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This special issue gathers empirical papers that develop and employ digital ethnographic methods to answer core sociological questions related to community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. Each paper, in its own right, offers key sociological insights, and as a collection, this special issue demonstrates the need to bring ethnographic methods to digital communities, interactions, practices, and tools. Both as a topic and a methodological approach, "the digital" points us to the need to update, rethink, and grow qualitative sociology. The exemplary papers comprising this special issue exhibit this curiosity and expansiveness, with lessons and implications for an interdisciplinary set of fields and research problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper derives applications of an observation about how fears are constructed by people in their daily lives in order to expand upon developments and critiques in constructionist analyses of scares in the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines 16 methodological papers concerned with the adequacy of the parametric strategy. The parametric strategy is a core procedure in quantitative social science. It transforms ordinal variables into interval variables thereby permitting use of sophisticated statistics including regression analysis. Parametric strategy papers address general problems in the use of quantitative methods. A content analysis reveals that parametric strategy papers use strategies of "next stepping," the creation of literary lacunae and tensions, and recontextualization to create the appearance of resolving the problems inherent in the parametric strategy. Since the problems are not actually resolved, this content analysis provides further evidence for the argument that `the variable' must be abandoned as the primary object of social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is qualitative research? Aspers and Corte (2019) make a case for a definition that they believe captures what many qualitative researchers intuitively know. Although I agree with many of the authors' points, I argue that the effort to identify what makes qualitative research qualitative requires there to be a clear single thing to define, and there is not; that confronting this fact forces their paper into a central contradiction; and that in spite of these and other problems, the paper succeeds in crystalizing questions that qualitative researchers must grapple with today. The authors' most valuable contribution may be less its definition than the issues we are forced to clarify when concluding what we think about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid increase in deportations during the last decade has provided multiple avenues to analyze the experiences of deportees immediately after deportation. More than 90% of the deportations to Mexico occur in border cities. Deporting people to the border is problematic since most of these deportees are not familiar with the area and do not have a social support network. On top of that, Mexican border cities are experiencing a growing spiral of violence due to the aftermath effects of the "Mexican drug war." Within this context, migrant shelters have become one of the few survival resources for deportees. Using an ethnographic approach, in this study, I investigate how violence is not singular but multiple and multilayered by inspecting deportation policies and practices as the junction where migrant shelters interact with cartel forces and state-made violence to support deported migrants. The paper demonstrates how deportation policies produce or perpetuate various forms of violence toward Mexican deportees in already hyper-violent border cities in Tamaulipas. The empirical findings shed light on how violence against migrants is not exclusively about cartel forces. It is a matter of institutional and structural violence coming from US deportation policies and practices that migrant shelters can hardly handle. Therefore, in this paper, I approach violence not exclusively as direct violence that inflicts physical pain but as a complex process that uncovers other more subtle forms of structural and symbolic violence, carrying nonphysical injuries that can be more enduring and traumatic than those caused by physical pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between conceptual and embodied reasoning in engineering work. In the last decade across multiple research projects on pipeline engineering, we have observed only a few times when engineers have expressed embodied or sensory aspects of their practice, as if the activity itself is disembodied. Yet, they also often speak about the importance of field experience. In this paper, we look at engineers' accounts of the value of field experience showing how it works on their sense of what the technology that they are designing looks, feels, and sounds like in practice, and so what this means for construction and operation, and the management of risk. We show how office-based pipeline engineering work is an exercise in embodied imagination that humanizes the socio-technical system as it manifests in the technical artifacts that they work with. Engineers take the role of the other to reason through the practicability of their designs and risk acceptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitization of schools has increased significantly in recent years and is generating a massive innovation boost in education. This development is accompanied by an increased demand for new digital educational objects for schools. The resources required for creating such objects (expert knowledge from teaching contexts versus technological knowledge and infrastructures) are distributed among different groups of actors from digital economy and educational practice. Therefore, the production of such new objects requires new forms of cooperation in the education sector. This article discusses