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Between 1964 and 1985, a military dictatorship in Brazil combined an arsenal of political instruments—surveillance, violent repression, and propaganda, among others—to justify its illegal rule. How did the Brazilian military regime attempt to justify its claim to power for more than two decades? What discursive strategies did it use to win popular support, despite the violence it perpetrated? This paper investigates how discourse is used to legitimize power and create meaning in authoritarian regimes. Using ethnographic content analysis of archival materials, I pinpoint and analyze three key discursive frames employed in regime propaganda: "defenders of democracy," "Great Brazil" and "model citizenship." I argue that the Brazilian military regime used these frames to justify its authority, forge national values and social norms, and redefine the boundaries of the national community. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of authoritarian power that is wielded and legitimized through discourse, but also speak to the enduring consequences of authoritarianism in sociopolitical subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the meta-semiotic complexity of place branding through the theoretical lenses of affect and mediatization. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through 'city-walking' experiences, photographs of semiotic landscapes, and public discourses on social media, this article investigates how the affective potentials of nostalgic Shanghai are regulated, experienced, modulated and creatively transformed through the dynamic interplay between mediatization, mediation and remediation. The findings suggest two major implications. Firstly, an open-textured but still recognizable realm of affective arrangement emerges within the constant calibration of the three-way interplay in affective place branding. Secondly, consumers enter into such a realm embedded with their reciprocal capacities of affecting and being affected. Their affective resonance with the situated environment ultimately brands the place. • Place branding calibrates indexical relations between brand instances and essence. • Such constant calibration entails a three-way interplay of semiotic reflexivity. • An open-ended but recognizable affective realm emerges out of such dynamic process. • Individuals are drawn by the characteristic affective intensity of this realm. • Affective resonance between individuals and the situated site realizes the brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how large and small discursive neoliberal moves create contemporary urban space. We explore neoliberalism's coordinates, how it gets vocalized, and its variously scaled economic realities. The setting is Brooklyn's changing status in 2003 from "outer borough" and marginal to Manhattan to a new economic and cultural center of its own. Focusing on private developer, Forest City Ratner's (FCRC) 2003 Atlantic Yards redevelopment with its large-scale movement of capital and corporate land seizure, we situate our family's 2003 move to Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood to examine the circulating discourses of gentrification and redevelopment. [ii] The area proposed to be developed as Atlantic Yards has been renamed Pacific Park. • Reveals how both large and small discursive and neoliberal moves create contemporary gentrified space. • D/discourses place responsibility on individuals, ignoring state and private actors. • Auto-ethnographic shows how these larger forces shape decisions people make at the personal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper responds to several calls for a cross-national comparative study of immigrant entrepreneurship throughout the longstanding discourse of this phenomenon. This study aims to comparatively analyze the nature of immigrant enclave entrepreneurship among one immigrant community across three different jurisdictional contexts (UK, Denmark and Norway) based on comparative ethnographic methods of inquiry. Design/methodology/approach: The data was collected in person from April 2022 to June 2023 by the researchers to identify the similarities and differences of migrant entrepreneurial activities in three immigrant enclaves (Manchester, Oslo and Copenhagen). Comparative ethnographic narrative analysis methods and template analysis approaches were combined to analyze interviews, observations and secondary published data. Findings: This study examines spatiality, sectoral occupation and market orientation for comparative analysis. Through detailed analysis, it uncovers the spatiality and nuances in market demands and sectoral similarities across diverse regulatory environments. Notably, it identifies traditional migrant sectoral occupations shared across regions and its relevance to immigrant enclaves. Originality/value: This scholarly contribution explores immigrant entrepreneurship in various national contexts, emphasising their engagement in neglected and low-value sectors within immigrant enclaves. The study addresses the influence of the host economy's conditions on immigrant entrepreneurs, impacting their strategic orientation and the extent of their "embeddedness". It responds to the theoretical gap in immigrant entrepreneurship literature by conducting a cross-national investigation across countries, extending the comparative dimension to Norway and Denmark. The research employs a unique design focusing on a specific immigrant group and emphasizes spatial contexts, sectoral proliferation and market orientation within immigrant enclaves, offering insights into the mixed embeddedness perspective and the broader environmental forces shaping migrant entrepreneurial activities in the UK and Scandinavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on India's toy industry, this study investigates how field-configuring events facilitate the institutionalization of ethical consumerism in emerging markets. Through virtual ethnographic analysis of the First India Toy Fair 2021, we examine how digital platforms enable institutional change processes. Drawing on institutional theory, we identify three key mechanisms through which the fair shaped ethical consumption practices: normative space creation, regulatory framework development, and cultural-cognitive meaning making. The fair served as a platform where stakeholders collectively defined ethical practices, negotiated quality standards, and legitimated traditional production methods within contemporary sustainability discourse. Our findings reveal how virtual field-configuring events can transcend geographical boundaries to enable broader participation in institutional change processes, while also highlighting the complex interplay between traditional craft values and modern market demands. The study demonstrates how traditional practices can provide templates for sustainable production while meeting contemporary consumer expectations. These insights contribute to understanding how ethical markets are moralized in emerging economies and how virtual spaces