Search

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]

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 revisits discussions about the pursuit of a singular location for ethnographic research. Citing challenges to the fixity of location, from circulation of people to the impossibility of containing digital worlds, scholars have proposed multi-sited, multi-scalar, multi-modal and multi-sensorial ethnographies, advocating that the researcher 'follow the actor'. Drawing upon these innovations, this paper traces the affects generated in the process of following the actors as well as the consequent blurring of the division between the researcher and the researched so that they together constitute the category of 'actors' who co-produce the field. Using the example of an ethnography with young lower middle class women in Delhi, this paper deploys the researcher's experience of dislocation or unexpected shuttling in the field to develop 'dislocation' as a methodological and analytical strategy for studying marginalisation in the context of socio-economic change by embracing intersubjective relations, affects and partiality of knowledge in ethnographic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the affects retained, carried, and effected by documents, as they are produced, exchanged, transformed, and transacted among their users. I study the interactions which Turkish-Cypriots (in Britain and on either side of the border in Cyprus) forge with documents, especially those used for identity verification and travel. For those who juggle documents manufactured by several complexes of law and statecraft (including the 'illegal' Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), documents generate differential and politically charged affectivities. Bringing anthropological literature on law, policy, and bureaucracy, as well as Actor Network Theory, into dialogue with psychoanalytic work on affect, this article charts a new terrain for the study of affect (in the domain of documents as objects) and explores emotive dimensions previously unattended by scholars of bureaucracy. [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]

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 paper, I question how a researcher might fulfil the unique adequacy requirement when studying novices in a setting in which the researcher is already a member. Since novices by definition lack the expected competencies in a setting, having unique adequacy for novice methods may appear oxymoronic. However, this paper suggests that unique adequacy requires enacting specific ways of 'seeing' as part of accomplishing local order; once one is competent, it becomes difficult to enact incompetent action in a locally adequate way, suggesting one can actually lose unique adequacy. Furthermore, as any given situated involves a multifaceted set of competencies, exactly which or whose competencies are relevant is both an analysts' and members' issue to solve. With reference to examples, I discuss how analysts and members delimit the 'provinces of meaning' in the process of finding what is locally adequate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural race-based inequalities in Mexico cannot be denied. Anthropologists and social scientists have thoroughly documented racism at both personal and systemic levels. Following I.M. Young's framework, this paper identifies two possible pathways for the anti-racist movement in Mexico: the liability and the social connection models. The former uses guilt to assign responsibility —it requires an agent to be voluntarily and causally connected to injustice; the latter does not isolate perpetrators but assigns responsibility to all agents who contribute (voluntarily or not) by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice. After examining the trajectory of the Mexican anti-racist movement, this paper demonstrates that activists are relying too heavily on the liability model. Furthermore, drawing from ethnographic material from Brazil and the United States, the paper suggests that this model is not only unnecessarily confrontational and ineffectual, but potentially counterproductive for the anti-racist movement, as it is prone to provoke a defensive response. In turn, this paper suggests focusing on the structural nature of racism in Mexico and developing ways to communicate this effectively, in order to foster the positive prospects of successful anti-racist activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a translation lens, we explore templates for writing ethnography in organization studies and their evolution over time through the analysis of all ethnographic papers published in the premier journal Administrative Science Quarterly, 1956-2018. We found three templates of ethnographic writing. Few early ethnographic papers resemble travelogues, as they use theory to explain a unique case based on firsthand experiences of the author. Most studies read like detective stories, using extensive, quantified data from a case and systematically analyzing it to advance theory. This template has remained predominant over time. Finally, some ethnographic papers read like postmodern detective stories, in that they attempt to create knowledge from lived experience, while also hinting at the partiality of this knowledge. This template appeared around the turn of the century but is today rare. The overall low number of ethnographies and the lasting hegemony of the ethnography as detective story template reflect the strict disciplining of ethnography into the emulation of positivist research, constraining knowledge creation in organization studies. We conclude by offering researchers some strategies to recover the strengths of templates available in the past to broaden the boundaries of existing norms for writing ethnography today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical considerations are increasingly important because new online techniques of research such as online ethnography often have novel ethical challenges. Our research aims to help online ethnographers by providing a moral/philosophical framework to be used in making ethical decisions and guiding them to reflect on how these decisions affect and justify their methodological choices. We draw upon prior research on ethics and online ethnography, and utilize five key dimensions of moral and philosophical principles (autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, justice and trust, explicability) for our framework. Our research highlights essential ethical questions such as selecting a philosophical basis as your ethical frame and coming to terms with ambiguity, and related methodological guidelines such as avoiding personal prejudice, assumptions and bias, research site entry strategy, researcher's communication with the participants, protection of data, research site exit strategy and communicating online research findings. This paper contributes to the existing literature by identifying how moral and philosophical guidelines impact our ethical