empowering migrants to navigate challenges more effectively. These empirical findings challenge the narratives of migration being individualistic and contribute to the literature on creation, dynamics, and benefits of networks of irregular transit migration, highlighting the differences from other migrant networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper narrates an induction process about how adolescents and young men are drawn into living and practising a distinctive and often violent cultural form of street masculinity on an inner-city estate in London. The paper sets out to counteract dominant discourses which often portray young black men from working-class and impoverished backgrounds as ‘hypermasculine perpetrators of violence’. Developing the concepts of caring and personalized masculinities shows that, in the right conditions, young men exercise agency to perform different masculinities in different contexts and times, fashion more inclusive identities, and create new trajectories and lifestyles. The ethnographic fieldwork took place over nine months in 2019. It involved around 50 young men who were Black, Asian and minority ethnic. The paper focuses on two particular young men, aged 19 and 22, who appear as exemplars of ways of enacting different patterns of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a historical and ethnological review about the Anioma people of Nigeria. The popular narrative regards the Anioma land as Benin kingdom territory, and generally describes the people as Benin immigrants or refugees in their present locale. This brand of thought has been amplified to the extent that their past is distorted, and they are now experiencing crisis of identity and with time, they will be as little informed about their past. The paper deploys the critical historical analysis method to interrogate the origin of the Anioma clans. It depends on primary source materials which consist of archival and oral testimonies obtained from the field and supplemented with available secondary materials. The paper argues that any workable hypothesis on Anioma identity in the present time must begin with a plausible explanation of the original groups. It shows that the current identity crisis among Anioma people has much to do with the event of the Nigerian civil war. It concludes that although there were external stimuli into Anioma area, such had been absorbed linguistically over time, the innovations they came with reinterpreted completely in the climate of the aboriginal Igbo culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the rise of mobility platforms, this paper explores the practices and politics of mobility arising from the everyday infrastructural functioning of Baemin, the largest food delivery platform in South Korea. While the literature on food delivery platforms centres on changing labour relations, platform workers do not merely represent a new type of labour; they likewise form a critical conduit in the urban logistics system. Platform-mediated food delivery can be therefore conceptualised as a moving assemblage of heterogeneous entities that constitutes an urban infrastructure. Having emerged as an urban mobility regime, food delivery platforms increasingly enact a form of governance, enabling a particular mode of circulation and movements. Engaging with the mobility framework, combined with critical infrastructure scholarship, this paper seeks to uncover the politics of im/mobility involved in the creation of a ceaselessly flowing city envisaged by Baemin. It identifies three forms of mobilities—connected, programmed, and immobilised—produced through contingent interactions between moving bodies, technologies, and the environment, which could amount to tethering effects. Integrating empirical materials from multimethod mobile ethnography in Seoul, it presents on-the-ground accounts of practices, interactions, and sensations gathered around the Baemin-mediated food delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic researchers have long relied upon observation as a powerful means to learn about social relations. This paper discusses research observation that was conducted as a part of an institutional ethnography (IE) investigating how people use the language and ideas of neurodiversity across different settings. While our research protocol initially called for ethnographic observation to take place at in-person events in Southern Ontario, our approach needed to be re-formulated with the switch to online events during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the shift to online-only spaces, a total of 52 sessions at 7 online events related to neurodiversity or autism were observed by a team of 5 researchers: these events were no longer geographically restricted but were officially "hosted" by institutions in Canada, the US, and the UK. This paper reflects upon the challenges and opportunities we encountered as we conducted observations in digital spaces, including our experiences of navigating the "chat" feature. We discuss the need to analyze the format as well as the content of online events, and present findings on how neurodiversity appeared in these social spaces. Finally, we consider the implications of this research for people who are conducting ethnographic observation in an increasingly online world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Alevi movement, originating more than three decades ago in Turkey and the Western European diaspora, has led to significant social and cultural shifts within Alevi communities. This movement witnessed the emergence of Alevi associations, increased religio‐political activities, and a fervent search for a redefined Alevi identity. The quest for a comprehensive understanding of Alevi identity remains a contested debate, prominently reflected