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This paper questions the hyper fixation on papers in producing citizens or proving citizenship, arguing that not papers but the agglomeration of legal, bureaucratic and social processes produce citizenship in Assam’s Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs). Based on ethnographic fieldwork with members (presiding over cases), lawyers, border police officials and victims of citizenship examination processes, this paper shows that citizenship cannot be easily proved or disproved based on the possession or absence of papers, as the ‘truth’ about one’s citizenship is produced equally outside these courts. One’s citizenship status inside the court depends on a series of procedural, documentary and certificatory correlations accompanied by social performances (testimonies from family and community members). This is contingent on the truth produced outside through the suspicion of being a ‘foreigner’, easily cast in terms of one’s physical appearance, social class, religion and language. Community structures outside courts also enable certain groups to be documented easily, aiding the production of the legal truth required inside for establishing citizenship status. Therefore, the way suspicion is informed and legal technicalities are deployed to generate information and knowledge along with the role of family and community social networks all contribute towards establishing one as a citizen or a ‘foreigner’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

This paper analyses the practices of (im)mobilities and the accompanying emotions to question the exceptionalisation of crisis and migratory categorisations. Focusing on Kel Tamasheq (aka Tuareg) mobile livelihoods and their fluid interconnections with kinship networks and emotions across time, it argues that the multidimensionality of causes behind a migratory project, and the importance of historically contextualising the relation between a crisis, here the 'Malian crisis', and regional patterns of (im)mobilities, reveal the arbitrariness of making crisis exceptional and migratory categories uniquely discreet. This paper is based on a 10-month ethnography among Kel Tamasheq in Bamako. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research that examined teacher talk about moderation of English, mathematics and science assessment across Years 4, 6 and 8 as part of a broader inquiry into the use of scaled exemplars to support consistency of teacher judgement. The paper draws on Dorothy E Smith's sociological work, including the process of mapping textual connections to research everyday practices. We illustrate how moderation activities were shaped by systemic policy and related documents. We further illustrate how teachers used artefacts that they were created as part of the research project to leverage the value of moderation discussions. In the project, teachers generated artefacts that were written commentaries or texts explicating their judgement decisions (cognitive commentaries). Our analysis demonstrates how teachers then took these cognitive commentaries and independently embedded them into their everyday work. Teachers described how they used the artefacts in their moderation discussions as a means of improving their own practice, as well as their students' learning. We argue that when teachers are provided with the time and space to share their assessment and pedagogic knowledge and practice with school colleagues, including via cognitive commentaries, they are able to expand their field of professional impact and build their professional knowledge and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using grief as a node of beginning, this paper considers how all qualitative writing is an intra-action through which the process of engaging with one's memory, remembering, and collective memory co-constitutes subjectivities and agency within and across the writing process. Therefore, this paper argues that through writing qualitatively, both the author, as well as broader sociopolitical norms and values be and become in ways that are worth our attention and intention as researchers and participants in local and less local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western liberal media theories often neglect to recognize "news translation" as one of the journalistic practices. This paper problematizes this dominant understanding of journalistic practice and expands the Bourdieusian media sociology project beyond western media systems by applying it to Indian agency journalism. A case study of the United News of India Urdu (UNIU) serves as the basis for this examination, drawing on an ethnography of news production practices, and supplemented with in-depth interviews conducted with Muslim journalists from 2018 to 2020 across four major Indian cities. Through this investigation, the paper asserts that "news translation" is indeed a vital but contested component of media work within the sphere of Indian-language journalism. The paper uses "media work" as a key concept to demonstrate that UNIU's journalists are anchored in the field of journalism, as is evidenced by their institutional-cum-organizational location and their application of the elements of journalistic practice to their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a situated analysis of infrastructures of surveillance and control in Rotterdam through Latour & Hermant’s concept of the oligopticon. Oligopticons are networked devices and their supporting infrastructures that render the city in extremely narrow but very clear representations, in this case as a city of waste hotspots. In Rotterdam, public management is designing data-hungry oligopticons that map, control and intervene in the illegal disposal of waste and litter. An analysis of two vignettes from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork finds that these oligopticons do more than simply make visible and control these practices of waste disposal: they instead engage in punitive politics that frames those who illegally dispose of waste as exceptions to a normalizing way of life, fighting not waste but difference. Through ethnographic comparison, this paper aims to evoke thought, imagination and reflection in readers regarding the consequences of infrastructures of surveillance and control and the intimate knowledge that may escape these infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sweat, meaning to sweat, is a moniker attached to prearranged but unorganised and informal sport and physical activity within local communities in Trinidad and Tobago. Explained as a culturally significant phenomenon, the sweat is a space of community cohesion and radical questioning through its resident attendant ole talk where the critical deconstruction of social reality readily occurs. Using Paolo Freire's pedagogical ideas of