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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]

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]

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]

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 transition from late adolescence to early adulthood represents a key moment in trajectories of social reproduction and mobility. A central mechanism influencing these trajectories is the cultivation of specific versions of selfhood. Research shows that socialization within various class locations shapes individuals' sense of self in ways that impact how they imagine the future and the actions they take in pursuit of goals. Thus far, however, existing literature has neglected to consider the experiences of youth from immigrant families, a population that encounters unique challenges in the transition to adulthood. This paper relies on 40 in-depth interviews to explore the self-narratives of second-generation immigrant (SGI) youth. We seek to understand how these narratives relate to their future orientations and approaches to planning. Additionally, given the findings of prior research, we consider variation in SGI youths' self-narratives by social class background. Respondents from middle-class families displayed a durable sense of agency, crafting either a focused self with a clear trajectory toward a white-collar occupation or an exploratory self, open to unbounded personal discovery. By contrast, most respondents from working-class backgrounds exhibited a more tentative sense of agency and narrated a vigilant self that was proactive but cautious in the face of uncertainty. Divergence in participants' self-narratives related to different strategies for planning for the future. Our findings extend the literature on the construction of agentic selfhood for college-going youth in the transition to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So what I learned was look for where people are doing things together and you know, working together in a way that their work intersects with the work of other people and they can do more and more different things and do it better. Claudio E. Benzecry (CEB): Howie, you once said that there are only two questions in an interview: how do you get into it and then what happened? And that was the next big step for me, was to see that everything comes from people intersecting their lines of activity, intersecting so that your work produces something, some object or some idea and I say "oh, Claudio has that idea, I can use that" and then very often it ends up being kind of solidified into an organization or a named kind of work. [Extracted from the article]