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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]

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]

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]

Paper Kinship: Law, Power and Resistance in an Ethnographic Scene with Foreign Migrants starts from an "ethnographic scene" with foreign migrants in a lawyer's office to discuss the role that migratory documents play on kinship in the transnational movement. By doing this, it highlights how the state and the Law discipline these relations and how migrants themselves, using the legal logic of documentary production, elaborate themselves as persons, in resistance to state power. Based on this experience, named here as paper kinship, a reelaboration of the concept of document is proposed, encompassing both the bureaucratic agency and that of the subjects of documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 short paper introduces a special section exploring how human geographers use research notebooks. It outlines why a fuller exchange about how exactly we do ethnographic note‐taking in human geography is worthwhile, and describes a series of conference sessions in which a group of human geographers took the relatively bold step of showing each other examples of what could be found inside their notebooks. It also provides an overview of how the papers in the special section might help us all to consider the variety of options available to us when we choose to work in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global knowledge production and dissemination through academic publishing plays a critical role in achieving epistemic inclusion for peripheral scholars. This paper reports on an autoethnographic study of the 15 years of academic publishing efforts by the first author, Jiaqi Liu (JL). We used the theoretical lens of epistemic agency to explore how JL navigates the challenges posed by the structural constraints of academic publishing. We adopted the framework of “researching multilingually” (RM‐ly) as an analytical framework to examine the specifics of how JL exercises her epistemic agency. The findings indicate that linguistic injustice was associated with epistemic exclusion, but JL developed her epistemic agency by drawing on the intentionality, spatiality, and relationality dimensions of RM‐ly practices. She took responsibility for the advancement of her own knowledge, and generated new insights and practices in order to enhance her epistemic participation between English‐, Japanese‐, and Chinese‐mediated research worlds. The paper suggests that instead of perceiving epistemic exclusion as an insurmountable difficulty, peripheral multilingual scholars can foster epistemic agency through the alternative approach of RM‐ly and engage in multi‐directional knowledge production and dissemination. [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]

Heritage is defined and maintained through complex and changing processes. In what ways might heritage scholars and practitioners understand dynamic complexities theoretically, methodologically and ethically? Through reflections on involvement in environmental and cultural heritage initiatives with Maya communities in southern Belize, this paper argues for an explicit forefronting of community aims and goals in heritage-focused project design and implementation. It demonstrates how cultural anthropologists involved in collaborative projects with archaeologists, non-governmental and/or community organisations may use ethnographic approaches to push collectively towards decolonial, community archaeologies. The challenges of ethnographers and archaeologists working together to document heritage past and present are critically and reflexively analysed, using frameworks rooted in environmental anthropology to capture the fluid and negotiated nature of heritage constructions by exploring what it means to live a 'good life' in Maya communities in Belize. The insights generated for developing a decolonising approach for future work of this type are also considered. By challenging what constitutes project 'success', and discussing the questions simultaneously posed and revealed by the long-term community projects detailed here, the paper argues for a more collaborative, nuanced and fluid conceptualisation of what constitutes heritage, and who is served by its documentation and dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological studies of early weaponry have relied for decades on ethnographic parallels—whether from ethnohistorical accounts, ethnographic literature, or from objects studied in museum collections. While such accounts and collected objects provided key data in the past, including of morphometrics and functionality, few studies have explored the quality of such data. In this paper, we critically assess a dominant theoretical paradigm, namely the utility of ethnographic collections to assess Pleistocene archaeological material. Our focus is how ethnographic spear morphometrics are used to propose delivery methods of archaeological weapons. We discuss the archaeological significance of early spears, and the role that ethnography has played in interpreting them. We provide new morphometric data of ethnographic wooden spears, which have been used analogically to assess the earliest archaeological hunting tools. We systematically collected data from ethnographic collections of wooden spears in five museums in the UK and Australia including mass, length, diameters and point of balance, alongside any recorded information on provenance and use. Older datasets, as well as the data in this paper, are limited due to collection bias and a lack of detailed museum records. By subjecting the new data to statistical analyses, we find that with a few exceptions morphometrics are not reliable predictors of delivery as thrusting or hand-thrown spears (javelins). Prevalent hypotheses linking variables such as mass, tip design, or maximum diameter with delivery are unsupported by our results. However, the descriptive statistics provided may remain useful as a means of comparative data for archaeological material. We conclude that using simple morphometrics to parse weapon delivery has had a drag effect on forming new and interesting hypotheses about early weapons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a qualitative research project examining the dating narratives of single migrant men residing in Sweden and Italy. The study, analyzing 48 interviews with individuals from Syrian, Polish, Bangladeshi and Romanian backgrounds, along with ethnographic observations, employs a theoretical framework rooted in sexual capital theory and critical studies on men and masculinities. The analysis sheds light on the challenges faced by heterosexual single migrant men in their pursuit of intimate partners, attributing these difficulties to lower levels of social, economic and cultural capital, as well as the influence of their specific masculinities, which may be perceived as less attractive within the host societies. The paper argues that the migrant experience can be viewed as a distinctive sexual field wherein individuals encounter unique dynamics and obstacles in the realm of intimate relationships. The implications of these findings extend beyond the personal experiences of migrant men, offering insights into the broader socio-cultural landscape of host societies and the complex interplay between migration, masculinity and intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