can support the preservation and evolution of traditional craft sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the fall of Suharto and the retraction of discriminatory laws in Indonesia, many Chinese Indonesian Voluntary Associations (CIVAs) have reemerged. Over the past two decades, hometown associations have proliferated in order to channel support to, express love for, and generate identification with the kampung halaman, or hometown. These associations do not refer to qiaoxiang (侨乡), or the ancestral villages of overseas Chinese in China, but rather hometowns around Indonesia, and members consist of local, Jakarta, or overseas-based Chinese Indonesians who engage in developing their hometowns socially, culturally, politically and economically via a series of activities. The rapid revival of hometown and other types of CVAs in the Indonesian contexts indicates the resiliency of this form of social organization as a diasporic mechanism through which to construct community, articulate feelings of home and belonging, while contributing to regional place making within diasporic imaginaries of hybrid Chineseness. This paper presents a qualitative analysis based on ethnographic research in the city of Singkawang, West Kalimantan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In research on videogame production, much attention has been given, justifiably, to 'crunch', whereby employees in large studios work extremely long hours for months at a time prior to a game's launch, at the request of management. There has to date been limited research about how duration and urgency are experienced at other periods, and also in the economically and culturally significant 'independent' (or indie) sectors and companies. This article draws on a Deleuzian framework initially developed to analyse experience of temporality in academic research, and applies it to data generated by an ethnography of a UK-based indie game studio, which examined how games are produced as part of a more routine working life. The framework enables a re-examination of how 'passionate' work in the cultural industries is lived day-to-day, and aims to contribute to debates about the politics of time in the games sector, offering analytic resources which expand the vocabulary for expressing desired experiences of time in game work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant mobilities and infrastructures are often studied in either urban or rural socio-spatial contexts, whereas labour migration is often studied in either labour or non-labour realms. However, a too rigid division between these contexts might obscure a crucial part of migrant workers' everyday experiences, struggles and aspirations. To overcome these dichotomies, this paper looks at labour migration from the middle and uses migrant commuting as an entry point to grasp the variegated infrastructures, their connections, and migrants' infrastructuring practices and experiences. It deploys the notion of viapolitics to understand commuting infrastructures not as neutral elements but as relations of materiality, sociality and power. The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two agricultural regions in the Netherlands and Belgium. Following three commutes across long and short distances, with different vehicles, and along variegated routes, the analysis disentangles how these material, spatial and social ingredients produce different articulations of viapolitics as part of the broader infrastructure of agricultural labour migration. The article argues that the different ways migrant workers commute not only reveal a wide array of formal and informal, material and social infrastructures, but also gives insights into different dimensions of migrant workers' navigations of labour and migration regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether endemic or overt, conflict is an intrinsic part of policymaking. Public participation promises to give a place to those conflicts in a more inclusive and productive way. Previous research has primarily focused on the substance and discourse of conflict, studying what conflicts are about and how actors give meaning to conflicts. Less attention has been given to how conflicts are enacted and performed when citizens and the state meet. Using a dramaturgical approach, this paper explores how the performances, staging practices, and scenography of public participation influence policy conflicts. The research concentrates on two contentious urban projects in the Belgian city of Genk, employing ethnographic observation of participatory moments to expose the performative elements of participation. The analysis uncovers the artifacts and communicative methods that narrow the conflict scope, determine the micro-politics of the participatory meetings, and influence whose voices are heard. Using a dramaturgical analysis framework sheds light on some underexplored, micro-level dynamics of participatory efforts that may limit the scope of policy conflict. Understanding these micro-mechanisms is essential for a more inclusive and equitable urban transformation policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates relations between dual senses of economics as 'discipline': as a form of knowledge and as a form of training. Scholars have suggested that economics performatively brings homo economicus into being. Yet this has been often posited as a singular figure, while eclipsing the unequal forms of personhood and sociality it instantiates. Through ethnography of elite undergraduate economics education in the United Kingdom, I ask how the 'representative agents' of homo economicus are considered 'representative', and how they relate to the forms of 'agency' that students cultivate. I argue that ambivalent epistemologies in economics oscillate between a‐realism and what I term 'brutal realism', which appeals to epistemic prowess yet normalizes the partial perspective of a detached elite masculinity. Students are encouraged to foreclose critique to stabilize these unstable models; thus the multiplicity of representative agents paradoxically contributes to their traction. Meanwhile, students cultivate ethics of efficiency that facilitate this wilful blindness, shaping their trajectories into finance. I demonstrate that the authority of economics emerges through distinct affective, pedagogical, and epistemological forms, and there are multiple mirrors between these forms and the content of economics education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the potentialities and limits of nonviolence as a method of resistance against modern biopolitics? This article offers an ethnographic account of Irom Sharmila's sixteen‐year‐long hunger strike against the continued state of emergency in the Indian state of Manipur. It interrogates how she envisioned the protest, the objectives that she set, and how her protest came to an end. This article demonstrates that her protest was not about a will to death, as it has often been described, but instead was based on a radical distribution of responsibility among the people suffering under the regime of violence. Her nonviolent protest as a Gandhian practice was directed particularly at the entailments of violence. In challenging the state but refusing to emulate it, she became an exemplar. She became the one who could not be killed even by the state with exceptional powers. Finally, by contrasting her protest with Manipuri nationalism, this article shows how the ethics of nonviolence offers a unique vision for peace and liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In rural Sri Lanka, marital tension, frequently leading to violence, is an increasing problem. This article explores how the house becomes both the source of problems and a possible solution to them. By examining the way that the social, material, and symbolic dimensions of houses are made to interact, I show how women effect the shaping of social relations and homemaking. Specifically, I focus on how houses become spaces where women are expected to embody the ideals of wifehood and motherhood, thereby creating and maintaining a 'good house'. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over fourteen months in a rural village, I illustrate the ways in which women actively engage in strategies to construct and preserve their houses as spaces free from violence. I describe how women, in addition to their traditional caregiving roles, employ the science of architecture (vāstu vidyava) to restructure their houses as a way to promote peace and prosperity. As a result, houses emerge as strategic allies in women's lives, facilitating their pursuit of the desired 'good life'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationships among speculative rumour, everyday storytelling, and financial speculation that impact small‐scale gold mining towns in Colombia. By following the stories surrounding the visit of Arnold Schwarzenegger to Marmato, a mining town in central Colombia, and its consequences, I explore how people speculate about such 'speculative' visits so as to reframe the events as part of wider colonial histories. I aim to comprehend the affective constellation of lives criss‐crossed by financial speculation and the political openings created by rumour, storytelling, and fabulation. I argue that people locate the Schwarzenegger visit as part of a crisis‐ridden history that counters the narratives of modern and responsible mining. The argument contributes to the conceptualization of speculation in anthropology, as well as to questions of history, temporality, and politics of extractive frontiers. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019 in the central Andes of Colombia and with governmental and corporate representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the efforts of a public healthcare business intelligence unit to implement and disseminate their data products and thus make the healthcare organization more data-driven. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a healthcare business intelligence unit (the BIU) whose mission is to improve healthcare efficiency and quality by making data and data analyses available to healthcare managers and staff. Their primary products consist of a data warehouse and Data Reports, both providing curated and daily updated data for healthcare staff to analyze and visualize. We conceptualize these Data Reports and the data warehouse as boundary objects through which cooperation around data between various users is achieved. Our focus is on the BIU's efforts to introduce and promote the use of boundary objects to healthcare staff while providing them with the competencies to use them in practice. Efforts that we conceptualize as collaborative boundary work through which a new joint field of working with data is created between the BIU and healthcare staff. Based on the analysis of the ethnographic fieldwork, we point to three important aspects in creating this new joint field: Mobilizing interest, building local capabilities, and propagating data locally. The paper makes three contributions: It adds to our understanding of how new joint fields can be cultivated through collaborative boundary work to make healthcare data-driven; it contributes to the emergent field of data work studies; and finally, it adds to the largely normative literature on business intelligence and self-service business intelligence through an ethnographic analysis of its efforts to make healthcare data-driven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil was the target of great international concern due to the policies adopted by the far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro. His disregard for Non-Pharmaceutical Initiatives (NPI) for combatting COVID and his defense of pharmaceuticals considered scientifically ineffective were often characterized as denialist and anti-science. This diagnosis may not clearly describe the multiple dimensions enmeshed in denialism. This article focuses on the temporality implied in governmental denialist discourses and practices. Based on an ethnographic analysis of public documents, speeches, and posts on social networks made by Bolsonaro and his ministers between 2020 and 2022, this article describes how denialist actions of the Brazilian government were structured in the future anterior. The article underscores how future anterior ethics and denial politics open a temporal and ethical space for governance to become unbound from responsibility for deaths and the suffering of victims, which are quickly forgotten or denied. The article argues for a nuanced examination of temporality and denial as a way to grasp the material and political effects of institutionalized state denial, especially as they entail modes of life and death governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of subjectivity are increasingly key to critical studies of migration, which highlight the production of subjectivities as one of the central functions of borders. Yet the question of how borders operate at a psychic level is rarely considered. Drawing inspiration from Gail Lewis's psychosocial approach to the racial formation of subjects and focusing on the UK asylum system, this article examines how borders shape and are navigated within psychic reality over time. Through close analysis of ethnographic material, I propose the concept of "psychic holds" to understand some of the ways in which borders impinge upon the psychic mobility of those they target over time. This term captures a dual process, invoking both the subjective chokeholds and deep attachments that may be involved in the bordering of subjectivities. These psychic holds, I argue, operate in the long durée, often far outlasting the temporary legal categories created by migration regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deploys a semiotic anthropological analysis of value to understand the recent emergence and spread of the Kurdish book cafe, or pirtûk kafe, using it as a window into the changing state of Kurdish language-activism and Kurdish youth culture in Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with cafe owners, operators, and patrons, the