within Alevi youth, who navigate complex socio‐cultural landscapes and encounter challenges in defining their identity amidst competing narratives and associations. This paper examines the identity formation strategies of young Alevis in Berlin, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023. Contrary to mainstream portrayals of Alevi youth experiencing a loss of identity, this study argues for the presence of continuity dynamics, emphasising inherited Alevi mindsets and emotions. Through interviews and analysis of a documentary produced by Berlin Alevi youth, the paper explores new narratives about Alevi history, sociology, and theology constructed by young Alevis, highlighting their role in shaping contemporary Alevism in Germany. This research contributes original data and discussions to the existing literature on Alevi youth, shedding light on their evolving identities and the dynamics of Alevi discourse in diasporic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police departments around the world implement algorithmic systems to enhance various policing tasks. Ensuring such innovations take place responsibly – with public values upheld – is essential for public organisations. This paper analyses how public values are safeguarded in the case of MONOcam, an algorithmic camera system designed and used by the Netherlands police. The system employs artificial intelligence to detect whether car drivers are holding a mobile device. MONOcam can be considered a good example of value-sensitive design; many measures were taken to safeguard public values in this algorithmic system. In pursuit of responsible implementation of algorithms, most calls and literature focus on such value-sensitive design. Less attention is paid to what happens beyond design. Building on 120+ hours of ethnographic observations as well as informal conversations and three semi-structured interviews, this research shows that public values deemed safeguarded in design are re-negotiated as the system is implemented and used in practice. These findings led to direct impact, as MONOcam was improved in response. This paper thus highlights that algorithmic system design is often based on an ideal world, but it is in the complexities and fuzzy realities of everyday professional routines and sociomaterial reality that these systems are enacted, and public values are renegotiated in the use of algorithms. While value-sensitive design is important, this paper shows that it offers no guarantees for safeguarding public values in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore the construct of the 'natural' voice within the context of the natural voice movement, before invoking perspectives on voice from the posthumanities and D/deaf studies in discussion of The Walk, a performance between a puppet, a natural voice choir, a refugee choir and a large audience that occurred in London in October 2021. Methodologically, this paper is an attempt at 'thinking with theory' (Jackson, Alecia Youngblood, and Lisa A. Mazzei. 2017. "Thinking with Theory: A New Analytic for Qualitative Inquiry." In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin, and Y. Lincoln, 717–737. Sage) – specifically thinking voice alongside theoretical stimuli from the posthumanities through the doing of ethnography – in the hope of provoking useful flights of thought in relation to the practice and study of music education and community music. I conclude by considering my personal rationale for engaging with the posthumanities as a means of researching community singing within the natural voice movement. A protean version of this article was presented as a paper-presentation at the Grieg Research School in Bergen, Norway in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article further systematizes the existential body, contributing to the ethnographic model of embodied objectivity. It situates embodiment as the foundation of knowledge, demonstrating its underdevelopment in anthropological literature. The paper explores the philosophical relationship between being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty's body-proper, emphasizing the central role of embodied pre-objective signification in representational ethnographic knowing. This aspect is often insufficiently addressed, particularly in light of certain ethnographic applications of the epoché. The paper concludes that, given the oscillatory apprehension of embodiment, the use of terms like "systematizing" and "inter-objectivity" adequately enhances its portrayal as a pre-objective phenomenon rather than an objective one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon the view that walking is a highly social act, i.e. "grounding" oneself in the realities, not just the medium of "moving," this paper explores robot-assisted rehabilitation and patients' aspirations concerning it. Fieldwork conducted in rehabilitation hospitals and disability centers in South Korea, reveals that rehabilitative medicine settles uneasily on the notion of neuroplasticity as a theoretical tool to legitimize robot-assisted therapy sessions, in the absence both of upstream treatment options such as stem cell therapy and their discernible benefits over human-based intervention. The patient's clear preference to walk rather than to move, and hence to regain the whole package of sociality associated with the bodily technique underlies their high expectations toward robots. Under these insights, the paper argues that, for the field to enhance its clinical impact, the current regime focused on mechanical, or neurophysiological, aspects of walking should incorporate elements vitalizing the sociality constitutive of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how gendered spaces are configured within local socio-cultural systems of beliefs and in