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AbstractThis paper examines a digital platform used in the primary health sector in a state in Eastern India. Within a ‘regime of tactility,’ it is supposed to redefine the state’s presence in rural areas, not only by attending to patients but also by screening the population and establishing health databases. While the health workers who operate the digital platform represent the state in ‘the peripheries,’ the state itself exhibits mistrust towards them and monitors their performance through the platform. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the manuscript analyses the use of digital health technologies as technologies of accountability. The competitive nature of monitoring techniques leads to an ever-higher number of digital consultations, which projects the image of a caring and efficient state. However, the paper also explores the unintended consequences of this politics by display on the provision of healthcare. Even though digital technologies and the managerial form of governance they engender promise to touch people’s lives, they lead to intangible forms of care while leaving untouched pressing structural issues that India’s health sector has been facing for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In thinking about care, much research has focused on kin relations, family-related care, and formal (medical) or informal care providers. Yet, how do we understand care responsibilities in contexts where kin care is absent despite being a desired social norm, and people turn to other community sources or practices? This paper draws on ethnographic research in a Sufireligious shrine in western India well-known for providing succor to those in distress, including those with mental illness. Interviews were conducted with pilgrims who had left homes due to strained relationships with kin members. For many of them, the shrine emerged as a sanctuary, even while not entirely a safe one, allowing women to live alone. While both academic research on mental health institutions and state responses have delved into the abandoned or 'dumped woman' in long-stay institutions or care homes, this paper argues that 'abandonment' is not a straightforward condition, but rather a dynamic discourse that works in different ways. For women bereft of kinship ties, narratives of being abandoned by kin became ways of justifying long (and sometimes permanent) residence in religious shrines, which were able to absorb such 'abandoned' pilgrims who had nowhere else to go, even if half-heartedly so. Importantly, these alternative forms of living made possible by shrines reflect women's agency, enabling women to live alone even while belonging to a community. In a context with limited social security options for women in precarious family situations, these care arrangements become significant, even if they are informal and ambivalent forms of care. Keywords: kinship; abandonment; agency; care; religious healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To advance understanding about the way endogenous knowledge on mangrove swamp rice (MSR) farming is transmitted, reinvented and negotiated between generations and highlight the implications this has for R4D. Long-term qualitative research using an ethnographic approach, technography and biographies of farmers. The endogenous Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) is dynamic but faces shortcomings owing to socio-environmental changes. This highlights the relevance of knowledge exchanges from multiple sources, eroding the divide between endogenous and exogenous from the farmers' point of view. For positive exogenously induced socio-technical change to occur, external actors must fully understand the conditions under which (a) endogenous knowledge is produced and reinvented and (b) endogenous innovations flow among farmers. This will then allow the co-production of innovations adapted to each specific agro-ecological, cultural and socio-economic context, leaving them to be further transformed and refashioned by smallholders to meet their individual 'dispositions' and generate the roots necessary for a strong AKIS. This paper highlights the importance of locally embedded processes of learning and innovation, the better understanding of which can provide a more solid basis for the co-production of technologies and the establishment of an AKIS. This paper improves understanding of socio-technological change in smallholder agriculture by focusing on endogenous processes of learning and innovation. This paper advances the knowledge on endogenous processes of learning and socio-technical change in smallholder agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe practices surrounding pregnancy ends and pregnancy remains shift and change depending on the cultural and historical context. Based on ethnographic research in one group NHS Hospital organisation in England, the paper explores what practices around pregnancy remains reveal about the values afforded the material in different contexts by different actors and the moments when these intersect. It argues that framing miscarriage as bereavement helps to structure caregiving in clinical settings and that clinical practices produce foetal personhood in ways that may not be in keeping with women’s notions of their pregnancy material. It illustrates that hospital practices contain notions of value which become legitimated as the appropriate approach with consequences for normativity. This may lead to women feeling isolated and abnormal when their approach is at odds with that of the clinic. Through an exploration of how women encounter and negotiate disposal practices, the paper argues that current practice requires revision to flexibly respond to diversity but also shifting meaning and values attributed to these experiences and materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on extensive ethnographic research on Mayotte (Indian Ocean), this article presents a case study on how environmentalism manifests in one of the world's richest biodiversity sites. It illustrates how Mayotte, the last and poorest French overseas department, is shaped by ‘hyper-environmentalism’ – where residents are forced to be ‘hyper-aware’, ‘hyper-educated’, and ‘hyper-committed’ to environmental issues. The paper discusses how Mayotte is constructed by the Wazungu ("white people") as a tropical ‘otherness’ and describes the process of ‘eco-infantilisation’, where the Maorais people are paternalistically portrayed as ‘children’ who need to be taught to ‘see’, ‘read’, and protect their environment. Finally, it shows how this effort to ‘change mindsets’ fails because it doesn't integrate new scientific knowledge with local expertises, which are often not recognised. The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the diverse manifestations of environmentalism in a post-colonial, tropical, insular, and ‘southern’ territory like Mayotte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe paper analyses the discourses of teenagers from Barcelona around LGBTIQ+ rights and individuals, focusing on determining what influence the media have on these discourses. Short-term ethnographic research was carried out from March 2022 to May 2023 in three educational institutions from the Barcelona metropolitan area. The study involved 59 participants aged between 14 and 18 years old, encompassing diverse identities and backgrounds. The data gathered during the ethnographic research were coded and analyzed qualitatively. The results are presented in four main areas: (1) Over-information, dis-information, and confusion; (2) Media usage; (3) LGBTIQ+ phobia; and (4) LGBTIQ+ self-perception and responses. The paper contributes to LGBTIQ+ Media Studies by incorporating ethnographic methods into this field. In addition, it provides information for educators