and methodological choices when engaging in online ethnography and what this means in terms of research practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choosing an appropriate qualitative methodology in nursing research is a researcher's first step before beginning a study. Such a step is critical as the selected qualitative methodology should be congruent with the research questions, study assumptions, data gathering and analysis to promote the utility of such research in enhancing nursing knowledge. In this paper, we compare focused ethnography by Roper and Shapira and interpretive phenomenology by Benner. Though these methodologies are naturalistic and appear similar, both have different methodological underpinnings. The historical, ontological, epistemological, and axiological philosophy guiding each methodology are described. In addition, the methodological underpinnings of both methodologies and a justification for use in nursing research are provided. This paper will assist future researchers who aim to employ these methodologies in nursing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the becoming of neoliberal cities, consumption can play an important role in the process of marking who is human, that is, fit for consumption, and who is not. This paper explores such processes as affective becomings and focuses on the workings of comfort and discomfort to highlight how some bodies are delegitimized in order for others to become legitimatized. Using an ethnographic approach with affective methodologies, I trace the process of erasing activism collectives that were resisting gentrification in São Paulo and advocating the 'right to the city'. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it highlights how the becoming of the neoliberal city follows a neoliberal normativity in tandem with a colonial one. By exploring how spaces, bodies, and norms are always related to one another in this process, I highlight how 'the consumer' has become the body who counts (i.e. the human). Secondly, this paper shows how activism work refracts the dynamics of the neoliberal-colonial normativity, as it (re)acts to its mechanisms for sorting out bodies. Thirdly, this paper highlights the political dimensions of (dis)comfort that mark the splitting of legitimate and illegitimatebodies in a social reproduction for consumption. Consequently, it explores how discomfort has been used as a political-affective tool of delegitimization, subjugation, and oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undertaking research involving vulnerable groups, such as those requiring resuscitation involves careful analysis during the ethical review process. When a person lacks the capacity to make an informed choice about their participation in a research study, a waiver of consent offers an alternative. This paper is based on a doctoral research study using ethnography to explore the resuscitative practices and experiences of rural nurses through observation and interviews. This paper aims to explore the ethical issues raised by the Human Research Ethics Committee relating to consent of vulnerable patients requiring resuscitation within a rural context. In particular, the challenges of addressing risk (privacy) vs benefit (public) associated with a waiver of consent. This paper will consider why the rural context should be championed during the ethical review process, when decisions about public benefit are being deliberated. Utilising a communitarianism approach that advocates for greater rural representation during the ethical review processes will ensure that rural research involving vulnerable groups can be addressed safely and benefit not only the experiences and practices of rural nurses but also the wider rural communities they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing Sexuality Education among learners in rural schools can be challenging when using traditional designs such as ethnography and phenomenology. This paper introduces Cyclical Longitudinal Ethnography as an innovative design for addressing Sexuality Education in South African rural farm schools. This design was developed as part of an engaged scholarship on HIV prevention in rural farm schools in Soutpansberg North Circuit, Limpopo Province, South Africa. The paper provides an overview of Sexuality Education at schools and the challenges thereof. It further provides the basics of ethnography and its limitation. The paper then introduces and describes cyclical ethnography as an alternative to original ethnography. The design allows researchers to still have a prolonged engagement with the community without gross disruption of other academic responsibilities such as tuition, academic citizenship, leadership, and administration. The design allows the researcher to visit the area several times over the years, enabling the researcher to observe variations of a phenomenon over time. The Cyclical nature of the design allows data collection, analysis, intervention, monitoring, and evaluation to be conducted iteratively. Though there are primary key informants, the findings could lead to other key informants, settings, and interventions which were not part of the initial plan and objectives. In this study, the target population was educators teaching Sexuality Education, but it ended up involving learners, parents, and community members. The Longitudinal nature of the design enables the researchers to see the impact of the interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative researchers experience a myriad of emotions during fieldwork. Yet, a reluctance to display and openly discuss emotions in relation to research practice means little insight on how these can inform the research process exists. In this paper, we explore the researcher's emotions in an organizational ethnography of an emergency department during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify three emotional triggers (uncertain field access, disrupted research practices, and researcher exposure) and discuss the researcher's embodied experiences and reflexive responses. We present four ways in which the researcher's emotions can be used as a resource for embodied reflexivity: (i) deepening field engagement through a focus on collective experiences, (ii) using the researcher's agency to refocus data collection and enhance creativity, (iii) merging inward and outward focus to reframe the research project, and (iv) visualizing emotions throughout the research process to avoid mind-body dualisms. This paper joins recent discussions on qualitative methods and reflexivity and answers calls for making the researcher's field presence visible in qualitative research. We contribute by delineating ways in which emotions, as a resource for embodied reflexivity, can inform qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the issue on the theme of ethnographic methodologies in market research, including a guest editorial by Caroline Hayter Whitehill, an editorial by Philly Desai, four formal papers and case studies.

