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Following Butler's argument that understanding the operations of power requires an examination of the contexts of 'infants' emergence', this paper explores the potential for infant geographies. Butler points to the importance of infancy to subjection, the formation of psyches, and the 'fiction' of an interior or socially anterior self. Attention to infants' everyday geographies therefore has the potential to unravel how individuals are subjected; how power becomes an embodied part of individuals' subjective identities, operating creatively to produce subjects with agency, and, at the same time, limiting and circumscribing appropriate subjectivities. A critical reflection on Butler suggests a need to focus upon how subjection occurs in specific material spaces, and the role of a host of human and nonhuman others to the process of subjection. Also pertinent is a fuller exploration of how diversities of kinship and nonkinship social relations might lead to other constellations of power in the subjection of infants. How the geographies of infants can be operationalised methodologically and epistemologically is also explored. The paper has broader resonance to issues of subjection; to how embodied inequalities are reproduced, transformed, or both; to questions of agency; and to concerns to deconstruct an autonomous, thinking, rational, human subject within human geography--reconfiguring individuals as constituted within emotional and psychic interdependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative researchers of 'unsavory' populations experience a complex range of emotions as they sustain close contact with people and communities that are deemed reprehensible, dangerous, or toxic. Empathy, in particular, raises ethical and methodological challenges for scholars who must build rapport with people who may perpetuate racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on. Drawing on existing qualitative literature and ethnographic fieldwork, I propose critical empathy as a methodological framework to account for the difficult and sometimes problematic emotional dimensions of research on 'unsavory' populations. Instead of trying to resolve the tensions between empathy and critique, critical empathy compels us to grapple with these tensions and make them apparent in our work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the emotions highlighted by interactions between British migrants and Gulf nationals in the emerging global city of Dubai. Tracing the emotions that emerge in 'expatriate' handbooks, field notes, and interview narratives, I contribute to an emerging body of work that focuses on the embodied migrant and troubles the notion of privileged migrants as being detached from place. 1 demonstrate that attention to the emotions framing such interactions, in both geographical and temporal terms, can help us to better understand migrant encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the framework of emotional political ecology, we seek to expand ways of studying the relationships between emotion, power, and environmental conflict. Our review of work in feminist studies, human geography, social psychology, social movement theory, and social and cultural anthropology suggests the need for a theoretical framework that captures the psychological, more-than-human, collective, geographical, and personal-political dimensions that intersect subjectivities in environmental conflicts. We stress the need to explicitly consider 'the political' at stake when researching emotions in environmental conflicts, and develop a conceptual framework for facilitating nuanced conceptualisations and analyses of subjects and power in environmental conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart technologies in the home promise efficiency and control, but this simplistic story obscures their potential to reconfigure relationships and introduce new tensions into domestic contexts. This article explores ethnography as a method to facilitate sociological analysis of smart technologies in the home and develop a grounded understanding of their role in lived experience. The article assembles insights from ethnography of silence, ethnography of infrastructure and autoethnography. While much sociological commentary stresses the dataveillance capacities of such technologies, for ethnographers it is important to remember that our role is to do justice to members' understandings whether they relate to dataveillance or not. Ethnographers need to address the common tendency for facilitating technologies of this kind to become unspoken aspects of everyday life. Autoethnography offers a route into exploring the nuanced meaning of the silences that the use of smart technologies entails and engaging with emotional dimensions of their use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how Syrian men in Egypt rearranged their lives around the newly imposed label “refugee” and negotiated notions of masculinity during their forced displacement. Drawing upon data collected during fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo from 2014 to 2015, this article shows that in Syrian men’s daily reality, their “refugeeness” was present through several encounters and experiences, such as worries about identity documents or contact with the state authorities. Having articulated men’s various experiences with the refugee category, this article goes on to describe how Syrian men in Cairo distanced themselves from the refugee label and tried to masculinize themselves by erecting boundaries between themselves and other Syrian men in their narratives and engaging in reverse stigmatization of the Egyptian host population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The courtroom work of defense lawyers has received surprisingly little sociological attention. What does a defense lawyer actually do in court? How do defense lawyers represent their client beyond the hard paragraphs of the law? By studying this phenomenon in a context where the scope for expressive gestures is limited, it is possible to gain a greater understanding into the often subtle ways in which legal teamwork is performed. This article draws on ethnographic field notes from courtrooms in Sweden to explore how defense lawyers, who have taken an oath to loyally represent clients, do this using (1) little dramatic productions, (2) little dramatic reductions, and (3) directions of teammates. These strategies are found to involve the use of props and the body in order to perform vicarious face-saving practices necessary to maintain professional face and teamface and to manage face threats. Each of these strategies reproduce and reinforce the emotional regime of the courtroom. A Goffmanian framework is used to show how emotions are managed in the courtroom in order to conform to the emotional regime. The findings therefore show how defense lawyers not only represent their clients juridically but also interactionally and introduces the new term “little dramatic reductions,” which is also relevant to other professions involving loyalty and teamwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of mirror neurons opens new doors for ethnography. By attending to these advancements in cognitive science, ethnographers are provided firmer ground for investigating perceptual and emotional dynamics that are outside the realm of conscious deliberative processes. In this article, we explore these extra-deliberative processes in order to posit a new way to collect, analyze, and present findings. By