and practitioners that can be used in subjects that include aspects on gender and sexual diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the global call to upscale mental health services in low--income countries, mental health non-governmental organisations (MHNGOs) have sprung up in Kerala to address mental health needs by partnering with pre-existing locally grown, bottom-up, community-led pain and palliative clinics (PPCs) to increase access to mental health care through task-shifting. The MHNGOs mandate filtering only patients with 'severe mental disorders' from low socioeconomic backgrounds for their free services. This eligibility criterion mandated by the MHNGO is ruffling feathers within the palliative clinics that oppose such -classifications. They believe that suffering cuts across all divisions and should not be discriminated against based on economic background and severity of illnesses. When chronicity and suffering are held universal by the MHNGO and palliative care, respectively, it brings to the fore the enactment of two perspectives of care. Drawing on observations of clinical interactions between patients, MHNGO staff and mental health professionals and interviews with community volunteers of palliative care clinics in Kerala, this paper demonstrates how chronicity narrative promoted by MHNGOs based on biopsychiatric model gains hegemony, whereas the community care model loses traction progressively. The state, caught between these two narratives, frontstages development by submitting its health machinery to the MHNGOs flouting basic medical safety laws in its services to marginalised people like the tribal population. This paper argues that the rising dominance of chronicity narrative in community mental health clinics as well as in popular media discourses evolves out of power relations between the MHNGOs and the palliative clinics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on ethnographic research, explores the material conditions of price realization, in the context of a poverty-reduction intervention implemented in rural areas of an East African country. It describes a pricing experiment conducted by development economists on people living in extreme poverty, with real money. Using pricing as an analytic prism, I discuss the politics of a market-based poverty-alleviation project. The goal of the experiment was to identify a price that ultra-poor, off-grid consumers would be willing to pay to acquire a solar light. It consisted of testing different prices simultaneously and led to a situation in which participants within the same village were offered to buy the same object at a randomized price. The paper details the operations through which prices were turned into experimental objects and analyses the consequences of the particular way in which prices were materialized. As a result of the experimental pricing process, prices were carefully detached from the solar lights for sale, and carefully attached to randomly selected people. I show that beyond testing the villagers' ability to pay a given price, the experiment aims at testing their ability and stimulating their desire to behave as payers in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on children's perspective on their outdoor play environment. The research took place in settings with designated disadvantaged status—in the backyards of Przedmieście Oławskie—a small district of a large city of Wrocław, Poland. The research aimed to reveal dimensions of children's perception and understanding of studied backyards. Multimethod qualitative research procedure was used: the ethnographic research strategy with elements of mosaic approach were combined. Around 70 children aged 3–10 years were observed in their natural play environment and 23 of them were engaged in guided-tours and meetings in backyards. The results of this research show multidimensionality of children's experiences of their play environment. The study underlines the importance of considering children's experience as competent social agents while planning outdoor play environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore how professionals in the financial sector understand the challenge that climate change presents to economy and society. It is a case study into how 'climate-related financial risk' is understood in a particular area of expertise – within the actuarial profession. There is an increasingly prominent claim among financial regulators that climate change should be considered as an issue of financial risk and stability; it is argued that this will drive capital towards green ends, and an orderly low carbon transition. Responding to this, actuaries are seeking to establish climate-related risk as part of their professional jurisdiction. Yet they are struggling to do so because of their relationship to the investment chain and because the tools they employ for risk management, mostly drawn from financial economics, are fundamentally failing to consider, quantify and financialise climate risks. Instead, the profession is moving toward scenario-based tools for managing climate-related uncertainty that incorporate narratives about policy interventions and market reaction. The paper draws on interviews and ethnographic research conducted with members of the UK-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) to explore these established and emerging risk management tools and perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This methodology paper aims to offer useful guidelines for adopting social media in ethnography by reflecting on the two authors' fieldwork experiences of using WeChat to investigate Chinese outbound tourists. The paper suggests social media as an effective tool to support data collection and analysis in ethnographic studies. Particularly, it helps to establish rapport with informants, collects various forms of data, assists in gaining a holistic understanding of the travel experience, makes good use of the fragmented time of participants to collect data, and improves the researcher's wellbeing and effectiveness during fieldwork. In addition, the paper highlights the importance of reflecting on the embedded culture while adopting social media in ethnographic fieldwork. Barriers and challenges to using social media in ethnographic fieldwork are also discussed. We propose six recommendations and suggestions for researchers who may consider using social media in ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ontological and material dimensions of peasant struggles in Colombian northwestern Amazonia in a context of increasing international deforestation concerns that press the Colombian government to enforce protected areas through military campaigns and market-based conservation programs. Building on ethnographic research in the region, the paper contributes to ongoing debates in the field of political ecology about the ontological dimension of dispossessions and social struggles. It brings together ontological studies with a perspective of critical geography to propose an integrative political ecology of socio-environmental conflicts that addresses the material and the ontological dimensions of domination and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the way novice marathon runners experience and respond to a change -- becoming marathoners. It utilises Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas to illustrate the complexity and challenges experienced by novice runners. The scope of sociological research regarding distance runners over the last two decades has expanded, nevertheless, very little has been written in reference to the process of the liminal phase per se. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to address this lacuna of research and focus on the link between the process of 'becoming' and concepts such as solidarity, hierarchies, and standing norms, which play significant roles and constitute key components in the process of liminality. An ethnographic research design of three years was implemented in two running groups, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The data presented suggest that embarking on a marathoner identity requires a phase of betwixt and between wherein the 'traditional' borders of liminality and communitas are not fixed and often negotiable. Moreover, the relatively advanced age, similar socioeconomic status and military background among the running members serve as loopholes in liminality for novice runners towards 'interested solidarity' with veteran runners in achieving their new status as marathoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper marks the study of childhood creativity as a geographical concern and examines children's experiences of creativity in school spaces, paying particular attention to how such experiences are understood intersectionally and spatially. It draws on findings from an ethnographic research project that was conducted in one Scottish primary school classroom. It argues that the performance of children's intersectional identities during peer-group interactions influences the way power operates in and through school spaces, creating cultures of inclusion or exclusion. It reaches the conclusion that childhood creativity is directly linked to, and affected by, the way children's intersectional identities are performed within social spaces, and suggests that it is important for creativity research to take into account the operations of power among children. Implications for further research include the need for more dialogue on children's experiences of creativity in various places and spaces in both the global North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe the preparation for the supervision approach that we used on behalf of the Social Work Company to supervise workers at the Grenfell Support Service. This paper centres on a moment of new consciousness concerning the formation of values that occurred when discussing a poem written by the first author, Deborah, during a narrative interview conducted by the second author, Hellmuth. We present the poem and use auto-ethnography to explore the new realisations that arose through the dialogue. We consider the multi-dimensional listening that created the opportunity for this new realisation and consider the conceptual resources that a dialogic theory of action might add to the practice of relationship-based supervision in social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiencing spinal cord injury (SCI) can be life-changing for individuals and their families. Previous reviews have focused on coping and psychological adjustment, sexual function and sexuality, or factors facilitating or impeding interpersonal relationships after SCI. However, there is a very little synthesis of research focusing on changes to adult attachment and emotional intimacy post-SCI. This review aims to examine the mechanisms of change in adult attachment and intimacy in romantic relationships following SCI. Four online databases (Psycinfo, Medline, CINAHL, and Scopus) were searched for qualitative papers concerning romantic relationships, attachments, and intimacy post-SCI. Sixteen of the 692 papers met the inclusion criteria. These were quality assessed and analysed using meta-ethnography. Three main themes emerged from the analysis: (a) strengthening and maintaining adult attachment; (b) changes in roles; and (c) changing views of intimacy. Many couples face significant changes to adult attachment and intimacy following SCI. Systematic ethnographic analysis of their negotiations enabled the identification of underlying relational processes and adaptation strategies associated with changes to inter-dependence, communication, role revision, and re-definition of intimacy. The findings indicate that healthcare providers should assess and respond to challenges faced by couples post-SCI using evidence consistent with adult attachment theory. Professionals should support both partners to develop strategies to try to cope with spinal cord injury (SCI) and its associated stressors following injury. Information and support regarding both the physical and emotional impact of the injury on coupledom and romantic relationships should be provided after SCI. Support should be tailored to reflect an individual with SCI and their partner's cultural and societal background and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 14 months of ethnographic research, this paper analyzes soil management within the plantation model of farmingin order to understand the extent to which life on large-scale monocultural farms can be controlled and directed toward extractiveproduction. Transnational soy farmers in Western Bahia Brazil 'correct' soils in the region to make them productive and marshal thisagronomic work to claim that they have added value to the land by 'building it up'. Still, the permeability of the plantation keepstransnational farmers from achieving their dreams of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumptions of the body and spirit in dance/movement therapy (DMT) impact how we examine dance and their application for healing. This paper compares DMT that developed within Judeo-Christian worldviews and gimoo (qi-moo, or spirit-dance) that originated from Eastern, Confucian, Korean traditional medicine and Korean traditional dance. Cross-cultural critical reflections can offer new insights on different ways of observing and assessing movement for health as body-based practitioners and dance/movement therapists. The authors reflect on how our socio-culturally situated knowledge of the body and worldviews of health, dance, and healing frame how and what movement we see. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 Swedish law was amended to allow single women to access fertility treatment with donor sperm. In this paper, based on interviews, document analysis and autoethnographic insights, I examine the implementation of this law using human rights approaches, specifically the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality framework (AAAQ Framework). While the law extended the scope of reproductive rights, the health system was unprepared. Five years on, women seek care in the private sector or continue to travel abroad due in large part to waiting times which can be up to four years in some regions. The paper also provides a meeting point between anthropology and policy analysis. The law change provides a pathway for analyzing the Swedish health system and political context, particularly the relationships between the private and public sectors and between different regions, and the balance of responsibility between national and regional levels. While many of the challenges are unique to the Swedish context, they also offer lessons for countries which have or are considering expanding access to fertility treatment for single women and other patient groups, thus demonstrating the importance of ethnographic approaches in health policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the social role of collaborative ethnographic research amid our current intersecting social, political and ecological crises. It investigates how the multi-sited, arts-based, ethnographic study, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019–2024), adopts drama as a tool to at once respond compassionately and imaginatively to crisis, and envision alternative social, political and ecological futures in its wake. A "metho-pedagogical" paradigm is mobilized as a framework to consider how drama is put to work, methodologically and pedagogically, at a time of climate emergency and pandemic. This framework is illustrated across two vignettes, which attend to the social challenges and impacts of emergent