This paper analyzes the City of Portland, Oregon's recent zoning code amendment which legalized sanctioned homeless encampments. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Portland, the paper details how the City Government's long-held opposition to homeless camping shifted to a position of acceptance. The paper identifies the state of emergency (SOE) on housing and homelessness as a critical moment for developing not only a legal foundation, but also a social justification, for legalizing encampments as an official shelter strategy. In contrast to research over the past few decades articulating the camp as the realization of punitive sovereign power, the paper suggests the relationality of emergency governance, or "governing-through-emergency," instead provides an opportunity to legitimate the lived experiences and desires of unhoused people residing in sanctioned encampments. It concludes by warning that, although emergency governance serves as a critical tool to advance the interests of the unhoused, such governing strategies are limited by structural forces producing homelessness more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper seeks to understand the social role played by food assistance initiatives in Portugal. Based on the understanding that these organizations are "spaces of care," it is possible to reflect on the support provided by them in a more comprehensive and integrative way. Therefore, the various care practices that emerge in these organizational contexts are explored. This study presents a qualitative comparative methodological approach and a range of ethnographic methods to explore the perspectives of different actors (supervisors, volunteers, and beneficiaries) within different models of food assistance (Surplus Food Redistribution Charity, Soup Kitchen, and Social Supermarket). The main results indicate the presence of several "improvised" and "veiled" care practices in the analyzed initiatives that go beyond food issues. These manifestations of care may stem from altruistic acts and/or function as a "remedial measure," serving as a compensatory mechanism in response to services deemed inadequate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Showcasing plays a fundamental role in arts education programmes. This paper presents an approach to research scenarios which explore 'event-centred' projects. Drawing on arts-based methodologies and research projects, this approach could be extended to the study of seasonal rituals, festivals and other types of organisational settings in which creative work culminates in some type of public display. This paper defines the key features of this method, which draw on Paul Willis' concept of 'grounded aesthetics' and Sarah Pink's work on the sensorial and embodied experience. I discuss the experimentation with various digital media and documentation strategies which adopt a participatory and collaborative perspective. I focus on how the sensorial, multimodal and collaborative approaches to ethnography are used within event-centred research projects which complement more 'traditional' ethnographic approaches. Finally, this paper offers a methodological contribution regarding how to unpack the 'grounded aesthetics' of specific contexts and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: There is limited scholarship on artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education governance, despite the growing prevalence of AI-powered technologies in many fields, including education. However, as the technology is still nascent and has yet to reach its full potential, ideas and arguments abound, championing or cautioning against the use of these technologies. Design/Approach/Methods: To fill this gap in research on policy networks and AI in British higher education, this article employs network ethnography and discourse analysis to study how ideas about AI-powered technologies in higher education circulate in policy networks in the United Kingdom. Findings: The findings evidence a policy network showing signs of a heterarchy permeated by neoliberal rationales and populated by policy actors actively promoting artificial intelligence technologies to be used in education. Originality/Value: This paper builds on existing research by looking at the university and not-for-profit sectors, in addition to the governmental and educational technology sectors. Using network ethnography, this article expands our understanding of the policy actors involved and critically analyzes ideas regarding the use of AI in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this methodological paper is to discuss the challenges of conducting fieldwork, using reflections from our experiences of accessing a research site for ethnographic data collection. The research project aimed to explore nurses' social relations in their workplace and the inequities between and within these relations among nurses of diverse social positions. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, access to the research site posed several challenges and was further complicated by the bureaucratic ethics process that governs clinical sites in Australia. Although this study was considered a low and negligible risk research, negotiating the ethics process was full of hitches and hindrances resulting in the refusal of access. This paper offers ethnographers a reflection on challenges in accessing clinical sites to conduct research and a discussion of strategies that may be useful to navigate and counter these challenges by managing social relations in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intricate relationship between border control and migrations is the core puzzle of this paper, which takes voluntary returns from Morocco as a case study and autonomy of migration (AoM) as a theoretical framework. More precisely, the paper examines voluntary returns from the perspective of migrants themselves to grasp border control through the lens