what way energy interacts with cultural constructions in an Indigenous village of the Brazilian Amazon. Particularly, this paper explores the perceived changes brought by fuel availability and affordability on gendered division of space and local cosmologies. Ethnographic techniques were adopted in the collection of primary data, particularly participant observation and in-depth interviews were best suited to understand the lived experiences of these changes. This paper found that access to cooking gas and fuel for transportation can partially shift pre-existing gendered spaces and, in turn, gendered practices. However, this shift does not challenge pre-existing hierarchies of power which still limit women's freedom of movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents ethnographic work conducted to investigate how notions of culinary capital have the potential to shape the everyday experiences of children during mealtime in school. Children's early experiences with mealtimes and food are critical determinants for eating behaviour over the life course. The paper presents an account of conceptual debates based on longstanding ethnographic work on school food with a particular focus on a case study of Maple Field Academy to frame the research. Research methods used included semi‐structured interviews, fieldnotes and photographs with the aim of capturing a rich picture of the school. This paper introduces Laird's sensory theory to frame the discussion. This research calls for the need to recognise the social good that can be realised from participating in mealtimes and school is a microcosm of society, which means it can function as a driver for social change. The paper calls for more engagement with social theorising on studies which focus on researching food in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional ethnography (IE), a term coined by sociologist Dorothy Smith, explores the nuances of institutions and their complex relationships in sociology. IE is an approach to studying and analysing social organization, and it provides a more holistic understanding of 'invisible' relationships that govern institutions and how those relationships interact with each other. Health sciences researchers in patient care, patient experience, and allied health professionals have recently become more interested in the use of this methodology and how to incorporate it into their research. However, in health professions education (HPE) there is little use of IE. We hypothesize this may be because of limited practical knowledge of this methodology. This paper serves as an introduction to the use of IE in HPE, describing the differences between IE and traditional ethnographies, recognizing the common pitfalls when utilising IE, and incorporating texts into IE. While ethnographies may be daunting to researchers less familiar with these approaches, the tips in this paper will provide an introduction and help educators and researchers successfully navigate the use of IE in health profession scholarship and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many ethics review bureaucracies present signed, written forms administered at a single point in time as the default, best‐practice method for obtaining and documenting consent to participate in research. The demand is emblematic of ethics review committees' insistence on form over function, their failure to understand the cultural contexts of field research, and erroneous assumptions about research methods. Ethnographers responding to an international survey argued that written consent may not protect participants, may mask unethical research, and may often be inappropriate for legal, cultural, political or historical reasons. We suggest the dominance of written consent reflects culturally specific views of paper, writing, signatures, and contracts grounded in particular historical imaginations of the authenticity of the signature and the power of writing and forms. Construed by ethics review institutions as culturally universal, the signed consent form has come to take on the qualities of a fetish. [research ethics, informed consent, signatures, forms, research ethics committees, institutional review boards] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon research in the state of Bihar, India, this article argues that informal access to medicines in Northern India is a core element of the government of healthcare. Informal providers such as unlicensed village doctors and unlicensed drug sellers play a major role in access to medicines in Bihar, in the particular context of the dismantling of public procurement services. Building on recent works in the socio-anthropology of pharmaceuticals, the article shows the importance of taking into account the political economy of drugs in India, in order to understand local problems of access more fully. If informal providers occupy such an important position in the government of healthcare in India, this is partly due to the shaping of healthcare as access to drugs on health markets. Elaborating the argument from interviews with health professionals and patients, the article first shows the situation of public healthcare and public procurement in Bihar; then it presents the role of informal medicine providers; lastly, it shows how patients deal with the fact that they live in a ‘pharmaceutical world’ where access to health equates with access to medicines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the past few years, pandemics like HIV/AIDS, influenza, and SARS-CoV-2 have become common worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out recently, profoundly impacted the world. As part of containing this pandemic, lockdowns which put a moratorium on human mobility and associational life became a dominant measure. Yet these mobilities and