drama-based ethnographic research across two years of the study, in varying geographic locations with different cultural orientations, in live classrooms and in virtual theatre spaces. Attention, risk, desire, trust and reciprocity emerge as important proposals for engaging in arts-led research with youth in these times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ethnographic and qualitative exploration of how resident-driven mapping shapes our understanding of place and space in a changing environment. Conducted from 2018 to 2022, the study collaboratively engaged community members in mapping exercises, which helped inform the study and its purpose to uncover their complex feelings related to changes in the neighborhood, including the light rail expansion. By "hanging out" with the community and embracing a participatory research stance, the study unveiled a nuanced understanding of how residents make sense of space and place in an evolving context. This paper sheds light on the dynamic interplay between space, place, and identity. The mapping component served as a counterpoint to traditional top-down power dynamics, allowing residents to visually articulate their boundaries of South Phoenix. As the co-collaborators' maps challenged government-issued maps, the project highlighted the agency of Latinas/os in redefining spatial narratives. The incorporation of mapping, often overlooked in empirical literature, has emerged as a tool of resistance and empowerment, giving voice to historically marginalized perspectives. By integrating spatial analysis into the study of community dynamics, this paper's findings contribute to a more holistic understanding of the impact of urban development on identity and sense of place. It underscores the importance of collaborative, bottom-up approaches in research and planning processes, emphasizing the role of spatial perceptions in shaping lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital tools are becoming more and more common in healthcare. Their potential to improve treatment, monitoring, and coaching in physiotherapy has been recognized. Yet studies report that the adoption of digital health tools in ambulatory physiotherapy is rather low and that their potential is underexploited. This paper aims to investigate how digital health tools in general, and the mobile health tool physitrackTM (hereafter the app) more particularly, are used in outpatient physiotherapy clinics and also to identify what facilitates or hinders the app's use. The paper is part of a larger study and adopts an ethnographic approach. It is based on observational and interview data collected at two outpatient clinics. We reveal how physiotherapists and patients use the app in physiotherapy and identify 16 interdependent factors, on the macro-, meso-, and micro-level, that either facilitate or hinder its use. We argue that a single factor's facilitating or hindering impact cannot be grasped in isolation but needs to be investigated as one piece of a dynamic interplay. Further qualitative research is required, especially to shed more light on the app's compatibility with physiotherapy practice and use in therapist-patient interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marginalisation, discrimination and depersonalisation are some of the negative experiences of children with Special Education Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND) in rural mainstream primary schools in Guyana. This paper presents these experiences from qualitative data gathered over six months of ethnographic research in two primary schools in Guyana. The data were analysed using situational analysis as posited by Adele Clarke and interpreted through a poststructuralist lens with the social model of disability theoretical framework. Children with SEND feel valueless and experience anxiety and loneliness in their placement in rural mainstream schools. This paper forms part one of a series presented to highlight institutional discrimination embedded in the practices and discourses which is fuelled by the dominance of the individual deficit model of disability in mainstream schools. The paper also illustrates how teachers' beliefs' that disability is biological and they can not cater for such children who are considered unteachable and challenging. The paper further reflects on the collective conscience of mainstream teachers in rural Guyana who feel unsupported in unsuitable classrooms to meet the needs of children with SEND. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scapula bone is bestowed with a particular prominence among the various traditional Siberian tribes. Besides its rich symbolic importance, the shoulder blade is connected with shamanistic rituals and in particular, fortunetelling. Scapulimancy (telling fortunes from the scapula) is a tradition with its roots in ancient China. Historical chronicles and ethnographic research on scapulimancy in Central Asia had led archaeologists to assign a ritual meaning to scapulae with regular perforations. This paper is to present the problematic matter of distinction of fortunetelling scapulae in the archaeological material. Another aim is to sum up historical and ethnographic data regarding scapulimancy. A comprehensive approach to this topic was also provided by microscopic observations on the materials from the settlement Chultukov Log-9 (Altai, Russian Federation), dated back to the Xiongnu-Xianbei-Rouran period. Excavations were conducted by the authors of this paper in 2012–2016. Experiments were also conducted in order to distinguish shoulder blades of utilitarian character (tools) from those of ritual use. In general, this issue shows the importance of animal symbolism in crucial matters for pastoral, nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this autoethnography I present three narratives exploring how I understood and experienced my identity as a gay beginning teacher working in a rural Australian secondary school, where my sexuality was generally not accepted. Reading these narratives through a phenomenological lens highlights how my subjectivity as a gay man was entangled in my embodied identity as a teacher and how students' homophobic attacks attempted to disempower this identity. I explore how colleagues' responses to these incidents advocated for a disembodied understanding of practice which positioned my sexuality as the issue and attempted to straighten me as a teacher. As a result, this paper argues that being an effective ally to queer beginning teachers starts with respecting and valuing our embodied subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study addresses certain methodological challenges of being a 'practisearcher' at a worksite that is physically distant from but no less influential to freelance interpreters – the interpreting agency. Drawing on the discourse of emotionality and positionality of workplace ethnographic research, this paper focuses on the diverse emotions that are experienced by the author through navigating conflicting expectations in a complex business environment. The purpose of this study is to highlight the analytical values of the emotional efforts of the researcher through reflecting upon the uneasy moments when our identities are questioned, our behaviours cause distrust, or when our rushed decisions lead to unforeseen results. Although such instances are integral to everyday fieldwork practice, they tend to be largely toned down in the rational account of academic reasoning. Through presenting a series of extracts from the research diaries and fieldnotes, the author argues that emotions are untapped resources that can help researchers to delve into the complex network of participants, to critically assess our multiple positions and identities (in the eyes of others and our own), as ethnographers go through rites of passage, and to make sense of the socio-cultural contexts where the organisation under study is situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laparoscopic tubal ligation is the most prevalent method of contraception amongst India's rural and urban poor. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Rajasthan in 2012–2013, this paper investigates how rural women's perceptions of a biomedical instrument—the laparoscope—influence their perceptions of sterilization, a procedure often entrenched in coercive, target- and incentive-driven population control programme. By investigating how a laparoscope is entangled in global exchanges, national policies, institutional arrangements, and local moral worlds, this paper demonstrates that while wider biomedical discourses perpetuate the narrative of safety and convenience, people's everyday lives inform their understandings of technology that is widely known but rarely seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper points to an underexplored relationship of reinforcement between processes of quantification and digitisation in the construction of mental health as amenable to technological intervention, in India. Increasingly, technology is used to collect mental health data, to diagnose mental health problems, and as a route of mental health intervention and clinical management. At the same time, mental health has become recognised as a new public health priority in India, and within national and global public health agendas. We explore two sites of the technological problematisation of mental health in India: a large-scale survey calculating prevalence, and a smartphone app to manage stress. We show how digital technology is deployed both to frame a 'need' for, and to implement, mental health interventions. We then trace the epistemologies and colonial histories of 'psy' technologies, which question assumptions of digital empowerment and of top-down 'western' imposition. Our findings show that in India such technologies work both to discipline and liberate users. The paper aims to encourage global debate inclusive of those positioned inside and outside of the 'black box' of mental health technology and data production, and to contribute to shaping a future research agenda that analyses quantification and digitisation as key drivers in global advocacy to make mental health count. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been increasing calls for collaboration between Indigenous health practitioners (IHPs) and allopathic health practitioners (AHPs) in Africa. Despite this, very few successful systems exist to facilitate formal collaboration. Direct relationships between providers, and at a health systems level are crucial to successful collaboration, but the nature and extent of these relationships have yet to be adequately explored. To explore the relationship between IHPs and AHPs in Africa, and to discuss the implications of this for future collaboration. An interpretive qualitative synthesis approach, combining elements of thematic analysis, meta-ethnography, and grounded theory, was used to systematically bring together findings of qualitative studies addressing the topic of collaboration between Indigenous and allopathic health practitioners in Africa. A total of 1,765 papers were initially identified, 1,748 were excluded after abstract, full text and duplicate screening. Five additional studies were identified through references. Thus, 22 papers were included in the final analysis. We found that the relationship between Indigenous and allopathic health practitioners is defined by a power struggle which gives rise to lack of mutual understanding, rivalry, distrust, and disrespect. The power struggle which defines the relationship between IHPs and AHPs in Africa is a hindrance to their collaboration and as such could partly account for the limited success of efforts to foster collaboration to date. Future efforts to foster collaboration between IHPs and AHPs in Africa must aim to balance the power disparity between them if collaboration is to be successful. Since this would be a novel approach, decision-makers and organisations who trial this power balancing approach to facilitate collaboration should evaluate resultant policies and interventions to ascertain their feasibility and efficacy in fostering collaboration, and the lessons learnt should be shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding people's concepts of illness and health is key to crafting policies and communications campaigns to address a particular medical concern. This paper gathers cultural knowledge on infectious disease causation, prevention, and treatment the Philippines that are particularly relevant for the COVID-19 pandemic, and analyzes their implications for public health. This paper draws from ethnographic work (e.g. participant observation, interviews, conversations, virtual ethnography) carried out individually by each of the two authors from February to September 2020. The data was analyzed in relation to the anthropological literature on local health knowledge in the Philippines. We find that notions of hawa (contagion) and resistensiya (immunity) inform people's views of illness causation as well as their preventive practices - including the use of face masks and 'vitamins' and other pharmaceuticals, as well as the ways in which they negotiate prescriptions of face mask use and physical distancing. These perceptions and practices go beyond biomedical knowledge and are continuously being shaped by people's everyday experiences and circulations of knowledge in traditional and social media. Our study reveals that people's novel practices reflect recurrent, familiar, and long-held concepts - such as the moral undertones of hawa and experimentation inherent in resistensiya. Policies and communications efforts should acknowledge and anticipate how these notions may serve as either barriers or facilitators to participatory care and improved health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Portugal and Greece, the number of individuals who resort to alternative medicine continues to rise. From yoga, meditation and energy therapies to healing based on various religio-spiritual traditions, there is a variety of therapeutic practices one can choose from. The main objective of this paper is to show how a therapeutic and spiritual pluralism is produced through the implementation of transnational influences on spirituality and healing. It investigates the diverse ways in which the practice of spirituality through healing leads to a better understanding of how current processes of globalisation, transnationalism and multiculturalism affect, develop and negotiate one's individual, social, spiritual and medical identity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lisbon and Athens, the Portuguese and Greek capital equivalently, the paper explores the pluralistic and transnational character of alternative medicine and the spiritual creativity with which such therapies are practised. Taking the role of the (spiritual) holistic practitioner as healer as a point of departure, it provides an empirical account of the shifting status of both religiosity and healthcare in two southern European countries that are still followed by the stereotype of being predominantly linked to Christianity as the denominational religion, and to biomedicine as the predominant healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-induced lockdowns have increased the importance of technology in education. Though access to technology as well as availability of the internet remain a major concern for a lot of children in the global south, children with intellectual disabilities are disadvantaged even more as most of the e-content is developed keeping in mind the average learner. Unstructured interviews were conducted with children with intellectual disabilities studying