article offers both an overview of the pirtûk kafe in contemporary Turkey and an analysis of its role in promoting Kurdish culture and the use of the Kurdish language among the country’s youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractAmidst the industrial decline in South America in the 1980s, and the failure of economic development projects, perspectives have shifted from industrialisation towards a focus on human development ‘by design’ and the empowerment of craftsmanship. In Chile, interactions between design and craft have increased significantly since the 1990s due to new national and international cultural policies. Efforts have been made to safeguard tradition or induce innovation through professional design to promote craft products and mediate between local and global values. This study examines the tensions in design-craft interactions, unpacking the hegemonic and paternalistic design approaches that often overshadow artisans’ innovations. Using historical and ethnographic analysis, this study focuses on Pomaire, a village renowned for its pottery tradition and cultural significance that has faced criticism from the Chilean cultural establishment for a perceived loss of tradition, with institutions favouring specific cultural expressions and modern design over artisans’ strategies. This research highlights the frictions between design and crafts in pursuing innovation and development, showing how institutional frameworks influence the recognition, valuation and commercialisation of artisanal production. It also contributes to our understanding of the power dynamics between designers and artisans, emphasising artisans’ agency in shaping their traditions amidst socioeconomic changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a research study aimed at understanding the discourses and practices regarding police violence that human rights defenders in Chile have. Using an ethnographic methodology (2020-2022), I worked with defenders from a state institution, a civil organization that supports victims, and another civil organization that monitors protests. I conducted 16 interviews, document reviews, and daily activities observations. The integrated ethnographic analysis aimed to understand how discourses and practices maintain and promote certain social relations. This research allowed me to identify practices directed toward the State, society, and the organizations themselves. The meanings of these resistance practices come together in three interrelated areas that characterize this institutional violence: invisibilization, naturalization and impunity. I conclude that filing complaints and educating to promote cultural changes create paths to face the causes of police abuses associated with the productive role of the police in a racialized and class-based order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on two moments from drama workshops I conducted with British Muslim youth in Manchester, UK, this paper explores how we – as facilitators – should wield power vis-à-vis image and improv theatre. Through an intersectional racialised and gendered (auto)ethnographic analysis of the straight, Brown, Muslim, male theatre workshop facilitator's role, I draw on embodied knowledge to argue that the positionalities and assumptions of the facilitator are themselves forms of power, ones that – unexamined and unaltered – risk turning techniques like improv and image theatre into tools of oppression rather than liberation, undermining the possibilities of critical performance pedagogy in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to the police role and function are the inter- and extra-institutional demands for "knowledge" on crime and frontline policing. However, this subject has failed to generate the required empirical attention. The current study thus draws on Ericson and Haggerty's conceptualization of police as "knowledge workers" to reveal the extent to which knowledge production for other institutions remains salient and, as a latent function, burdens policing. To do so, we employ results from the analysis of two ethnographic studies of police paperwork. Results revealed significant extra-institutional information needs that have considerable effects on police work with seemingly little use-value, and a consensus that much of police paperwork represents a misplaced burden due to repetition. We conclude with a critical discussion on the policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voluntary organising frequently relies on affective intensities to direct organisational efforts. However, it is not well understood how these intensities are cultivated across time and different contexts to engage and coordinate heterogeneous actors. By applying a practice approach to affect, this paper proposes the concept of affective practices to theorise how affect is mobilised in materially driven (inter)actions to shape actions and relationalities around organisational goals. The analysis of ethnographic data from a long-term public art project reveals that four affective practices – enticing, envisioning, attending and asserting – are pivotal to sustaining the distributed process of voluntary organising. The sense of fascination, enthusiasm, care and discomfort that these affective practices mobilise instigates participation, support, acceptance and compliance from diverse partners, volunteers and the local public. Contributing to the affective turn in practice theory, the paper theorises how affective processes are cultivated as situative accomplishments in an ongoing and translocal organisational process, highlighting the important role played by the vibrant presence of matter in affective practices. Additionally, the study expands our understanding of how an interplay of affective intensities engages and aligns diverse individuals and groups in voluntary organising by fostering coalitional moments in the organisational process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To explore neonatal assessments that include an element of evaluating skin colour in neonates of black, Asian and minority ethnicities, focusing on the Apgar score, presence of cyanosis and presence of jaundice. Design: We employed focused ethnography involving diverse healthcare professionals (HCPs) and parents or caregivers with Black, Asian, or ethnic minority children born in the last five years. Zoom interviews were performed following a semi-structured interview guide. Ethnographic data analysis was conducted using NVivo software. Results: There was a lack of consistency in how HCPs applied the Apgar scores, which also varied from textbook guidelines. The use of pink as a skin colour descriptor for ethnic minority neonates created a divide among both parents and HCPs. HCPs relied more heavily on other elements of the Apgar score or infant breathing and crying at birth to gauge infant wellness. When identifying cyanosis, HCPs depend on specific body locations for accurate assessment of oxygenation, but the limitations of visual assessment are acknowledged. For jaundice, most HCPs recognised the