associational life are the lifeblood of migrants and diaspora belonging. This paper examines the impacts of bans on associational life on migrants and, further, what migrants did to continue living in the absence of these associations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is based on a case study of Lydiate informal settlement in Zimbabwe, where Malawian migrants have established an ethnic enclave to shield themselves from the precarity and injustices of foreign lands. Through convivial and digital ethnographic fieldwork, the paper revealed that bans on associational life disrupted community engagements and binding religious associational life, increased targeted violence and "othering," and perpetuated stigma and discrimination and loss of ties with family and fictive kin. However, migrants restructured their associational life by adopting agile and new forms of belonging to get by, including relocating religious shrines to more secretive places or conducting religious ceremonies in the dark, drinking beer within the perimeter of the settlement, using of WhatsApp and instant messaging and WhatsApp groups for important community updates, and collective resistance. I termed these strategies "nimble forms of sociality and belonging," meaning there are lithe mechanisms that migrants employ to further their sociality even when they are restricted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following my original paper on the history of the concept of the chaîne opératoire, Audouze and some colleagues responded by accusing me of being biased and defamatory in my exposé. In my response here I offer further evidence in support of my argument and, most importantly, suggest that the concept of the chaîne opératoire (1) is not the creation of a single man – André Leroi-Gourhan – but should be considered as the product of a time and a state of mind shared by many researchers; and (2) was introduced to prehistory (and lithic studies) by Jacques Tixier and Daniel Cahen in the late 1970s, independently of the complex filiation from ethnology to prehistory on the side of Leroi-Gourhan's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines newly minted estimation procedures and techniques to tackle these challenges for the case of massive data samples. i Editors' Choice Paper Volume 23(1) The B I JGS i b B Editors' Choice b of articles represent papers that the editors see as providing an especially significant contribution to the field. With the first issue of 2021, it is our pleasure to announce two novel initiatives to acknowledge and celebrate the outstanding quality of research published in the journal: first, the new annual B I JGS i b B Best Paper Award b , and second, the B Editors' Choice b of their favorite paper of each issue. [Extracted from the article]

Qualitative research methods are increasingly used in nutrition and dietetics research. Ethnography is an underexploited approach which seeks to explore the diversity of people and cultures in a given setting, providing a better understanding of the influences that determine their choices and behaviours. It is argued that traditional ethnography, that is, the methodology of living within participant communities, is a dated practice, with roots in colonialism, accessible to only researchers with the means, connections and status to conduct such research, typically white, privileged males. This paper proposes a formal interpretation of 'patchwork ethnography', whereby research is carried out in situ around existing modern‐day commitments of the researcher, thus enabling more researchers within health, nutrition and dietetic practice to benefit from the rich data that can be discovered from communities. This review proposes the concept that pragmatic patchwork ethnography is required, proposing a framework for implementation, providing researchers, particularly within the fields of human nutrition, dietetics and health, the accessibility and means to deploy a meaningful client‐centric methodology. We present pragmatic patchwork ethnography as a modern method for use within multiple healthcare settings, thus adding a progressive brick in the wall of qualitative research. Key points: Ethnography in health research allows professionals to gather rich qualitative data such as lived experiences of participants.However, undertaking traditional ethnography can be demanding, costly and time‐consuming, consequently rendering it inaccessible and challenging to undertake.Pragmatic patchwork ethnography is underpinned by guiding principles of traditional ethnography, enabling researchers to weave the method into existing life and health practice commitments.This paper sets out the seven steps required to deploy pragmatic patchwork ethnography enabling and empowering public health, nutrition and dietetic researchers to undertake valuable qualitative research in a contemporary research landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper draws on conceptions of culinary capital and socialisation to explore children's experiences of mealtime in one academy school. In this paper, the author argues how 'healthy eating' interventions have led to the neglect of the social significance of dining together. The paper highlights how children's culinary capital is reproduced in schools, whilst recognising the rising tensions between how eating spaces designed for children become consumed by adults. The findings from the study outline the growing power relationships in relation to school food spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decades, Nigerian migrant women in the European sex market, described as victims of trafficking, have generated consistent concern and outrage. This article analyzes data from an ethnographic study of more than 800 Nigerian sex workers in southern Spain, describing