in government schools in Haryana as well as their teachers and parents. Thematic analysis of the interviews was conducted to understand the use-patterns of mobile phones by children with intellectual disabilities. Findings suggest that these children are learning to use mobile phones on their own or with some support and are able to navigate the complexities of these smartphones quite well. They use these devices mostly for their entertainment. This paper then reflects on the need and strategies to develop these technologies in ways that they can be used as effective tools for teaching children with intellectual disabilities, especially in the inclusive education system in developing countries. The paper reflects on the need to develop technology and tools using flexible and exploratory designs to enhance the learning processes for children with intellectual disabilities from the lower income strata. This study highlights the importance of being able to use mobile phones by children with intellectual disabilities belonging to low income families. Following this, the article argues for designing of mobile phones suitable for use by children with intellectual disabilities using playfulness and explorations, and Building e-content keeping the elements of playfulness and exploration which can enhance the learnings of this group of students which is often ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically interrogates care and violence, demonstrating how they are both spatialised and mutually constitutive within the shelters and clinics of Singapore for migrant workers. While there are seemingly disconnected sites, both clinics and shelters are utilized to provide different forms of care, discursively represented as spaces of protection and healing. Drawing on ethnographic research with migrant domestic workers at these sites, this paper will, however, argue that shelters and clinics are also spaces where violence is enacted and experienced. Indeed, despite having lived through different forms of violence in their employers' homes, this paper will reveal how domestic workers were subjected to further suffering and bodily harm; all while, paradoxically, receiving different forms of care. Building on social and cultural geographic debates, and particularly on feminist scholarship that foregrounds care, violence, and the body, this paper will argue that care and violence are mutually constitutive in these sites. Moreover, it will show that the migratory regime in Singapore creates spaces where the care that is practiced cannot be abstracted from violence. Beyond coexisting, in these geographies care and violence are shown to be inextricably connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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While violence against health care workers is being progressively recognised as a serious problem in the healthcare industry, it remains an under-studied area of enquiry in global public health. Anthropologists have long observed that violence toward patients is tied to institutional care practises in multiple ways, including repression, misrecognition and silencing. But research on health care staff's experience of violence is still lacking. This article aims to address this literature gap by providing research on the daily experience of vulnerability to violence that health care providers face during their work. To do so, the paper ethnographically explores the effects and perception of violence against health care workers in an emergency department (ED) in northern Italy, a place with a dramatic escalation of violent incidents. The article illustrates how the ED staff attended to the experience of suffering of potentially violent patients. In so doing, ED professionals shifted the responsibility of violence against them from violent individuals to violent structures shaping health inequities. The paper thus argues that ED professionals display a structural competence perspective when dealing with violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In England the macro context of adoption practice is characterised by radical change across administrative, political and organisational systems. The adoption regionalisation programme is underpinned by a policy commitment to speed up 'matching' processes. The Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 states that adoptions should 'proceed swiftly' and some agencies are pioneering online and virtual introductions between children and prospective adopters. This paper offers a timely contribution to practice debates and scholarship in this area. Drawing on a collaborative doctoral study, 'everyday' practices are considered through an emergent theoretical framework, the 'liminal hotspot'. The analysis hones in on the transformative practices generated in the early matching stages and the role of the social worker in their mediation and management. This paper supports findings from other studies that suggest that when matches are rushed necessary processing of complex dynamics is by-passed, creating unnecessary vulnerabilities in the fabric of new families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have critically examined a range of reforms from education and land to finance and health. Yet the predominant way of looking at reforms has been through a lens focused on neoliberal governance. For example, prior studies of health reforms focus on insurance, financing, and access to care. Yet, seeing reform in this way fails to attend to other types of cultural work at play when calling a policy or law a reform. In this paper, we draw on ethnographic research on health policy reforms in Israel and Bolivia to examine the concept of reform and the work it does within national movements. We argue that while the language of reform often signals change or novelty, reforms also carry forward historical continuities and reifications of the past. By delving into the past and its relationship with ongoing health reforms, we attend to how reforms can reinforce and maintain health inequities in some cases, while creating a national language for new possibilities in others. Reform, as we will discuss in this paper, is not only about political ideology, neoliberal governance, or on-the-ground policy implementation, but centrally it is about representations of aspirations, and about crafting relationships between past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global health organisations are increasingly involved in large-scale health interventions in countries in the Global South, partnering with states to implement programmes to strengthen national health systems and promote Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Drawing on an ethnography of a large-scale global health partnership between the Zambian state and the Clinton Foundation, this paper examines the novel configurations of sovereignty that are created by these large-scale global health partnerships. It shows how officials from the Clinton Foundation came to believe that senior Zambian government actors had granted them the authority to implement the programme outside of the formal channels of the government health system. I conceptualise this as an informal mode of 'outsourcing sovereignty' and show how it led Clinton Foundation employees to behave as de facto state actors in rural Zambia. This paper contributes to the broader critical task of describing and analysing new forms of governmental pluralism in contemporary global health and highlights some of the politically troubling consequences when sovereignty is informally outsourced in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented natural experiment in drug policy, treatment delivery, and harm reduction strategies by exposing wide variation in public health infrastructures and social safety nets around the world. Using qualitative data including