difficulty in identifying the colour yellow in infants with darker skin tones. HCPs focussed on yellowing of the sclera and gums and other well-being assessments to detect jaundice. Some interviewed parents noticed jaundice in their infants before HCPs but felt they were not listened to when raising concerns. HCPs acknowledged the need for additional training to effectively assess the health of ethnic minority infants. Conclusion: This study highlights disparities in neonatal health assessment from the perspectives of healthcare professionals and parents from diverse backgrounds. Varied practices in determining the Apgar score and recognising cyanosis and jaundice signal the need for standardised protocols, appropriate educational materials, and targeted training. Addressing these challenges is vital for equitable care, emphasising comprehensive training and bias mitigation efforts in maternal and neonatal healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 16 years, Central American governments have increasingly embraced diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China to foster economic opportunities and national development. This analysis builds on ethnographic research in Costa Rica and Guatemala to trace the kinds of entrepreneurialism Central American governments are mobilizing to foment these transpacific commercial relations. This article explores those transpacific spaces and subjects deemed valuable for national development. Though a strong tradition of transnational business connects local ethnic Chinese Central Americans with firms in mainland China and Taiwan, these subjects have largely not been protagonists of incipient state‐led initiatives. I argue that the racialization of Chinese Central American businesspeople as ethnic entrepreneurs has precluded them from serving as appropriate subjects of national development. Instead, Central American governments have relied on white elites to develop desired commercial relations and class interests in this new era of transpacific relations. As such, I emphasize the racialized and classed underpinnings of entrepreneurial identity, showing how it positions some as always already suspect economic actors, while others are seen as national subjects capable of a process of entrepreneurial becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic market analysis online and on-site, this study explores strategies of ethnic food entrepreneurship by first-generation Korean migrants in London. The focus is on how urban difference is translated through entrepreneurship into concrete everyday interactions across urban divides, as migrant entrepreneurs engage with urban economies, societies and regulatory frameworks through their enterprises. This empirical focus is driven by an interest in the application of the notion of conviviality as a lens to understand urban interactions of living with difference. We thus deliberately depart from assimilationist and groupist precepts as imposed by the “migrant integration” agenda or multiculturalist approaches ignoring persistent hierarchies of difference. Our contribution is in providing empirical insight into living with difference in the city through the exploration of how difference is translated through the entrepreneurship of a conspicuous and often racialised group of migrant entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study aims to provide an understanding of how the relationships between standard and non-standard varieties of the Turkish language are perceived by young people of Turkish Cypriot descent within the context of Turkish complementary schools in London. These schools are set up by diasporic communities to fight/reverse language shift and loss. They are also political spaces where cultural and linguistic practices are legitimised and delegitimized to help create an imagined community. Hence they provide rich contexts to investigate young people's perceptions of standard and non-standard varieties of languages. This study specifically draws on interview data of eight UK-born Turkish Cypriot young people, collected through a 13-month ethnographic study in a London-based Turkish complementary school. The results of the thematic analysis of the participants' discourses showed that the participants thought that the role of the Turkish school was to teach the 'proper' variety, i.e. standard Turkish. Through the lens of Bourdieu's capitals, the results indicated that the participants believed that acquiring this variety would make them become more 'educated.' However, some participants problematised the seemingly straightforward association between standard varieties and positive perceptions of their speakers, which raises important questions about rethinking the position of non-standard varieties in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic fieldnotes can contain richer and more thorough descriptions of social phenomena compared to other data sources. Their open-ended and flexible character makes them especially useful in explorative research. However, fieldnotes are typically highly unstructured and personalized by individual researchers, which make them harder to use as a method for data collection in collaborative and mixed methods research. More precisely, the unstructured nature of ethnographic fieldnotes presents three distinct challenges: 1) Organizability—it can be difficult to search and sort fieldnotes and thus to get an overview of them, 2) Integrability—it is difficult to meaningfully integrate fieldnotes with other more quantitative data types such as more such as surveys or geospatial data, and 3) Computational Processability—it is hard to process and analyze fieldnotes with computational methods such as topic models and network analysis. To solve these three challenges, we present a new digital tool, for the systematic collection, processing, and analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes. The tool is developed and tested as part of an interdisciplinary mixed methods pilot study on attention dynamics at a political festival in Denmark. Through case examples from this study, we show how adopting this new digital tool allowed our team to overcome the three aforementioned challenges of fieldnotes, while retaining the flexible and explorative character of ethnographic research, which is a key strength of ethnographic fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores autoethnography as a critical research methodology in dialogue with post- and decolonial critique. It draws on an (auto)ethnographic research on and within the transnational solidarity network of the Mapuche people in which encounters of solidarity across difference are understood as postcolonial "contact zones." This contribution hereby suggests three important opportunities for autoethnographic positioning analysis by looking at (a) different layers of the author's field access, (b) the author's strategic membership within the international solidarity activism, and (c) experiences of being rejected. This article argues that the careful and systematic analysis of such ethnographic