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This is an autoethnographic note on conducting fieldwork with the purpose of documenting; first, outside academia––doing documentary photography; and second doing ethnography and autoethnography within academia. It explores different ways to conduct fieldwork (alone or in groups, ethnographically or autoethnographically) and different traditional and innovative ideas about how the "field" was interpreted commonsensically in the past and could be interpreted now, using the analytical dimension of the hybrid field. It is written both autoethnographically and creatively and includes a short methodological "novel." The research note concludes with a reflection on a particular field-work experience, tackling its limitation and imagining different ways to perform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tackling aversions to theory in the social sciences and humanities, this piece unpacks the bad faiths and myopic commentary directed at non-positivist and conceptually driven texts. Drawing on critiques and defenses mounted in the 1980s, 1990s, and the present—alongside exchanges inside and outside the classroom—it mounts an unapologetic defense of theory centering the skillful labors that allow us to compare, argue, distill, critique, abandon, rework, and interpret phenomena. Zeroing in on the empirical and theoretical moves always at play in ethnography, it argues on behalf of the value of allowing lines of thought to carry us obliquely along as much as explicate things. Some closing injunctions around foregrounding what is exciting and nourishing about theory and the pleasures and possibilities of adopting an experimental ethos toward it are put forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Howard Becker's practice of description has been debated, critiqued and reclaimed in a range of fields including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, Science & Technology Studies, critical drug studies and more recently Heather Love's (2015) appraisal of deviance studies. Much of this debate concerns the uses of social research methods and their political effects. Taking up these issues with the construction of social scientific knowledge in Becker's work, this article returns to the methodological problem of description in Becker's research on drug use. Focusing on the legacy of Becker's empirical studies of deviance and the critiques of his research methods, it addresses the problem of description in the research process. In reviewing the methodological relevance of Becker's problem of description as a tool for thinking sociologically, the paper evaluates the contribution of descriptive methods for contemporary sociology and knowledge production. In so doing, it demonstrates how description is transformative of objects, problems and disciplinary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work assessments, and in turn clinical judgment and intervention practices, are increasingly framed by standardised tools and technologies that are digitised. These tools and technologies mediate social workers' relationships with services users, while also privileging, and in turn reiterating, particular identities and particular forms of knowledge. In this article, I am interested in how standardised tools and technologies, like computers, operate to mediate the relationship between social workers and services users. I work with an autoethnographic narrative in order to examine standardised social work practice. Methodologically, autoethnography rests within a reflexive frame of qualitative research, allowing us to excavate our experiences in order to understand how our lives are ordered and knowledge is socially constitutive. In mining this narrative, I am interested in the body, and in particular, the corporeal dimension of standardised practices. I historically locate these practices, and use the work of Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault to examine how tools and technologies function in relation to the body, even when there is no direct physical, bodily contact. Ultimately I argue that there is a scientific discourse underpinning current clinical practice and I use the framings of Donna Haraway to understand the implications of this for social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on issues arising from attempts to treat behaviour as an object of scientific and social scientific study. It examines what happens when behaviour is taken as a thing, an object of concern, modification and enquiry. At the heart of the notion of behaviour, this article argues, lies a fundamental ambiguity. The concept's power, but also its elusiveness, lies in its ability to tack back and forth between two visions: on the one hand behaviour as materialized, objectified action, regular, repetitive and rule-bound, and on the other behaviour as a placeholder, a word to index something we do not yet know or understand. Those are two ways of being a 'thing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'reflexive turn' transcended disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Feminist scholars in particular have taken up its core concerns, establishing a wide-ranging literature on reflexivity in feminist theory and practice. In this paper, I contribute to this scholarship by deconstructing the 'story' of my own research as a white, genderqueer, masculine-presenting researcher in Ghana. This deconstruction is based on thirteen months of field research exploring LGBT activism in the capital city of Accra. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes, I examine questions of queer subjectivity, embodiment and self/Other dynamics in the research encounter. Specifically, I interrogate what a reflexive concern for power relations means when researchers share moments of commonality and difference with research participants, here in relation to axes of gender, sexuality, race and class. Finally, I explore the challenge of theorising resistance in light of feminist postcolonial critiques of the politics of representation. I conclude that it is only by locating these tensions and dissonances in the foreground of our inquiries that reflexivity becomes meaningful as a way of rendering knowledge production more accountable and transparent, of practising feminist solidarity, and of excavating our own queer research journeys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Van Gennep’s research interests were located in the region where the fields of folklore, anthropology, sociology, and religion overlapped. His Rites de passage reflected a broad approach to ritual and social life that took into account the natural environment, biology, and history. This article scans his interests and emphases in relation to the American school of cultural anthropology that developed in the twentieth century. It assesses parallels and differences, and points to areas deserving further clarification such as Van Gennep’s understanding of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced consensus analyses are made available with the cultural consensus theory (CCT) framework, which is a model-based methodology used to closely derive the consensus knowledge of a group or population (e.g., a culture). The relevant data are their questionnaire responses about a subject domain. CCT has been established as a main methodology for ethnographic studies in social and cultural anthropology, and it has also been incorporated into other areas of the social and behavioral sciences as an effective information-pooling methodology. Recently, there are major advances in CCT, including (a) the multicultural extension, which can detect latent subgroups of a population, each with their own consensus answers to the questionnaire items; (b) the development of new models for several questionnaire designs, true/false, ordered category (Likert) scales, and continuous scales; (c) the estimation of important parameters that affect the response process; and (d) the development of Bayesian hierarchical inference for these CCT models. The joint analysis of these features positions such CCT approaches as some of the most advanced consensus