of its disputed, distorted and sometimes subverted implementation. The paper draws on data collected during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Morocco, including ethnographic observations and interviews with staff from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), migrants and local intermediaries. It focuses on the case of sub-Saharan migrants leaving Morocco through "Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration" programmes led by IOM and confronts empirical data with the AoM theoretical framework. The paper demonstrates that migrants' entangled appropriations of return are defined in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return. Ultimately, migrants reformulate the meaning of their involvement in voluntary return into strategic, moral, relative, and symbolic terms. However, these entangled appropriations of a deportation device simultaneously reinforce social norms and institutional regulations underlying migration dynamics and border control. Eventually, the paper draws conclusions on the political effects of migrants' entangled appropriation of a deportation device on the production of intertwined im/mobility regimes between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Cancer remains a significant health burden in Nigeria and requires the efforts of all stakeholders to address it. Little is known about how the worldviews of Nigerian patients with cancer and other institutional factors affect cancer management in Nigeria. This paper draws evidence from an ethnonursing study conducted in a Nigerian cancer care setting. Method: This study adopted a qualitative design using an ethnonursing approach. The study was conducted in one of the primary cancer treatment centers owned by the federal government of Nigeria. Data collection was conducted using participant observation, interviews, and field notes. Data collected were analyzed using NVivo 12 and presented as categories and sub-categories. Results: Analysis yielded two themes and seven sub-themes. The major themes included (1) dominant worldview and (2) institutional/contextual factors. Participants attributed life, living, and death as being controlled by a supreme being. Cancer care was constrained by unfavorable institutional factors such as lack of equipment, staffing, and intensified workload. Discussion: Cancer institutions should provide more cancer care infrastructure that will facilitate the work of nurses and other health care workers. There should be an enabling environment that would attract and retain nurses in the cancer wards. The hospital environment should be made conducive for the cancer care providers, patients with cancer, and their relatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have found that many post-secondary music students suffer from physical and mental health issues. However, researchers have mainly studied these problems at the individual level, with little investigation of how music students' work is shaped by the coordinating effects of policies, texts, and discourses at and beyond their local site. This paper describes a protocol for an international project that will explore the health of music students in the context of their daily work. Using an institutional ethnography approach, we will examine the social organization of music students' work at three universities: two in Canada and one in Australia. This will be the first set of studies that use institutional ethnography specifically for the purpose of understanding how the social organization of music students' work shapes their health. Data will be collected using several methods common to institutional ethnography: interviews, focus groups, observations, and collecting texts. Data analysis will begin during the data collection process and proceed in two fluid stages. The first stage will involve a detailed investigation of the pertinent work activities at each music school. The second will involve linking that work to specific social relations within and beyond the institution. After data analysis has been completed at all three sites, findings will be compared to one another to identify commonalities and differences in how students' work is organized. Findings of the entire project may inform policy-making and lead to positive change at the institutions studied, as well as others where similar social organization may occur. The novel approach described here will provide opportunities to expand current knowledge about music students' work and health beyond what has been learned through approaches that focus on students' individual behaviours and attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the role of materiality in legitimising art organising as occurs at festivals and performances. Through ethnographic fieldwork pertaining to art events and projects, we documented how legitimacy is accomplished through the very performance of art. We observed that artistic practices materialise the very norms by which they are assessed and demarcate a normative space of their own. Our paper contributes to the research on legitimacy by showing that it takes place through connection with societal norms and also through a disconnection that fosters such a distinct space. Legitimation thus corresponds to configuring the specific situation where the actions under scrutiny are legitimate; it is a continuous process that is accomplished not for but with an audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights a methodological vagueness within the existing qualitative research interview literature related to reflecting where interviews takes place. The aim is to interrogate how the use of the concept of emplaced participation can account for the multisensory constitution of place within interviews as well as how the place can provide an opportunity to generate knowledge about participants' everyday practices. Casey's understanding of place as a gathering and Pink's perspectives on emplaced