the networks used by these women to carry out their migration projects and the relationships they establish with their agents. Thus, it contributes to refuting the hegemonic narrative about trafficking and its victims by contrasting it with data collected and systematized over almost a decade of participant observation and informal conversation. This paper argues that the stereotypical image of the Nigerian migrant women as victims of abuse and violence by transnational trafficking networks functions to justify strict migration-control policies and the denial of labor rights to sex workers. As an antidote to the dominance of narratives based on stereotypes and pseudoscientific claims, this paper underscores the urgent need for ethnographic research and its focus on emic (participant) perspectives. The goal is to develop tailored and effective policies and practices for the prevention of and intervention in migrant women's experience of exploitation, abuse, and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the theme of collaboration through the prism of game design, and especially the example of serious games. At its heart, this is a consideration of two collaborative projects between experts. The first is a current collaboration between computer scientists, game designers, and a theatre company in Scotland, in which the author is also a collaborator and the project's ethnographer. The second is perhaps the largest and most high-profile collaborative project recently led and documented by anthropologists, Meridian 180, which aims to experiment with the norms of collaboration itself, and which has already been theorised and extensively reflected upon by one of its founders, Annelise Riles. The paper aims to put these two collaborations into some kind of conversation in order to throw each into productive relief and to ask some new questions about how we think about both the exercise of collaboration and the deliberate subversion of its norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While methodologies on fieldwork are widely discussed in geography, this paper illuminates the challenges of emotional labor that are associated with ethnographic fieldwork. For many geographers, fieldwork is an exciting and crucial part of their job, but for some, especially junior faculty and graduate students, there are many undiscussed and unanticipated difficulties associated with this work. We focus on three challenges that in particular require emotional labor: always being on alert, attachment to places, and the relationships to research participants. Building on personal stories from their research in US cities, both authors reveal the hardships and realities of ethnographic fieldwork. Yet, in order to open up more critical dialogue and honest conversations about the emotional toll of research, this paper demands an institutionalization of support services, particularly for Early Career Researchers (ECRs), so fieldwork can continue to be a crucial and rewarding part of our discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on geographies of masculinities by examining how young men's (aged 12–18) performances of masculinity through humour was mutually constitutive of and constituted by the spaces of the Fusion and Retro youth cafés in the city and suburbs of Cork in the south of Ireland. Research on open access youth provision such as youth clubs, centres and youth cafés have found that they can afford young people the opportunity to 'be themselves', reflecting the ideals of safety and inclusivity that are meant to be sustained in these spaces. Using ethnographic observations, this paper shows that such ideals are never a given as the inequality embedded in gendered performances mean the spaces must be continually (re)produced as inclusive. It contributes to an understanding of youth cafés as micropolitical spaces of becoming that shape and are shaped by negotiations over meanings of gender and masculinity in particular. Furthermore, it advances two new concepts - 'humorous improprieties' and 'humour bombing' - to the performative geographies literature, highlighting two nuanced ways in which young men construct themselves as men in relation to space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co‐present. The sudden shift towards remote hearings in fieldwork conducted during the COVID‐19 pandemic presented an opportunity to compare in‐person and remote ethnographic methods. Through a case study of bail hearings in the immigration tribunal in the UK, this paper explores the value and challenges associated with conducting remote ethnographies and asks how they can help to shed light on the impact of absences in legal events. Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co‐present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding young people's lives through a focus on their micro‐geographies has been central for exercising young people's voices through research. However, such a focus has also neglected the multiple and complex realities of growing up that ripple throughout their lives, resulting in calls for more research to go beyond capturing daily snapshots of experience. This paper acknowledges that decades of research with and for young people living on city streets has underpinned activism and challenged western child rights discourse, helping to ensure that abuses and violations of street young people's rights are confronted. Yet, much of this research draws attention to lives lived in present moments – the difficulties encountered and capabilities displayed. It does not account for the temporal fluidity of how young people's realities are future impacted by slow crises and challenging daily life experiences as they grow towards adulthood. This paper explores the crisis temporalities of young people's street lives