episodes is able to (a) generate important epistemological insights within a particular research field, in this case transnational solidarity and networked social movement activity, and (b) highlight and reflect upon the researcher's "complicity" within fieldwork. The first part of this contribution briefly introduces post- and decolonial debates on solidarity across difference and moves on to suggesting autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying/supporting the transnational solidarity activism, drawing upon the author's research with the Mapuche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I outline the framework of (auto)ethnographic positioning analysis. Using the example of an unpleasant field experience, I first develop the "metainvective positioning circle," a heuristic model that I use to address the crisis of ethnography, its consequences for methodological development, and its implications for contemporary ethnographic practice. In the further sections, I outline how (auto)ethnographic positioning analysis combines various previously established methodological procedures, how it differs from them, and how it goes beyond them. Furthermore, I highlight key features of (auto)ethnographic positioning analysis and the most promising moments in the research process for its application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Auto)ethnographic positioning analysis is a new approach that mobilizes the demarcation between evocative and analytic autoethnography and combines the strengths of both with positioning theory. It is considered a suitable methodology for addressing the ongoing crisis of ethnography, understood as a continuing expression of the moral explosiveness of ethnographic relations in a socially divided and connected world. This introduction outlines the special issue's line of argument and justifies its goal and contribution to the persisting crisis of ethnography. The individual contributions are presented, focusing on how each study "positions" analysis autoethnographically and what this indicates about the respective research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological, historical and anthropological research has been quite limited in identifying external cultural influences separately and within a range of still very casuistic themes, which are specific and detailed but often disconnected from broader contexts. There is no integrated research theme on all aspects of foreign culture that influence local culture, so conclusions about the influence of Islamic, European and Chinese culture are still incomplete and limited. An analytical study of old Islamic-European-Chinese tombs in the development of multiculturalism in Maluku is a new study which aims to see how the Maluku people lived with immigrant communities regarding the shape, decoration and distribution of the tombs. This study employed a combination of archaeological research methods, including site excavations and artefact analysis, historical research methods such as document review and analysis of historical records, and anthropological research methods such as ethnographic interviews and observation of cultural practices. Even though it is still a new study, preliminary findings show that the migrant community in Maluku is well received and various cultures can coexist peacefully. The discovery of old Islamic, European and Chinese tombs, schools and settlements marks this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry Glassie's Passing the Time in Ballymenone – Culture and History of an Ulster Community (1982) is a touchstone text in anthropological, folklore, material culture, and ethnographic scholarship in Irish Studies and beyond. In spite of its numerous references to agriculture, cooking, and eating, it remains underexplored with respect to its capture of aspects of twentieth century foodways on the island of Ireland. This essay argues that Glassie's text (and ethnographies of folklife more broadly) provides rich material for understanding how vernacular food culture comprises intangible cultural heritage as defined by UNESCO (Mac Con Iomaire, 2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of K-pop cover dancers worldwide reveals how artists creatively adapt and transform this genre to suit local priorities. This ethnographic analysis examines two K-pop cover dancer influencers in Bali to illuminate their curation of authenticities through local events and social media. One dancer generates a version of K-pop in Bali as a cosmopolitan, upper-class elite judge and modern dancer; the other exhibits the flow of K-pop from Bali to Seoul as a diasporic, queerish waacking dancer. This study foregrounds the disjunctive flow of glocalization as K-pop's cultural capital extends beyond Korea for artistic, educational, and entrepreneurial benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores counter-design as a radical meaning-making practice for community co-design. Radicalism, here, is an ongoing process of complicating and unsettling daily practices to reveal and thus acknowledge socio-political context. Semiotic analysis of ethnographic research with grassroots organisations is taken as the point of departure to understand how communities co-design meaning, and in turn how we might co-design new meanings through countering. Through counter-design in place, we observe small semiotic moments that problematise the rhetoric of horizontal democratic organising amongst the realities of coercion and power asymmetries. These semiotic moments are thus significant for how they reveal the reproduction of meaning and how this constructs, and can subsequently limit, the possible actions for these communities. In this sense, our approach constitutes a design praxis, through which we analyse what it means to employ countering against existing institutional power, both for our participants and for ourselves as designers. Here, we reveal the tenuousness of (designer/ly) intent in relation to and in combination with the artifice of readymade community designs, as these are shaped by work 'on the ground' and consider how this might impact the co-creation of democratic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of dance shoes in LGBT+ ballroom dancers' identity formation and expression on the dancefloor. Applying Entwistle's (2015) 'situated bodily practice' to an analysis of ethnographic field notes and 35 interviews, I highlight that dancers' performative constitution of subversive identities through reiterative mobilisation of the traditional symbolic values of dance shoes is influenced by the material. The article makes a key contribution to sociological knowledge on performativity through an introduction of materialities of place, bodies and artefacts into a close reading of reiterative acts. I argue that a closer look into performative acts is necessary for determining whether and how resistance is constituted, recognised and reproduced, taking into account how materialities interweave with discourse in order to give credit to subversive agents emerging in the