participation provide a sensitive epistemological approach that can be applied by researchers outside the field of ethnography. Based on empirical ethnographic material from fieldwork in Denmark, this paper makes a novel contribution to how researchers can use sensory and emplaced experience before and during an interview. We argue that, if we cease taking emplaced dimensions for granted, new methodological techniques can be developed, which, in turn, can lead to new types of knowledge of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WhatsApp's ubiquity in many people's everyday lives points at new possibilities for conducting online and mobile focus groups. Yet, research on the benefits and potential pitfalls of this is negligible. This paper offers new empirical insights from using the method as part of a digital ethnography with young activists in Western Kenya. The presence of WhatsApp in participants' everyday lives offers a context with high ecological validity. The paper suggests that this opens up new options for designing online focus groups, transcending the traditional categorisation between synchronous and asynchronous interactions and some limitations of both approaches. WhatsApp also offers opportunities for creating more inclusive group discussions. Using discourse analysis of the WhatsApp focus group, the paper also finds that this familiarity and inclusivity affords the potential for group deliberation, which can be particularly valuable in participatory research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a fruitful tension in ethnomethodological work. On the one hand, real-world data are used to rein in analytical privilege. On the other, conceptual discussions necessarily take place in a more open analytical space. Describing settings in detail and thinking about things in the abstract are both essential components of the ethnomethodological project. What ethnographies might consist in complicates this picture. Garfinkel initially deflated the concept of 'ethnography', using it to refer to how all members of society make sense of their world. Sacks, on the other hand, initially construed his sociological project as a more rigorous form of professional ethnography. Ethnographic methods rightly remain an important tool for ethnomethodological analyses. They provide an empirical grounding for analysis and facilitate 'thinking about things' in a more open manner than some other forms of data. This paper argues that ethnographic analyses more generally can be used as ethnomethodological resources, (re)introducing the idea that others' fieldwork and analyses are legitimate resources for ethnomethodological work. Some materials from Elijah Anderson's classic ethnography A Place on the Corner are used to illustrate the possibilities taking this approach might offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video-Reflexive Ethnography (VRE) is an innovative and participatory research and improvement methodology that involves videoing in-situ work practices and collaboratively analysing this footage with participants during reflexive sessions. This involves participants 'slowing down', engaging reflexively with their everyday working practices, and taking time out to discuss issues collectively. VRE has increasingly been used across a range of different healthcare settings. However, one setting that has received less attention is the Acute Medical Unit (AMU). AMUs are busy short-stay hospital departments with very high patient throughput and large multidisciplinary teams where patients receive initial assessment, diagnosis and treatment before being moved to other wards or settings. The aim of this study was to examine how VRE as a research and improvement methodology can be applied, in the busy and complex setting of an AMU. In this paper we outline some of the methodological challenges encountered in this setting and discuss how these were transformed into opportunities and solutions. Then, we evaluate our work by using the four guiding principles at the heart of VRE (care, collaboration, reflexivity and exnovation) to test if, and how, the methodology can be used in such a complex and busy setting without losing its methodological rigor and impact. We show how it is possible to initiate and achieve the core principles of VRE in the complex and busy AMU setting through careful planning, constant revision of data collection methods, remaining highly flexible and adaptable to the spatial and temporal rhythms of the ward and being sensitive to hierarchical inter- and intra-professional relationships and vulnerabilities. Finally, we share recommendations for using VRE in other busy and complex settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the special issue, "Ethnography and Public Scholarship: Ethical Obligations, Tensions, and Opportunities." The editors begin with a discussion of Alice Goffman's On the Run. The popularity and influence of Goffman's ethnography, coupled with critique and controversy, represent the promise and peril of ethnography as public scholarship. The case operates as a portal to explore at once familiar and still often unanswered methodological and ethical questions as ethnographers engage in public scholarship. After reviewing key considerations, the editors provide snapshots of the papers, papers that explore topics such as ethnography as policy-relevant research, representations of marginalized populations, compliance with regulatory agencies, protection of participants' rights, and documentation and sharing of data. Recognizing the importance of Mills' appeal to encourage the sociological imagination, the editors argue that, taken as a whole, the papers demonstrate complex methodological and ethical considerations as well as immense possibilities to inform and reframe social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores entanglements and flows of power, performativity and related becoming subjectivities, in a rich thicket of lived experience in a global bank. The inquiry focuses on an affective auto/ethnographic field text of a mundane, cross-continent, telephone meeting between a senior executive colleague and myself. Experimenting with post-qualitative, transversal, feminist inquiry 'I' deliberately plug into multiple, criss-crossing, philosophical concepts of gendered power, performativity and subjectivity. 