through a youth‐led ethnographic longitudinal approach. The paper focuses on 18 youth researchers and over 200 of their peers' experiences of research over three years while living on the streets of three African cities. The paper discusses the challenges of undertaking longitudinal research alongside the temporal affordances of surviving urban informality and the compounding effects of slow crises on present and future‐oriented survival. These affordances emerge as street youth respond to daily trials, experience setbacks, crises, triumphs, and failures, yet show resilience and employ capabilities. The paper concludes by demonstrating the crucial importance of ethnographic longitudinal research for policy and practice to ensure that youth who age on the streets, and their families, are supported in accordance with social justice concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue offers a substantial contribution to the field, outlining how materiality and embodiment offer insights into science learning with respect to argumentation, use of diagrams and gestures to understand abstract concepts, the role of materiality in digital learning and the importance of material and embodied interactions in investigations, plurilingual settings and in the positioning and identities of learners of science. This paper responds to the special issue by outlining a distinctive theoretical framework for understanding materiality and embodiment in science education: a conceptualisation of material-dialogic space. Contrasting this framework with the multimodal, social semiotic and narrative ethnographic frames used in the studies in this special issue, this paper argues that by examining materiality as voices within a material-dialogic space, new insights into dialogic learning and 'becoming' in science are possible. In this paper, I discuss the papers in this special issue using the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space, grouped according to three areas of interest in science education: methods of analysing materiality, meaning-making in science through 'doing' and 'thinking' science, and science identities. A means by which material-dialogic space might be examined empirically is proposed, and how this enables an approach to think about thinking and doing science that focuses on the relationality of materials, bodies and language in science meaning-making is explored. The notion of becoming, changing and being changed through participation in a material-dialogic relational space is proposed as an approach to thinking about 'being' in science and science identities. The role of material-dialogic space with respect to spaces of science learning is raised as a key question. This paper highlights the lively open questions in the field of materiality and embodiment in science education, whilst offering the concept of material-dialogic space as an important avenue for studying these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, a spectral turn has animated geography and related fields like archaeology, memory studies, and landscape studies, examining how places can be haunted by the ghosts of the past, with heavy emphasis on metaphorical specters and spirits. The geography of spirits and other unseen forces presented here takes a less metaphorical approach to haunted landscapes. This paper examines how spirits have traditionally dwelt within everyday places and objects like trees and stones in Palestine, and how people have sought to cohabitate with or settle such spirits. Attending to the physical geography of the spirit world can shed light on how spaces become sacred through belief and practice, and how sacred spaces are continuously remade within changing social, cultural, and political contexts. Drawing together historical observations by European and Palestinian ethnographers and interweaving the voices of Palestinian elders in the form of recorded oral history testimonies, this paper examines the typologies and environments of spirits and jinn in Palestine, with particular attention to water demons and haunted trees. The paper reflects on how these unseen forces play a role in establishing moral, gendered, and sacred boundaries, while at the same time blurring boundaries between popular religion and religious orthodoxy. • Examines haunted places in historical ethnographic writing and oral histories. • Jinn are closely tied to physical geography, including trees, caves, and springs. • Jinn play a role in establishing and maintaining geographic and moral boundaries. • Belief in spirits dwelling in physical landscapes is deeply rooted in Palestine. • Belief in jinn and spirit dwelling are folk traditions shared across religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of how domesticity is enacted and adapted at homeless shelters for determining which clients are “service worthy .” The study draws on nineteen placement meetings with homeless men and focuses on institutional mechanisms for encouraging homemaking skills or domesticity among clients. Adapting Robert K. Merton's typology of adaptations to social norms, as well as Jaber Gubrium's “task‐designated identity,” we showcase male clients' self‐presentation strategies for adapting to the institutional mandates of domesticity. Specifically, our qualitative analysis reveals four modes of task adaption: (1) task conformity by professing the desired norms in their service encounters, (2) task evasion to avoid conversations and related tasks, (3) task transformation by linking the task at hand with something other than originally intended, particularly by reframing biographies to meet the local goals of domesticity, and (4) task protestation, which involves questioning the rationale and necessity of assigned tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers' reflexivity