such a hybrid collaboration between a software developer and the teachers of two pilot schools for the creation of interactive learning software. We examine this collaborative relationship in light of different bodies of knowledge that both groups of actors bring to the relationship and that need to be reconciled. We also examine the ways in which the organizational boundaries between schools and companies are temporarily blurred, and the distribution of costs and benefits between the participating groups of actors. By looking at the various dimensions of the cooperative commercial production of these digital objects as well as their (prototypical) experimental stage, the paper analyses the digital transformation of teaching as an innovative social process, structured by economic and educational rationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reflection on the power of archives in driving research. Just as much as informants draw the attention of researchers to social patterns, archives do, too. Both archival and ethnographic research depends on the authority of written documents like field notes and official papers—even in the sociology of art. Archives consist mainly of papers about objects and property. I argue that the material turn in my work and the study of logistics as a form of power became important to me because of my archival experience. Sociologists recognize the importance of property as a driver of social relations of power, but they rarely study logistical power. I do, but only because the archives demonstrated its importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In science and technology studies (STS), reflexivity is not the foremost political or ethical concern that it is for some postmodernists, feminists, anthropologists, or those earnest students of Bourdieu. For us, reflexivity is a practical methodological concern. When reflexivity is raised in our scholarly communications it is, without irony, about crafting scientific communications (i.e., scholarly accounts like articles or books) reflexively. This paper therefore is an actor-network account of making reflexive actor-network accounts, specifically, in the process of writing-up qualitative research findings. It is a paper about research. It is a paper about the research process. As our empirical contribution, we report on research we previously conducted and about the subsequent steps we took toward a (publishable) way of reporting it. We are trying to honestly disclose how the process of preparing a reflexive account is more than merely a matter of cleaning-up the messiness of data, but also, and perhaps foremost, a process of finding, aligning, and occasionally distancing our accounts from our allies — in our case, actor-network theory (ANT) and reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that lay people's legal consciousness, defined as how they experience and interpret the law and legal meanings, can be studied by observing natural conversation. It proposes a framework that analyzes the contexts when law is invoked to account for social behavior, which enables examination of individuals' perceptions of law through their utilization of and reactions to it. This framework is applied to recordings of a jury deliberation, an ideal setting due to its institutionally-controlled conditions. The analysis demonstrates that jurors wield law as a conversational resource to create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate conduct based upon their endogenous understandings of these boundaries. The invocation of law is an important element of the deliberation because it permits jurors to enforce these distinctions and understand their completed duties as aligning with the legal system's ideals. This paper also discusses the ability of this framework to study the law's influence in other social institutions, as well as those institutions' own "consciousness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research demonstrates that, since the beginning of contemporary US cities, the rental market has been a site of regulation and material disadvantage for residents racialized as non-White. We know much less, however, about the other side of the coin: rental housing and those racialized as White. In this paper, I use the panic over race suicide in the early twentieth century – the perceived decline in the birth rate among Anglo-Saxon women coupled with the putative high rates of fertility of immigrant women – as a case to demonstrate how various social actors used rental housing to regulate the sexualities of (1) immigrant women (who were racialized as non-White); and (2) women racialized as White. A variety of social actors sought to reform the physical conditions and arrangements of tenements that they associated with large immigrant families and discipline residents. At the same time, developers built new buildings that were more amenable to children and landlords offered financial incentives to have babies to women racialized as White. By illuminating these bifurcated racialized practices, this article adds to work demonstrating that rental housing can be adapted and adopted for various political racialized projects. The article also reveals rental regulations and domestic space as a hitherto unknown mechanism for subsidizing Whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of US higher education, the collective advancement of low-income youth, especially youth of color, has been limited. Latinxs are faring the worst, with the lowest college graduation rates when compared to Blacks, whites and Asian Americans. Yet, while collective mobility stagnates a growing number of Latinx youth are finding their way into elite colleges and universities. In this paper, we draw from life history interviews and focus groups to explore the mobility pathways of low-income Latinx youth who have achieved admission into a highly selective college. We pay special attention to how Latinx youth are experiencing educational mobility