AbstractThis paper traces how the meaning of symptoms and the positioning of selves are entangled and discursively constructed in therapeutic conversations between parents and therapists at a pain clinic for children and young people (age 8 to 18) with recurrent or chronic pain or other somatic symptoms with no established biophysical pathology. Based on data material from an ethnographic fieldwork it is examined how the selves of respectively children/young people and their parents are discursively positioned in conversational encounters and the role positioning of selves play in the context of establishing and negotiating the symptoms’ meaning. The bearer of medically unexplained symptoms is oftentimes subjected to moral assessments. In this paper it will be shown that parents, in the institutional setting of the pain clinic, enter the negotiation of moral assessments assigned to their children, and that these moral assessments not only concern the sufferers’ selves but also the selves of the parents. The overall argument is that dialogues between parents and therapists concerning the meaning and source of their children’s symptoms are simultaneously negotiations in which not only the sufferers’  but also their parents’ moral positions are at stake. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Talking about sexuality in a health care total institution is not an easy task insofar as it contributes to the disclosing of the subjective and cultural postures of professionals, in contexts still marked by the absence or lack of professional training on this subject. Talking about sexuality can also endanger or challenge the institution. This paper presents a secondary analysis of what is presented as a form of "clinical ethnography". The materials used in this study were collected in 1996–1997, in the context of a crisis situation caused by the revelation of illicit sexual relations between a head special educator and a young woman labelled as mentally handicapped, in a care institution. In the course of a psychosociological intervention carried out in response to a request from the management of the institution, professionals from different categories were able to express themselves on these "events" and to address, more generally, issues related to sexuality in the institution. The sessions, moderated by the author of the study and a psychoanalytic research assistant, were recorded and transcribed for subsequent feedback to participants. The thematic content analysis of the transcripts of the sessions allowed for a better understanding of the psychosocial obstacles to communication about sexuality, the subjective difficulties related to speaking out, the phenomena of denial of sexuality, as well as the representations of sexuality in institutional situations. The documents discussed here invite reflection on the complexity of collecting information and stories about sexuality in institutional settings. They explore communication processes and, in particular, the difficulties of communicating about sexuality and sexual abuse in institutions in the health and social sector. This study suggests ways in which clinical support can be provided to teams affected by and confronted with traumatic events and the personal and professional difficulties that may arise from such situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley in western India displaced more than 30,000 families, mostly from Indigenous communities. Many of those displaced were resettled in regions that had a starkly different ecological and social composition from the mountainous areas they were forced to leave. In this paper we draw on the anthropology of landscape, linguistic anthropology, and ethnophysiography to chart the transformation of referential landscape terminology in the indigenous Bhili language as a result of displacement and subsequent resettlement. We focus on semantic domains covering ecological features such as soil, rivers, and forests, as well as the use of land for functional purposes. In doing so, we demonstrate how bridging conceptual and perceptual ethnographic approaches to landscape provides a more holistic view of displacement that encompasses both the memories of the places left behind as well as the unfolding process of resettlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an edited version of a conversation between Silvia Gherardi and Lynne Baxter at the Inaugural Distinguished Speaker Event of the Gender, Materialities, and Activism Network. We learn about the development of Professor Gherardi's interest in feminism, how it evolves and informs her wider work on organization studies and methodology, and how she supports community development while advancing her own work. Moreover, there is a perceptive reflection from Professor Gherardi uncovering what the article, as written text, loses compared to the multisensory verbal encounter taking place in virtual space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While methodologies are often presented as standardised procedures which, under specified conditions, should lead to the same conclusions, this case study presents the complex and deeply personal process of research (Addey and Piattoeva 2022). We analyse our application of network ethnography – an approach presented by Ball (2016) – to the study of contractors developing international large-scale assessments, exploring how we, as scholars, become with our methodology and navigate the 'messiness' of research (Law 2004). Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand the constitutive role of methodology and performativity of knowledge-making (Law and Singleton 2013, Rimpiläinen 2015), we show how methodological decisions construct what is studied and ourselves. Finally, we discuss challenges of visual representation, applying Galloway's (2011) 'conversion rules' to examine what was unrepresented – or unrepresentable. This paper shows the complex, subjective, and provisional nature of knowledge, theorising 'heterogeneity and variation' (Law 2004) as an inherent part of methodological application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the processes of educational ethnography and questions the traditional use of the field notebook and research relationships. It forms part of an ongoing collaborative study analyzing university students' learning trajectories. Guided by inclusive ethics, the study proposes that researcher–participant collaboration is fundamental in defying traditional research methodologies. Post-qualitative inquiry enables an inclusive ethics perspective by providing a critical view of the usual ways of conducting research. The paper presents three cases of collaborators taking a field notebook and self-observing their learning. Participant agency facilitates our immersion in different worlds and produces new, non-standardized perceptions that enable the transformation of educational ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of assemblage, drawing on the posthuman theorisations of Deleuze and Guattari, delineates a dynamic and new materialist approach to an event. In this approach, desires, material agency and (de)(re)territorialisation emerge as key concepts, and open ways to understand the school classroom in early childhood as a territory where lines of flight challenge the boundaries of normative education. This paper focuses on a classroom assemblage and aims to cartography the material relations between human and non-human bodies, where (de)(re)territorialisation forces are constant. We draw on diffractive ethnography in order to think-with-theory, making use of a vignette and a diagram containing its material relations. Our analysis highlights the agentic relations of matter in the assemblage, the role of desire as a dynamic force and the ever-changing flow of (de)(re)territorialisations that emerge in it. This study shows the complexity of material experience in early childhood, where desire and deterritorialisation frame creative and unexpected processes that defy the idea of education and classroom activities as linear processes controlled by adults. On the contrary, the cartography depicted in this research supports an idea of education as a space for the emergence of creative lines of flight, material relations and non-linear meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Play is a highly valued pedagogy in early learning settings around the world. Supporters of play have emphasised the benefits of this approach in promoting children's development and learning and their alleged freedom to choose, explore, and follow their interests. Feminist research, however, has shown that play contexts can be key sites that perpetuate gender inequalities. Building on this scholarship, I apply a critical feminist lens to examine the gendered effects of a recent shift in a Canadian province towards full-day play-based learning in kindergarten. Analysis of ethnographic data collected in two classrooms reveals that not all children may benefit from play-based learning. Instead, the findings show that the play settings in this study implicitly propagated patriarchal values that upheld hierarchal gender divisions and legitimized sexist practices among children in play. Specifically, in this paper I examine the subordination of girls through role allocations in the big blocks center. Given these findings, I discuss the need for critical gender literacy and transformative action among early education stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying situation involving a problematically aggressive 'bully' targeting a less powerful 'victim', it is part of a more complex figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, Italy has been at the forefront of mass migration flows. Starting from the late 1990s, facilities for the detention and expulsion of undocumented migrants have been established. In this paper, we analyse one of the earliest examples of such structures in the Mediterranean: the former temporary holding facility (or C.P.T. Centro di Permanenza Temporanea) ‘Regina Pacis’ located in south-eastern Italy. In 1997, the structure was repurposed into one of the largest C.P.T in Italy until its closure in 2005. Through an approach that combines archaeology and ethnography, we aim to understand the role that material culture played in subjugating and controlling the life of the migrants, attempting to evaluate, at the same time, the impact that the facility had on its hosting community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we make sense of our place in the field as researchers and as sexual, spiritual beings? Ethnographic fieldwork is central to several disciplines, including geography. It involves the researcher encountering and gathering stories and meanings through interaction with people's lived experiences in settings that are often not the researcher's own. Although rarely strain‐free, fieldwork is seen as a transformative experience, both from the personal and the academic point of view. This paper, situated at the intersection of geography, queer/ing practices, and ethnographic methodology, explores poetry as a form of self‐care in the field. In recent years, poetry has emerged as a creative and productive mode of representation and (co‐)interpretation of qualitative data. Based on my own spiritual experience(s) while conducting fieldwork in Spain, I consider prayer cards as a poetic form and a means through which issues of self‐care and spiritual self‐preservation are made visible, particularly when experienced within a social environment that is hostile to LGBTQ+ lived experiences of faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2015, Lebanon introduced a visa regime for Syrians, provoking havoc and panic among those already displaced in the country as a result of the war in Syria. This paper examines Syrians’ affective reactions in order to retrace how displacement as an imposed legal-political category also becomes an existential condition. By drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with Syrians in Lebanon, I capture the transformations in the transition from emergency to protracted displacement. The beginning of the “refugee crisis” saw Syrians struggling with socioeconomic hardships while their illegality was usually ignored. This configuration permitted the emergence of a presentist mode of being which nevertheless collapsed in the wake of the new visa regime. The elusiveness and illegibility of the new regulations made illegality and deportability real, tangible risks. This produced a sense of spatial–temporal entrapment in which the future colluded with the present and in which illegality became a status not only denying the entitlement to rights but also negating a claim to existence. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]