usually focuses on the spatiality and sociality of their ethnographic fieldwork. As a result, the temporal context of their positionality, whereby their various identities interact with one another at different research phases, is often overlooked. This paper adopts an agentic intersectional approach and draws from our separate studies of Thai migrant women in Belgium and Hong Kong to unpack the temporality of the power dynamics between study participants and us (the researchers). Through this reflexive exercise, we identify three salient aspects: first, different identities of the researchers intersect at each phase of the study; second, researchers are dependent on gatekeepers and study participants, notably during the data-gathering phase; and third, the changing researcher–participant dynamics throughout the research process are embedded in broader relations of power that encompass social institutions and migrant/ethnic networks. Hence, researchers' self-discipline and constant awareness of positionality are of utmost importance for achieving well-situated knowledge (re)production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015, when the so‐called migrant crisis exploded in Italy, Rome has become a transit crossroads for a huge number of people who arrived in Europe through the Mediterranean route (Lendaro et al. 2019). This phenomenon determined the development of a heterogeneous network of solidarity supporting migrants in transit (Giliberti & Potot 2021). Over the years, following the transformations of Italian and European policies for the management of migration processes, the solidarity networks have begun to meet other subjects in addition to migrants in transit: 'orbiters' around the city, awaiting access to international protection or recently expelled from the Italian reception system, forced to live in a state of stasis that allows them to be defined as 'lifelong in‐betweener' subjects and representing the concept of 'turbulence migration' (Papastergiadis 2000). This article focuses on the transformation of the solidarity practices and on the new mobility strategies acted by migrants, both linked with the social/juridical features of those we defined 'orbiters'. From a methodological point of view, this paper is based on different moments of ethnographic observation in some key sites for solidarity to migrants in Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neighbourhood of Abasto has been home to many Peruvian immigrants since the 1990s. Now, this population is suffering the effects of a notable increase in real estate value intensely. This work analyses the specific mechanisms that provoke a differentiated exposure of Peruvian neighbours to gentrification, as well as the differentiated responses of migrants to the housing crisis. This paper is an ethnographic account about the strategies developed by Peruvian families in the context of gentrification. For this purpose, an abundance of material collected through observation, in‐depth interviews and a rigorous review of bibliographic and documentary material is provided. The results demonstrate how the condition of migrant as in‐betweeners represents an overexposure to the effects of the housing crisis for this population. In this context, there is also an unequivocal tendency for migrants to develop autonomous strategies against gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matters of sound and listening are increasingly being attended to across the social sciences and humanities, reflecting what has been termed a 'sonic turn' since the early 2000s. In urban ethnographic research, scholars are starting to pay attention to the role of sound in social relations, in expressions of identity and senses of belonging, as well as in processes of othering. In this paper, we explore the theoretical and methodological opportunities of sonic urban ethnography, that is, an urban ethnography that foregrounds sound and listening in theoretical and methodological ways. We argue that the promise of sonic urban ethnography lies in its ability to interrupt the predominant focus on text and the visual by developing expanded practices of listening for alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the urban. We share four empirical vignettes from Shanghai, Berlin and London that illustrate, in their different ways, the power exercised through sound in the urban environment. Our discussion of the empirical cases highlights three key 'lessons' for doing sonic urban ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years Incel1 has become a regularly cited example of extreme contemporary misogyny and antifeminism. This paper develops existing understandings of the phenomenon and contextualises Incel as in important ways the product of a painful embrace of neoliberal ideas about market outcomes and social value, expressed through the practices and rhetoric associated with gender relations in this era, with an emphasis on its gendered metapolitical constitution and vision. This is achieved in two steps. Based on a close thematic analysis of textual data collected from the main hub of Incel discourse, other Incel texts, and elements of digital ethnography, I first draw attention to the Incel worldview's interpretation of the neoliberal era as uniformly pro-feminist and note how in doing so collapses the distinction between women, feminists, and elite power. Second, I highlight how this interpretation informs the self-ascription of transgressive and emancipatory qualities, which serve as additional animating logics in Incel hatred of feminism, feminists, and women. I conclude by suggesting that this approach allows for a more productive understanding of the Incel phenomenon and the role of antifeminism and misogyny within it, which includes complicating Incel's purported parallels with the far-right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on migrant youth's school transitions has focused on the country of residence, ignoring migrant youth's pre-migration lives in the country of origin. Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between Ghana and Germany, this paper instead analyses school transitions through migrant youth's mobility trajectories, encompassing all geographic moves and concurrent family constellations over time and space, both before and after migration. A mobility lens shows how resources gained in the country of origin – including confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability – help migrant youth navigate their school transitions in the country of residence, thus becoming forms of transnational cultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rituals are central to the everyday life of the nurse, yet the fundamental roles that rituals play in caring for the dead and dying has often been neglected. This paper explores modern palliative and post-mortem care – its practices, practitioners and arenas – against the background of long-held, global concerns regarding the dead and dying. Comparison with the archaeological and ethnographic records demonstrates the ubiquitous and enduring practices surrounding death, and the centrality of ritual specialists to this complex social and biological process. This deep-time perspective highlights the importance of nurses, and their associated nursing rituals, in the transition of patients between life and death, and the difficult journeys that nurse, patient and family undertake in this mediation between worlds. Such a perspective not only empowers nurses in their daily practices, and places nursing rituals firmly at the centre of modern palliative care work, but demonstrates the value of archaeology and ethnography in contextualising the challenges of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on a biographical approach that reconstructs the life and work of Johannes [Hovhanness/Յովհաննէս] Jakob [Hagop/Յակոբ] Manissadjian [Manisacıyan/Մանիսաճեան] (1862–1942), a highly successful scientist at the Anatolia College (Merzifon/Marsovan/Մարզվան), who established a meteorological station and a natural history museum with an extensive collection of specimens, the paper traces the routes of disappearance, dispersal and ruination of indigenous lives, people, and knowledge within the context of the Armenian genocide. Drawing on documents from Ottoman, German, and American archives, I stress the potential of biographical methods to study the processes and structures of mass violence targeting the Ottoman Armenians, as well as to foreground the agency and subjectivity of genocide survivors. The article also focuses on post-genocide scientific (dis)engagements of Manissadjian in light of Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘after Auschwitz’ discussions and from the perspective of indigenous knowledge production. In particular, his two ‘archival acts’ in the post-genocide context, the ‘Catalogue’ of the collection of the Anatolia College Museum that he prepared as ‘the former Curator’ and his small pamphlet entitled Proverbs of Turkey, which provided an ethnographic portrait of Anatolia, were his humble acts of saving a treasure trove of knowledge that was in danger of becoming debris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWithin urban sociology, the unpredictability of poor, urbanized space explains why black youth are “present oriented” and why they treat orientations to the future as futile. But where urban sociology suspends black youth in time and space, this research aims to de-arrest them from the “ethnographic present.” Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with thirty youth, I make the case that within “present orientations” there is prescience. This paper is based on over one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way – a center for youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With limited life chances and limited chances at life, youth at Run-a-Way saw the future as fugitive. Instead of being a paralyzing force keeping youth suspended in time, present orientations were marked by the production of nowness, in light of a prescient vision of what is to come. Because black youth chose not to entertain liberal futurities directed towards “rights” and “freedoms” associated with a post-raciality did not make them present oriented. It made them prepared. As prescience comes to serve as a more accurate signifier of black youth’s relation to the future, we come to see why the “ethnographic present” and the interpellation of blackness through abjection are both unsustainable and obsolete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been archaeological and ethnographic reports of artificially modified crania from all continents. Archaeological excavations at the late fifth millennium BCE cemetery of Tol‐e Chega Sofla, located southwest of the Iranian plateau, also revealed these crania. This paper uses the morphometric approach to study Tol‐e Chega Sofla's modified crania. The outlines of normal and modified crania of Chega Sofla and Khuzestan residents' specimens were considered. How accurate is the morphometric approach in identifying and recognizing Chega Sofla's modified skulls from normal ones? Can it recognize small variations in the skull's morphology, such as the flattening of the squamous part of the occipital bone? The results of this method can be compared with descriptive studies. Finally, it is shown that the morphometric approach based on Elliptic Fourier Analysis can identify the deformed skull of Chega Sofla and its intensity, as well as the flattening of the squamous part of the occipital bone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]