as members of socially marginalized families and communities. Our findings highlight the importance of three overlapping networks - family networks, local school and community networks, and elite recruitment networks- to students' ability to achieve mobility into education's upper echelons. We argue that place shapes both network access and the meaning educational mobility has in youths' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans are increasingly aware of structural racial disadvantages, and especially aware of Black disadvantage. In turn, this paper asks to what degree do whites interested in undermining systems of oppression and privilege understand their own place within those systems (if at all)? Based on participant observation of four grassroots organizations serving the unhoused and 30 semi-structured interviews with volunteers, I show that even explicitly color-conscious white volunteers, many of whom spoke about structural inequality and systemic racism without prompting, struggled to see how their race was important in their day-to-day service interactions. A general inability to speak about interracial interactions despite many interracial service experiences highlights the pervasive power and privilege embedded in the taken-for-granted nature of whiteness and provides empirical support to the idea that racialized social systems discourage racial self-awareness among whites. These findings have implications for social justice- and/or service-oriented whites who seek to undermine the systems they identify as problematic and emphasize that antiracism is a continuous process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans who identify as "homesteaders" and "preppers" seek to live "self-sufficient" lifestyles by distancing themselves from institutions that mediate access to the environment. This paper asks why individuals adopt "self-sufficiency" based practices and finds that they respond to discomfort about being embedded in risk society by adopting self-sufficiency as an emotion management strategy that fits within an American cultural logic of individualism. Based on ethnographic methods including interviews and participant observation representing two sub-cultures of American self-sufficiency movements, I show that cultural narratives about risk generate uncomfortable emotions that must be managed, resulting in material changes to daily practice via emotion management strategies that embrace cultural individualism. Self-sufficiency allows participants to reconcile American individualism with the lived experience of dependence on untrustworthy institutions, that expose them to global, impersonal risks, thus alleviating discomfort and reinforcing cultural beliefs. The self-sufficiency practices homesteaders and preppers adopt result in changing relationships to the environment. This paper intervenes in environmental theories that overlook the significance of emotion in shaping environmental practices and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between emotions, culture, and material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnoses are powerful tools that fulfill various practical and symbolic functions. In this paper, I examine how a contested diagnosis called orthorexia nervosa has been taken up by users on Instagram, where tens of thousands of posts engage with the topic, many of them from individuals who identify with the condition. I put scholarship on medicalization and diagnosis in conversation with literature on subcultures to foreground the subversive work that is enabled through this diagnosis. Drawing on more than 350 hours of online ethnographic fieldwork and 34 in-depth interviews, I examine how participants construct a shared identity, draw on common language and norms, and undertake collective practices, as they negotiate dominant understandings of health. I show how they draw on the legitimacy endowed by the diagnostic label to validate and make sense of experiences of suffering but also to counter dominant health-seeking discourses, practices, and aesthetics in an online space where these are highly visible and valued. I also discuss some ways Instagram as a digital platform shapes its uptake by this community in meaningful ways. On the one hand, participants draw heavily on the language and framing of medicine to make sense of their fraught experiences with food and their bodies, effectively advocating for the medicalization of their own suffering while also creating a sense of community and shared identity. However, on the other hand, they actively use the diagnosis and the recovery process enabled through it to effectively resignify dominant beliefs, values, and practices that are experienced as injurious, including some that are particularly prevalent on Instagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines different modes of inference that researchers are able to make from interview data. Rather than championing one correct mode of inference, I argue that most open-ended and semi-structured interviews contain (a) open contexts in which we can cautiously infer about other situations from the interview; (b) contexts that we should treat as hermetically closed; and (c) refracted contexts in which the relationship between the interview and other situations is patterned but not direct. Having outlined these contexts, the paper focuses on two forms of refracted relations between interviews and other contexts of action, analyzing interviews as refracted images of both people's landscapes of meaning and talk's promissory aspect. In doing so, the article makes two contributions. First, it seeks to clarify how researchers should think about the inferences they can make from in-depth interviews. Second, it is also meant as a contribution to our understanding of the relationship among situations by stressing how actors' talk sets up collective action in ways that often end up supporting the projects they narrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]