micro-moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annually on 1 January, Japan's efficient postal system circulates 2.5 billion New Year cards to arrive simultaneously in every home in the country. Based on ethnographic fieldwork around Osaka, this article investigates the continued popularity of this exchange of paper forms in an age of smartphones and fast internet connections. Extending recent anthropological scholarship about digital data, I argue that these seemingly trivial cards have transformative potential. They are active, potent participants in the cultivation, accumulation, and ongoing care of multiple networks of social, economic, and spiritual relationships. Through an analysis of the material and aesthetic qualities of the cards, I highlight how their front‐back design embodies co‐existing, but contrasting, dimensions of Japanese relations along a qualification‐quantification and personalization‐standardization axis. The cards also produce depth and scale by linking intimate, domestic concerns with larger political and economic interests, while weaving together multiple temporal dimensions. Ultimately, they exemplify how the manipulation of surfaces can have profound cosmological consequences. These cards possess a spiritual and social potency that generates an all‐encompassing, intimate closeness that yearly rejuvenates society by reconstituting individuals as part of the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the anthropology of critique has been hampered by an implicit framing of critique as the content of knowledge rather than an orientation to knowledge about the world. It does so building on an ethnographic account of a group of critical citizens in post‐recession Dublin, Ireland. It stages a comparison between two different forms of critique of importance to them: art and activism. Contrary to the assumption that activism and detachment, and moral advocacy and empiricism, are at odds, this ethnographic comparison reveals that here the ultimate critical skill is thought to be the ability to take up different critical attitudes. Moreover, it isn't a lack of detachment but the creation of a 'critical community' that makes critique political. Drawing from this ethnographic instance of what counts as critique, this article thus makes a case for an anthropology of critique as itself a critical practice – one that is becoming increasingly urgent as critique as we know it has come to exhibit a hegemony of form in the social sciences and public cultures of debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on an ethnography of the transmission of Senegalese sabar dancing in France and Switzerland to discuss how the religious pathways of sabar enthusiasts bear witness to many modes of adoption or rejection of Mouride and Baye Fall aesthetics. I focus on several portraits of students in order to highlight three modalities of the relationship with Baye Fall aesthetics, faith, and religious knowledge, ranging from the dissociation between dance and religious meaning to conversion and immersion into Baye Fallism. I defend the importance of elaborating post‐exotic anthropological tools – such as the ideas of ethnophilia or religious conversations – in order to grasp the nexus of affects, embodied experiences, and intimate relationships that are conducive to and mediate the religious pathways of sabar enthusiasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By treating the upper caste as an ethnographic category, this article shows what an endeavour of flipping the ethnographic gaze away from Dalits and onto the upper caste looks like. In studying upper caste victimhood, this article sees how being a victim acts as an important tool of mobilization and collectivization among upper castes. In interweaving cultural analysis and ethnography, I engage the complex relationship between regimes of affect, power, and caste as they implicate the production of a twisted, weaponized form of vulnerability. When contemporary Indian politics is saturated with narratives of upper caste pain, which thereby stand as a testimony to what it means to be a human, I understand upper caste affect via their wound to highlight the simultaneity of upper caste's humanity and their inhumanity. I argue that we should take seriously and examine upper caste 'woundedness' as it helps us better understand the embodied nature of caste and its relationship with violence. In doing so, I re-create modes of citation and knowledge production using a language which doesn't imagine the marginalized body to hold the burden of doing the work of pain, trauma, and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to ongoing discussions in the social sciences about how to interpret the incorporation of gender equality into integration policies – is it a form of state feminism or femonationalism? Drawing upon intersectionality, we analyse how gender equality is presented, discussed and negotiated in relation to ethnicity and nationality in Sweden. Methodologically, we employ a bifocal lens that combines (1) a quantitative investigation of representations of civic orientation programmes in Swedish policy documents and mainstream media, and (2) a qualitative analysis of ethnographic data collected in six civic orientation courses – three in English and three in Arabic – in three large municipalities. Such a two-pronged approach, which connects policy and media discourses with interactions in civic orientation classes, offers a granular picture of the complex and often ambivalent intersections of ethnicity and gender in relation to migration in Sweden. Ultimately, the co-optation of feminist values brings with it the risk of warping feminism into a trait of national/ethnic distinctiveness. Crucially, femonationalism is not the prerogative of far-right parties but is already becoming institutionalised, informing both mainstream media and educational practices in a feminist state like Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attending college, for many immigrant families, is a critical step in achieving the American Dream. This essay, written as a reflection and response between professor and student, explores the conflicting messages young community college students negotiate and process as they move through the City, revealing how knowledge learned in the college classroom is imbued with value beyond that knowledge that they have learned in their homes and neighborhoods. It shares how a research interest from their professor in the knowledge and practices their families have to teach was a point of processing and potential reconciliation of these conflicts related shifting identities, and notes the potential therapeutic value of the embodiment of heritage practices as part of ethnographic research and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores research in the always already colonized spaces of academia with people in what is now the United States. In research projects, Wilson (2008) reminds us to begin with community relationships. Through ethnographic work, we trouble the idea of beginning research