'I' playfully–vulnerably assay with new ways of doing processual organizational research and making knowing–as–action, including with potential readers. 'I' write differently, aiming to enact and exemplify the post-qualitative organization studies terrain as unsettled, unsettling and unpredictable. In a processual, abductive interpretation of my field text 'I' uncover agential subjectivities emerging from unconscious affective entanglements travelling across continents and disjunctive temporalities and between human and non-human entities. 'I' depart by reflecting on the contributions of my paper and implications of this inquiry for my practice as an organization studies practitioner–researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical role of material objects for migrants in resettlement contexts is well established, but less work has been done to investigate the role of materiality in shaping migrants' experiences and lives in transit. This paper provides insights into the materiality of migration journeys in the eastern Mediterranean with an approach situated at the intersection of ethnography and archaeology. A focus on items migrants carried, kept, and valued, as well as items lost or gained during their journeys, is used to investigate the importance of material objects in transit, behaviors and experiences of migration journeys which may be otherwise unseen, and the ways in which migration restructures relationships between people and objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pulse and rhythm are found in our heartbeats, our breaths, and our physical movements. Pitch and tone give our voices distinct expressive and communicative qualities that serve as articulations of our relationship to space and time. Sound constantly surrounds us, embeds us, and embraces us. Yet, in the academy, conversations on Hip Hop as a field of study tend to focus almost exclusively on lyrical analyses. We do not have to completely abandon this mode of engagement, but we seem to forget that Hip Hop is not simply about empirics or measurement. And so, this paper seeks to re-think, re-consider, and re-articulate how we theorize Hip Hop—its politics, its culture, and its ways of being—by attending to the vibrations in the air, nonlexical expressions, and the practices of looking and listening. Drawing from Black feminist studies as well as the methods of ethnography, autobiography, and social and oral history, I discuss the interiority of sound, the contexts of reception, and the sets of relations that exist between sonic phenomena. I argue that these creative approaches not only compel us to ask better questions about cultural moments but are foundational to understanding that Hip Hop is not just rap music; it is a practice, process, and lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What smell does border death leave to the inhabitants of borderlands? Is the encounter with the dead bodies of the migrants who perished in the Mediterranean Sea telling in how we articulate discussions around (necro)politics at the external borders of Europe? Based on one-year of fieldwork on the island of Lampedusa (Southern Italy), Door to Europe, and frontier for irregular border crossing, I argue that border death has consequences for both the migrants and the inhabitants of borderlands. The paper will trace such consequences through the testimony of Vincenzo, the old cemetery gatekeeper of Lampedusa, the witness and bearer of knowledge around the nameless bodies buried in Lampedusa's cemetery since 1996. This approach will help considering the extent to which the encounter with migrants' dead bodies – bare life in death – allows ethnographers to speak of the inherently violent system that scholars referred to as necropolitics or thanatopolitics, and the otherwise irreducible force of life, which manifests itself beyond any possible attempt to reduce it or silence it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning often tries to shape human behavior for public benefit. Planning also seeks to implement broad constructs, like livability and sustainability. In response to both tasks, qualitative explanatory research can help build crucial understanding. Still, qualitative approaches are often underused and undertheorized due to misconceptions about their resource and time-demands. This paper explores how rapid ethnography, already used in health and other disciplines, could help planning researchers improve their understanding of human behavior and of broad constructs. It then illustrates the methodology through a case study exploring performances of authentic community at an arts festival in Victoria, BC, Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asylum-seekers nowadays undertake multiple journeys before reaching a country of resettlement. In Southeast Asia, several countries are playing important roles as transit locations. This paper focuses on Thailand, which serves as a major transit point for Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers who hope to move to resettlement countries through irregular channels. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations from 2018 to 2019, this paper examines the Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers' migration experiences in Bangkok, and how they plan their onward migration and utilise connection networks. Moving beyond traditional pull-push approach that standardises reasons to flee, this research uses asylum-seeking habitus as a conceptual lens to explore the interactive process between structure (economic and cultural) and asylum-seekers, and individual/communal interpretations of such structural environment that trigger onward migration aspirations of asylum-seekers in a transit country. In Bangkok, because lived experiences do not meet personal and/or familial expectations, insecurity prevails following news from others in their networks, which then triggers onward migratory disposition among Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers. Asylum-seeking habitus as a conceptual lens provides a useful approach in assisting us in understanding asylum-seekers' vision of autonomy by investigating their changing perceptions of security at different stages of the journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically examines the notion of interpretation and interpretive practices within journalist-scientist interactions in the news production process. The linguistic ethnographic work in this paper offers rare insights into an intense and lengthy collaboration between a newspaper, university, and government agency as they set up a citizen science project on air quality in Belgium. Our analysis focuses on how journalists and scientists interpret scientific results and how they actively reflect on that interpretation. Beeman and Peterson's (2001) notion of interpretive practice is adopted as an analytical framework and operationalized by looking into how routine procedures, cultural categories, and social positions from the fields of journalism and science are adapted, negotiated or reflected on in the dataset. The findings show that the scientists go beyond providing data and expertise and are heavily engaged in the interpretive work within the news production process. The close-knit interaction between the scientists and journalists brings about a struggle over whose interpretation should be a part of the final news product and limits the interpretive power of the journalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field–fieldworker encounter in the contemporary ethnographic circumstances creates moving fields where the archetypal Malinowskian conventions have been experienced as insufficient practices. Calls were made for theoretical reconfiguration of a fieldsite from bounded single site to a multi-sited one. This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in an abandoned village, demonstrating how a fieldsite circumstantially oscillates from online to offline, factual to imaginary when attachment is still resilient and the desire to return is still alive. Its contribution to literature is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates how to adjust the academic qualitative inquiry to ensure a move towards the desired social changes by cultivating the role of the ethnographer from participant observer to a participant in action in the era of 'public-or-perish'. Secondly, it adds an important dimension to multi-sited ethnography: a new 'future' site, a new stroke to George E. Marcus's 'spatial canvas' in the process of place-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emotional labor performed by researchers when undertaking ethnographic research in hospitals. Drawing on emotion work theory to situate emotions at the center of qualitative and interdisciplinary research, I provide a methodological reflection based on a 20-week long ethnography at a Canadian pediatric hospital I conducted in the context of a research project examining risk communication of antimicrobial resistance. I argue that the emotional labor in which hospital ethnographers engage starts long before the fieldwork and carries on throughout the project and into the data analysis and writing of results. I divide these instances of emotional labor into four categories: gaining and maintaining access to the field site, resolving ethical concerns, managing relations with participants, and witnessing human suffering. This paper addresses a gap in the literature regarding the various barriers that hospital ethnographers encounter as I reflect upon the challenges I faced and the emotional labor I intuitively engaged in and provide advice for researchers on how to navigate these barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A more considered sense of the embodied nature of encounter is called for in the scholarship of ethnography. This paper argues for an ethnographic practice that accordingly moves beyond simplistic recounts of 'highly personalised styles and their self-absorbed mandates' (Van Maanen, 2011: 73), to more fully position an understanding of the ethnographer's Self as an also encountered 'site'. Taking cues from Heideggar's (2008/1927) formulation of Dasein and the realisation of the Self through the encountered Other, this paper argues that attempts to make sense of the Other in ethnography – ultimately the raison d'etre of ethnographic practice – concomitantly require an accounting-for of the Self. This paper takes aim at the nature of embodiment as central to the experience of encounter, but will argue that this encounter of the Self functions as an aporia : a site of unknowing, but equally, of generative possibility. It is with the effects that embodiment has and the inflections it provides for the ethnography that particular attention is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study discusses the methodological component of a research project with Sudanese musicians and their associated activist groups. The methodology included song-writing and, as such, is an example of collaborative creative research practice. Proponents of collaborative creative practice argue that the combination of aesthetic methods with ethnographic and participatory research methods brings both epistemological and ethical dividends. This paper considers whether these alleged epistemological and ethical advantages bore out in this research project. While confirming some benefits, my study also shows evidence of underlying tensions between aesthetic 'micro-methods' and