ethnographic methods, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with people who use drugs (PWUD) and Delphi-method with experts from field sites spanning 13 different countries, this paper compares national responses to substance use during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Field data was collected by the Substance Use x COVID-19 (SU x COVID) Data Collaborative, an international network of social scientists, public health scientists, and community health practitioners convened to identify and contextualise health service delivery models and social protections that influence the health and wellbeing of PWUD during COVID-19. Findings suggest that countries with stronger social welfare systems pre-COVID introduced durable interventions targeting structural drivers of health. Countries with fragmented social service infrastructures implemented temporary initiatives for PWUD led by non-governmental organisations. The paper summarises the most successful early pandemic responses seen across countries and ends by calling for greater systemic investments in social protections for PWUD, diversion away from criminal-legal systems toward health interventions, and integrated harm reduction, treatment and recovery supports for PWUD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a combination of autoethnographic reflections and oral history interviews with my parents, I explore the ways in which we enacted resilience throughout my father's unexpected hospitalization, rehabilitation, and his subsequent years of recovery, both individually and communally. Using communication theory of resilience (CTR) as a framework, I identify the ways in which we engaged in the five processes outlined by the theory: crafting normalcy, emphasizing action while backgrounding negative feelings, affirming identity anchors, relying on communication networks, and employing alternative logics. I then propose three additional processes of enacting resilience that emerged from my family's insights: enacting performative resilience, connecting to broader experience, and emphasizing perspective-taking. To conclude, I reflect on the value of these communicative processes and the combination of research practices I engaged in the paper, as well as the practical benefits of CTR and my additions to the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into the life and ethnographic work of Leonore Kosswig (1904–1973), who lived in Turkey as a German exile from 1937 until her death in 1973. While her husband, Curt Kosswig was invited to Istanbul University as a full professor, Leonore had no institutional affiliation. However, she traveled with her husband around Anatolia and joined his fieldwork, during which she developed an interest in local customs and the daily life of villagers and nomadic tribes. Leonore decided to stay in Turkey after Curt’s return to Germany in 1955. Her excellent command of Turkish and former experience in fieldwork allowed her to become one of the first women to conduct ethnographic research in Turkey. Until her death, she pursued several pioneering research projects on wedding customs, tablet weaving, nomadic life, and ownership signs. Relying on her research publications and ego-documents, we employ a biographical approach to articulate upon her liminal existence in exile. In dialogue with research on twentieth century forced migrations that engage with the concepts of in-betweenness and liminality, we address Leonore’s liminal existences on the edge of two worlds on numerous planes. In particular, we argue that Kosswig’s liminality was reflected on her exilic existence in Istanbul as a foreign woman; her ethnographic research agenda into liminal geographic locations, marginalized communities, and disappearing cultural artifacts; and her gendered navigation of foreignness and nativeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The current research builds on a previous review of the literature which explored sexuality during gender transition. There has been increased attention toward TGNC people across academic, political, and healthcare fields since the previous review, as well as shifts in language use and health interventions, justifying a need for more contemporary understandings. Aim: The current systematic review explores the experience of sexuality during gender transition. Methods: A meta-ethnography was conducted on 16 papers that focused specifically on TGNC people's experiences of their sexualities. Results: The main findings were the intersection of gender and sexuality; the importance of re-writing labels around sexuality, bodies and relationships; (re)negotiating changes in sexual, romantic and/or physical relationships due to transitioning; and changes in a sense of community and belonging. Discussion: The results have implications for supporting TGNC people navigating their identities by recognizing the multiple and intersecting levels of influence within which they are situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper explores experiences of a physician who in one life-altering day awoke in intensive care and had to embark on a complex journey as full-time patient. It identifies the important literature, albeit limited, from a unique dual lens view of physician turned patient, and analyzes the potential for advancing medical education by recognizing the expertise that patients possess from lived experience. Methodology: An autoethnography study was undertaken to unpack data obtained from lived patient experience during a two-and-a-half-year long hospitalization. Themes were captured in a series of eleven scenarios. Findings included critical reflection from the patient, medical educator, and research perspectives. Data was cross-referenced with relevant literature. Results: Seven themes emerged upon critical analysis of the eleven scenarios that described real-life healthcare encounters of the physician turned patient. These often-neglected themes from medical education include experiential learning, reflection, what counts as medical care, vulnerability, patient-centred care, agency, and patient expertise. Conclusions: This study highlights differences between intellectual–experiential knowledge, and challenges medical education to harness the expertise that patients possess. It contributes to scholarly discourses by demonstrating the utility of autoethnography in medical education, critiques traditional medical education models, expands the breadth of what constitutes knowledge, and invites medical educators to actively involve patients as equal stakeholders in curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video diaries are an innovative tool for ethnographic research, contributing to the quality of fieldwork and ethnographic data by giving additional attention to participant voices. Grounded in two fieldwork periods in secondary and higher education, this paper illustrates three key qualities through which video diaries contributed to ethnographic research: (1) Building trusting relationships with participants, (2) providing a space for participant autonomy, and (3) being a medium of self-explication and truth-telling. In video diaries, participants exercised free speech, providing a widely unmediated, personal perspective on their professional identity, roles, and relationships. This personal perspective allowed participants to contribute to trusting on their own terms, which mitigated face-work – especially when talking about conflicts and challenges – and provided additional entry points for conversations, enabling deep dialogue and understanding. Ultimately, the use of video diaries significantly strengthened the researcher-participant relationship and enriched the ethnographic data and the quality of interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gathers 14 ethnographic studies in a meta-ethnographic research