via local powerbrokers, who may privilege particular narratives and individuals. We offer reflections reconsidering power dynamics in community‐based ethnographic studies suggesting ways to think about who research relationships are built with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As a foreign anthropologist in Romania in the 1970s and '80s, Katherine Verdery was under observation by the secret police. Later, having obtained her files, she put the secret police under her own ethnographic observation. Her analyses are examined in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a consideration of the conceptual power of Verdery's concept of "fuzzy property." "Fuzzy property" has helped me understand the phenomenon of lupiaje in Guanajuato, Mexico—where men enter silver-gold mines at night to extract ore—by following Verdery's advice to "inquire ... into, rather than assum[e], the nature of property conceptions." Fuzziness has a new life in Juno Parreñas's 2023 article "Ethnography after anthropology: Become moles, not mining corporations," in which she extols "the synesthesia of fuzziness." While this isn't quite what Verdery had in mind, it does help us think about one of her greatest works, the astounding My life as a spy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her influential monographs and essays, Katherine Verdery transformed understandings of state socialism and the command economy at its heart. I reflect here on how scholars might similarly reframe understandings of Italian fascism through renewed attention to the infrastructural project so central to fascist governance in both the metropole and overseas possessions. The piece operates in the spirit of Verdery's critical questioning of Western accounts that overestimated the centralization of power within socialist states. By contrast, the prevailing scholarship on fascist political economy, as well as empire, has stressed its irrationality. A prominent view thus depicts fascist projects of public works and autarchy largely as future-oriented projections (delusions, even) of the Duce or as monuments to failure. By employing an ethnographic sensibility that takes seriously the logics of infrastructure and fascist infrastructural power, the analysis derives inspiration from Verdery's method of challenging orthodoxies about power in particular state formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the modern state most laws enshrine practical social norms in a way that everyone can be aware of. Laws take a legalistic form, as generalizing rules and abstract categories. But turning to historical and ethnographic examples, we find legalistic rules that do not bear a neat resemblance to the details and disputes of quotidian life. This raises questions about their purposes and effects. Some of the earliest laws ever made—in Mesopotamia, Israel, and Rome—consisted of ostensibly practical rules, yet they evidently enshrined grander social visions. In this article I examine the connections between the practical and the symbolic. An analogy with ritual performance suggests that even partial sets of laws may connect people with visions of justice and order, thereby garnering loyalty and helping to legitimize the aspirations of the law-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year the United States government detains and deports hundreds of thousands of people who prior to their removal are held in confinement for an average of 55 days. The short and long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic on migrant detention and deportation continue to be evaluated in real time, including how we can best study it. This paper provides a timely analysis on the relationship between immigration enforcement and confinement, public health emergencies, and ethnographic methods. It makes two contributions. The first is methodological and focuses on the challenges and opportunities of ethnographic methods in carceral settings when pandemic-related protocols have raised additional challenges to conventional in-person prison ethnography. The second contribution is empirical and documents how we adapted ethnographic methods to an interdisciplinary research design and to the exigencies of the pandemic to study the spread of the coronavirus in four immigrant detention facilities in New Jersey, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the Arabic-English pair in Dubai, an international hub representing a vivid case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity in the 21st century. An examination of the bilingual and translation practices enacted on Dubai's LL points to a ubiquitous phenomenon that the Arabic information is often not authentic Arabic but transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Such use of transliteration privileges the phonetic transference of sounds, at the expense of meaning and function. The prevalent use of transliteration as a 'go-to' strategy is interesting, considering the obvious existence of pure Arabic equivalents. To provide some ethnographic context for the analysis, 10 people in Dubai were interviewed (Arabic speakers from different Arab countries) to establish whether the transliterated Arabic can be understood and the possible rationale behind this interesting linguistic decision. Such symbolic and decorative use of Arabic reflects Dubai's global city status with immigrants significantly outnumbering the indigenous Arabic-speaking natives. The widespread aesthetic use of 'Arabised English' points to the influence of English in a globalised world. Some tentative reasons are provided to explain the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no participatory archive without an individual participant's willingness to share their archival records and relevant background information about their records. Yet, information sharing as it comes to archives is not centered or adequately explored in work on participatory archive initiatives—leaving questions about participant motivations and how these motivations line up with the archive's goals. Through a combination of primary source data analysis and ethnographic field data collection and analysis, this study aims to close that knowledge gap. The ties between archival institutions and archival record creators in participatory archives are investigated in order to understand what motivations for information sharing participants bring to participatory archives and how these correspond to the goals of archival institutions which engage with participatory initiatives. Findings show that key actors in participatory archives, the participants who contribute their stories and records to the archive, are largely driven by self-fulfillment when contributing to the archives. Meanwhile, goals from institutional archives include both inclusive community-building and collection-building. While participant motivations and institutional goals can lead to moments of friction between archives and participants, they can also be symbiotic foundations of participatory archive initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]