problem-posing dialogue, this ethnographic paper, explores three main areas. Those being, the sweats and ole talk; the radicality of the sweats displayed in individual agency against the structured restrictions of formal sports participation; and the sweats as a site for cross-cultural integration and interaction in an otherwise ethnically diverse country. Through the experiences of eight individuals associated to the sweats, Freirean ideas of love, radicality and hopefulness are prominent in the description of the sweats. To this end, this paper adds to the growing body of literature on informal sport participation as a site to negotiate and reconcile differences in local communities, as well as a site for social and sport-for-development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social justice protests that began on 18 October 2019 in Chile were greeted enthusiastically around the globe. The mobilisation 'woke up' society and contributed to the collective drafting of a new constitution for the country. Building on ethnographic insights gathered in January–February 2020, this paper analyses forms of violence together with relations of care and solidarity that emerged within the mobilisation. It walks the reader through central Santiago de Chile and discusses the praxis of conducting research in a non-war conflict site, embedded in relations of claiming space (both figuratively and concretely) and creating practices that contribute to greater social justice. Simultaneously, they are enmeshed with manifold forms of violence that need to be addressed for peace to become possible. This paper seeks to contribute to debates on the entangled forms of everyday peace and violence, drawing on feminist research and connecting these with critical geographies of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with a young female refugee-background student, attends to the evolution of the student's math identity shortly after arrival to the U.S. More specifically, it highlights the ways in which the student's background knowledge and competence with the subject impacted her performance and consequently her confidence and recognition by others as a competent math learner. The data showcase the transition from a pseudo-confident math identity in year one to the loss of confidence and increase of negative emotions in year two. The paper concludes with recommendations for practitioners who work with newly arrived refugee students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arranged marriage is associated in Western political discourse with “forced”, “sham” and transnational. Such discourse holds it to be an anachronistic practice in which parents are portrayed as misguidedly clinging on to “traditional customs” and understood to be premising ethnic and religious cultural reproduction above the needs and happiness of their children. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork including 44 semi-structured interviews, this paper analyses how an understudied yet implicated “group”, Somali Muslim parents, talk about spouse selection of/for their children. Building on the substantial scholarship on the marital practices of British Asians, this paper provides evidence which contradicts and complicates political assumptions and academic conclusions about the role of religion, “tradition”, and ethnic and cultural reproduction in arranged marriages, and brings into focus and problematizes the ongoing operation of “groupism” in relation to both ethnicity and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]

Noting the recent relational turn in disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, this paper draws on insights from the Russia-Ukraine war, also named special military operation, to postulate what it calls relanegraphy to theorize relations and their modular negations. In other words, relanegraphy offers a research design and theoretical position attuned to the recent ontological turn in technoscientific scholarship interested in a world that is increasingly being populated by sentient nonhuman objects which were historically ignored in research driven by designs rooted in humanist Enlightenment modernity. Arguing that life is irreducible to relations and entanglements, relanegraphy theorizes both the presence as well as the absence of human and nonhuman relations which challenge and decenter Enlightenment modernist ethnography and anthropos. The paper contends that as much as human and nonhuman actors establish relations, they are also engaged in pushbacks, expulsions and repulsions of relations such that the world is not reducible to relations. Relanegraphy recognizes that entanglements are not always desirable for actors which is why they are modulated by pushbacks, expulsions and even wars such as is happening between Russia and Ukraine. [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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper analyses 'human trafficking' with a focus on the unique vulnerabilities and experiences of Cameroonians who migrated to the Gulf Cooperation Council states to work, including those coerced into domestic roles. It critically examines 'human trafficking' as a migration category and scrutinises-related binaries. Ethnographic findings informed by the concept of 'infrastructural violence' indicate that exploitation is embedded in gendered macro-structures and institutions regulating labour migration, intersecting with micro-level interactions that either reinforce or mitigate the structural/institutional impacts. Furthermore, there are discrepancies between policy-induced migrant categories and migrants' navigation of multiple categories, undermining categorical rigidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the ‘homecoming’ experiences of young second‐ and third‐generation Australian‐Hungarians. The aim of the paper is to challenge the compartmentalisation of tourism and migration studies by exploring how these two phenomena intertwine, merge, and influence one another in multiple and fluid ways. Specifically, I attempt to merge the two disciplines by analysing the meta‐narratives that have influenced Australian‐Hungarian youngsters' experiences in Hungary. In particular, I argue that, alongside images internalised in the diaspora, interlocutors heavily rely on a popular Western backpacker discourse. I demonstrate the ways in which these two meta‐narratives are in conflict while at the same time closely inter‐related. Specifically, I look at the ways in which the notion of authenticity and the idea of ‘traveller hierarchy’ are borrowed from backpacker discourse, and through them diasporic themes are targeted and deconstructed. I refer to these youngsters as ‘diaspora backpackers’ to indicate that their journeys are influenced by both diaspora life and contemporary youth culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]