to generate knowledge on the possibilities of creative teaching practices with digital media from an ethnographic perspective to promote inclusive education in schools. It explores common details between the articles using cross-case aggregation, which allows to get to know how digital media is used inside pre-primary, primary and secondary classrooms in depth. This research followed the seven phases established by Noblit and Hare in 1988. The results reflect on how teachers are using digital media considering students' voices and interests, listening their voices through knowledge ownership, and promoting interaction between all. The articles also consider new ways of acting and developing from the opportunity that digital media provides in disadvantaged contexts. Studies show spaces mediated by digital media in which the students find their voices and give voice to their thoughts, feelings, and learnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mobility-related categorization processes are central to migration studies, the ways that mobile populations understand, adapt, or contest them remain understudied. To trace such interpretations across both space and time, this paper explores a migrant trajectory that first crossed national borders within Africa before continuing to Brazil and later proceeding to Canada. The research combines ethnographic insights with the autobiographic reflections of one protagonist, whose perspectives and experiences move between different places, countries, institutions, people, and critical events. Following that individual’s learning processes, this article traces which categories were meaningful in the context of origin, how these changed in the interaction with different authorities, how transformative events played into valorizations, and which signs of categorical dissolution were recognizable during these trajectories. A biographical learning perspective sees not only the aspirations and the ideals but also the pragmatism and skepticism around the impact of mobility-related categories change along such journeys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful inclusion is a subject that addresses the question of how well a society can prevent discrimination and ensure access to information, products, services, and spaces for all. Disability may not necessarily lead to exclusion, unless society fails to respond to the needs of people regardless of their impairment. Digital tools combined with ethnographic research may help researchers explore users' needs, perceptions, behaviors, and attitudes and can aid in understanding the interactions between the human, the space, and the digital within the urban realm. This paper thus outlines a diversity of digital tools in the context of the disability-inclusive city. Through ethnographic encounters with Joe, Ann, and Vanessa, we then explore how these tools can be applied to practice. Centering on Joe, we attempt to exemplify some of the key issues that need to be addressed when looking into the terrain of disability, the city, and digital tools. This paper explores how mobile phones and mobile applications can support people with disabilities in accessing the city and its services. The research also explores how modern technology, such as mobile applications can support city officials in understanding better what makes cities more disability friendly. With the help of Joe, Vanessa and Ann from Maribor, Slovenia, the authors have tried out a selected number of mobile applications and observed how these can help people with disabilities use the city and its services. The research with Joe, Vanessa and Ann showed that mobile phones and mobile applications can be useful for moving around the city, but people with disabilities may still face difficulties using mobile phones while moving. The research also showed that technology can make cities more disability friendly, but it cannot remove all the barriers that people with disabilities face in their everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenyan sex worker-led organisations (SWLOs) often play a key role in the national HIV response. Accounts of these organisations frequently focus on their community-led approaches to promote sexual health. This paper addresses sensitisation, an underexplored but significant activity in the political agency of sex workers (SWs). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a male SWLO in Nairobi, we examine how male SWs strategically use their position in the national HIV response to create spaces of police sensitisation. Taking police sensitisation as a manifestation of community-led advocacy and a 'politics of small steps', we examine how SWs respond to, resist and remake the political landscape of police violence. The strategy supports SWs in changing existing power relationships between themselves and the police, albeit within the confines of a criminalising legal system. The analysis of sensitisation practices supports a reimagining of SWLOs that stresses their political agency in the production of new political spaces and expands the focus on African SWLOs beyond HIV work to their political activities, which advance SWs' health, rights and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth-led peer-support initiatives appear well placed to dismantle conventional binaries of youth-adult, as they hold promise as models able to perceive youth outside the role of service recipients. Drawing on ethnographic research at an Australian youth program that included interviews with young people, young and adult volunteers, and staff, this paper investigates the role young people play in determining, creating, and applying change processes for their peers. Through the mechanisms of "cultivating relatability," "establishing a culture of support," and "role-modeling alternative pathways," new possibilities and hope were created. At the core of peer-support efforts was an attempt to increase social integration and a commitment to notions of equality and respect as well as the eradication of unequal power relations between adults and young people. The dual phenomenon of being both the recipient of peer support and facilitators of change processes for others has novel implications for youth programs that work with young people to enhance processes of empowerment and agency and promote positive youth outcomes. Such an approach to working with young people as engaged partners, which gives them a voice and, in particular, asserts the rights of young people to be involved in transforming and recreating their situations, creates opportunities that may both extend the reach and deepen the impact of youth services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early in South Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis, entertainment education emerged as a powerful vehicle for communicating health and social messaging to combat the epidemic. Applied theatre now accounts for the majority of arts-based HIV interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, and continues a history of theatre for social change in South Africa in particular. While much has been written about the dramaturgical and communication theories that support such interventions, the role of music, a formidable tool in the applied theatre intervention arsenal, has received considerably less attention within applied arts intervention scholarship. This paper draws from Durkheim's collective effervescence to propose a theoretical approach to music within the creation and maintenance of effervescent assemblies that is being employed by HIV/AIDS interventions to encourage participation in HIV testing. The theoretical model of musical effervescence is situated within ethnographic fieldwork conducted while accompanying an applied HIV/AIDS theatre company on a national tour of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]