analysis methods currently available. That is, they jointly (and hierarchically) estimate the consensus answers to the questionnaire items, the degree of knowledge (cultural competence) of each individual, the response biases of each individual, the difficulty (cultural salience) of each questionnaire item, and the subcultural group of the individual. In this article, we provide an overview of these major advancements in CCT, and we introduce CCTpack, which is currently the only software package available that handles all these extensions, especially (a) and (b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's concern is epistemological in that it seeks understanding of the nature of ethnographic knowledge production. Its background assumption is that decolonization of anthropology requires decolonization of anthropological epistemology. The article argues that anthropology is not so much a study of the ‘Other’, but an effort to acquire knowledge by translating across some sort of socio-historically established difference. Anthropologists do not acquire knowledge necessarily by translating between modern, Western European, and non-modern, ‘Other’ conceptual arrangements. Instead, the anthropological production of knowledge requires an effort to figure out the relevant differences and similarities between an anthropologist, their interlocutors, and their audiences, as well as a translation across these differences and similarities. In order to demonstrate this point, the article focuses on 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic discussions of rural joint families called zadruga in the Balkans. Through a critical reading of two works on zadruga, it demonstrates that anthropologists in the Balkans were epistemologically eclectic, in that they could make use of strategies of both ‘anthropology abroad’ and ‘auto-anthropology’, or combine and reverse them. While this instance of epistemological eclecticism is the result of widespread uncertainties concerning the status of the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’ as organizational categories in the Balkans, it has direct implications for the production of anthropological knowledge generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the reader to the work of Australian verbatim playwright Alana Valentine and examines the ways she raises the issue of veracity or truthfulness in her 2016 verbatim play Ladies Day. The article begins with a brief description of verbatim theater and the importance of veracity in verbatim theater and research-informed theater. It then moves to an analysis of the way Valentine takes up issues of veracity in Ladies Day. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications Valentine’s work has for research-informed theater practitioners in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Akiwowo propounded the Asuwada Theory of Sociation in the 1980s as a contextual episteme to explain African social experience. The theory particularly attempts an indigenous postulation to social interactions among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular. Its concepts attempt to emphasise contextual values of social beings who would contribute to social survival and community integration and development. This theory postulates that among Africans in general and the Yoruba in particular, the need to associate or co-exist by internalising and rightly exhibiting socially approved values of community survival and development, is integral to local social structure, as failure to co-exist potentially endangers the community. A deviant who defaults in sociating values is deemed a bad person (omoburuku), while the one who sociates is the good person (omoluabi). This theoretical postulation contrasts western social science theories (especially sociological Structuralist (macro) and Social Action (micro) theories), which rather emphasise rationality and individualism (at varied levels depending on the theory). Western social science ethnocentrically depicts African communal and kin ways of life as primitive and antithetical to development. Western social science theories have remained dominant and hegemonic over the years while Akiwowo’s theory is largely unpopular even in Nigerian social science curricula in spite of its potential for providing contextual interpretations for indigenous ways of life that are still very much extant despite dominant western modernity. This article examines the Asuwada Theory within the context of globalised social sciences and the complicated and multifaceted glocal challenges confronting the adoption of the Akiwowo’s epistemic intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores autoethnography as a strongly reflexive approach to qualitative research and its reception in German-speaking sociology and cultural anthropology. Over recent years, our academic communities have developed an increased interest in autoethnography, although many reactions range from critical to hostile: It is accused of solipsism, narcissism, lack of arguments and theory, affective immediacy, non-criticizability, endorsement of neoliberal politics, a threat to disciplinary identity, and a strategic mistake in the fight for appreciation of qualitative research. We discuss each point of criticism and translate our insights into more general considerations on strong reflexivity in German-speaking cultural and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I describe the racial order of America in the post–Civil Rights era. First, I discuss what racism is all about and emphasize the centrality of conceiving the phenomenon in a structural way. Second, I argue that the “new racism,” or the set of mostly subtle, institutional, and seemingly nonracial mechanisms and practices that comprise the racial regime of “post-racial” America, has all but replaced the old Jim Crow order. Third, I describe the racial ideology of color-blind racism and its component parts (i.e., frames, style, and racial stories) and contend that, like the racial order, this new ideology is slippery and has a “beyond race” character. Fourth, I explain that the Obama moment is part of the new racism, color-blind period and justify my claim empirically. I conclude this essay pondering if people of color will wake up and realize that the new, more “civil” way of maintaining and justifying racial things is a more formidable way of maintaining racial domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we sketch the field of qualitative video-analysis and locate videography within this. Instead of presenting the methods of videography formally, we illustrate the application of this method in a particular field: Marian apparitions occurring in a German town in 1999, captured live on video. The presentation of the method in this paper follows a general methodological structure. (1) We first outline the ethnographic context of the setting in which the video-recordings were made. This context includes actors, religious associations, and locations as well as some aspects of the apparitional events’ historical genesis. (2) We then turn to look at the performance of the Marian vision as recorded in the video. By applying sequential analysis, we roughly identify a temporal order to the event, which exhibits an interesting deviation from earlier forms of apparitions due to the way it takes a subjectively “spiritual” form. This finding leads us to finally (3) address the role of the subjective perspective that, as we argue, is a further essential dimension of videography. It is on this level that we are made aware of the relevance of the life-world as a methodological background for the kind of interpretive social science that takes the actor’s perspective into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our current global situation is characterized by multiple crises, implying a need to think outside traditional disciplines and boundaries. Problem-based, international teams of collaborative workers, scholars, and researchers are needed to bring new knowledge and perspective to our situation. This congress is a good beginning point for this process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]