ethnographic and participatory traditions of knowledge production. In relation to the alleged epistemological dividends, I argue that autoethnographic embedding in collaborative creative practice is alone insufficient. It requires a theoretical framework which theorises the relationship between one player's musical experience and another's. Only with this, can the sensory experiences of the researcher be used to inform analysis of participant observations and interviews. The autoethnographic experiences of the researcher are not findings in themselves. In relation to the ethical dividends, unlike other arts-based research, I found that the aesthetic micro-methods in this study did not naturally lend themselves to participant empowerment. The pursuit of aesthetic goals has its own division of labour which can lead to the deprioritisation of self-expression and co-learning which constitute the primary aims of classical participatory research. Overall, collaborative creative practice did enhance this research project but there are important caveats. To reflect these, I aruge that creative collaboration should not be considered as a simple sub-set of either ethnographic or participatory research but as a method in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a valuable ontological approach for investigating the coordination of social relations, both locally and trans-locally. However, much of the work utilizing IE remains within the confines of a local or national empirical field. This means there are limited accounts of IE exploring geographically dispersed institutions that cross borders and span regions. This paper makes the case for critically thinking and building on Transnational Institutional Ethnography (TIE). In it, I argue that TIE requires adapting the methodological toolbox of IE to deal with expanded geographic space and diverse bodily locations. By drawing on empirical work exploring scholarly participation in the European Union Framework Programs for research, tensions are illustrated that surfaced while working with TIE. In this discussion, I examine the ways in which interpreting an empirical field as a transnational institution, constituted of geographically dispersed people and organizations, caused a re-examination of the methods in IE to acknowledge institutional experiences shaped by diverse material surroundings and differing geopolitical locations. The paper argues that working with spatially conscious methods in TIE contributes positively to both fieldwork and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ethnography as both a methodological practice and a form of writing, and specifically how ethnography as a textual product may shape and be shaped by the methodological process. We argue that a critical discussion of this relationship is especially important in relation to the ethnography/ethnographies of violence. Examining a range of recent texts, we consider whether different forms of violence necessitate, or have prompted, different styles of ethnographic writing. The paper raises questions about how decisions to adopt particular styles of writing can affect the substance of empirical material, and we reflect on the use of testimonio, biography and quasi-novel, as well as issues of anonymity and composite characterisation. Finally, the paper introduces the special issue contributions from five authors, who were invited to contribute reflections on the multiple ways in which their field method has intersected with representation, textually and intellectually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selecting the research approach that addresses the research question is often challenging for novice researchers. However, getting a better understanding of the research approaches available in the field, is likely to help novice researchers identify and choose the research approach that fits their situation. In this paper, we discuss microethnography, ethnographic case study, and mini-ethnography case study in order to show that these approaches may have similarities but are different. The author hopes that this discussion will help researchers get a better understanding of these approaches and dissipate the confusion that may exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graffiti and street art research (GSAR) has become more acknowledged within the academic discourse; however, it has much to gain from theorising its methodological aspects. As a multidisciplinary field, GSAR has mostly used qualitative research methods, exploring urban space through methods that range from visual recordings to ethnography, emphasising the researchers' reflexivity. This qualitative approach has, however, paid little attention to the role of embodied practices. In this paper we discuss how embodied methodologies provide multisensory research results where the experienced moments, the participant's and researcher's senses, cognition and mobility in urban spaces are connected. Our discussion draws on the authors' fieldwork experiences of walking and edge working, and on the literature concerning embodiment and embodied methodology related to the context of GSAR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of ritual is a major anthropological question. In this paper, I challenge some of the explanations anthropologists have provided to such a question and I attempt to formulate an original theorization of ritual as metaphor. The proposed hypothesis is grounded in two inspiring concepts: Ernesto De Martino's idea of "dehistorification" as the main technique of the ritual and Bruce Kapferer's "virtuality" as its proper dynamic dimension. Drawing on these theoretical foundations and a direct ethnographic experience and conceiving of ritual as a practice rather than as a symbol, I propose to regard it as a particular practice of metaphorization that is not representative of reality but effective on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]