examining how extra-deliberative dynamics shape action in systematic ways, we endeavor to bring together two aspects of sociological practice that have been assumed to be incompatible: (1) analytic efforts to build general theory and (2) a focus on emotions and other extra-deliberative dynamics. We conclude by suggesting that insights garnered through the analysis of extra-deliberative processes are optimally communicated using emotionally evocative writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During fieldwork for my PhD in Oaxaca, Mexico, a serendipitous encounter with a group of displaced Zapotec families triggered an emotional journey against the rules of the academy and an unwitting entrée into ethnographic writing. Via a multilayered text moving between memoir, poetry, and conversations, this retrospective telling of fieldwork reveals what the academic thesis kept hidden. Written a decade ago and stored in a bag, these stories have existed separately from the completed doctoral research, thus highlighting the apparent separateness between the heartfelt experiences of “doing fieldwork” and the academic requirements of “gathering data.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores methodological issues as a prominent subject in ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a specific group of private security officers, namely, armed response officers, in Durban, South Africa. Through analyzing several experiences from the field, this article highlights the dialectic between emotions and participation in the field and its imperative role in analysis of the research setting. This article explores three different modes of participation, namely, active participation, reluctant participation, and passive participation. As a heuristic device, such a typology allows us as researchers to analyze our position, as participants, in relation to other research participants. This exemplifies the importance of the emotionality of field experiences in researching violence (and the perpetrators of violence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents research from a collaborative ethnography in four faith settings in London, UK. In particular, we show how a group of researchers from diverse cultures teach and learn from each other through the use of field narratives. After outlining a sociocultural approach to learning and discussing how faith situates itself within this frame, we show ways in which field narratives provide a bridge between the past, present and future of cultural events and practices and allow a polyphonic gaze by different researchers describing the same setting. We show how researchers learn to reflect upon their own research site, compare it with those of others, and, ultimately, become more aware of their own. This process is iterative and dialogic, which enriches not only the knowledge of the researchers themselves but also provides a mosaic of different interpretations to a wider interested audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents three ethnographic tales of interactions with living room media to help recreate the experience of significant moments in time, of affective encounters at the interface in which there is a collision or confusion of situated and virtual worlds. It draws on a year-long video ethnography of the practice and performance of everyday interactions with living room media. By studying situated activity and the lived practice of (new) media, rather than taking an exclusive focus on the virtual as a detached space, this ethnographic work demonstrates how the situated and mediated clash, or are crafted into complex emotional encounters during everyday living room life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sociology, the movement towards acceptance of emotion within research has been a slow process. Often referred to as the 'reflexive' turn (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), this development has enabled qualitative research to put forward more realistic fieldwork accounts. Drawing upon ethnographic studies on young people, this article explores the idea of a 'hidden ethnography', that is, empirical data not previously published because it may be considered too controversial. The article examines how explanations of research methods in sociology are reluctant to explore the legitimacy of emotional relations developed between the researcher and the researched, and seeks to add to the literature on emotion as a male researcher studying female participants. I argue that qualitative work in sociology needs to consider the existence of the 'hidden ethnography' in order to advance understanding of how studies are carried out and theory constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years demonstration marches have become an important way for the contemporary German far right to appear in public and disseminate their political messages. These actions not only bring together otherwise loosely organized small groups in an emotional collective but also serve to organize, educate, and indoctrinate the followers of the far right. Ethnographic research shows how emotion, ideology, and performance are intertwined dimensions of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this fragment of a socioanalytic account of his own social and intellectual formation, the author recounts the motivations, aims, and circumstances of his fieldwork in Algeria during the war of national liberation and the ‘epistemological experiment’ that he embarked upon by simultaneously taking his childhood village as an object of anthropological inquiry. The conditions of his landing in the French colony, the material and emotional parameters of research in the shanty-towns and countryside of a colonial society ravaged by military repression, and the role of delicate ties with informants are recounted, as are the interplay between personal dispositions, intellectual models, and the division and hierarchy between academic disciplines, in an effort to illumine the conversion of political impulses into scientific endeavours. The author's switch from philosophy to ethnology to sociology emerges as driven by the need to feel useful in the face of harrowing suffering and injustice and rooted in a deep repugnance for the scholastic posture made all the more intolerable in a state of social emergency. The quandaries presented by conducting fieldwork in a situation of war are revealed to be the initial impetus for his abiding concern for epistemic reflexivity. Such ethnography of ethnography can enable the researcher to recover the hidden social and personal springs of her investigations and thereby help convert intuition bred by social familiarity from intellectual handicap to scientific capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to sociological studies of emotions in organizations. It resides upon an innovative move to extend the ethnographic approach to include audio-recording, in this case managerial elites' naturally occurring interactions, to provide the basis for an `empirical filling out' of emotions research. Furthermore, theoretically to develop this field in ways that encompass the simultaneous speaking of emotionality and rationality; Nash's account of rhetoric as emotion is drawn upon. In particular the four discursive constituents which orators are said to need for `moving an audience' are deployed to analytically trace how elites intertwine emotional expressiveness and a rhetoric of rationality to influence management/strategic processes. These four constituents are empathetic matter/great Theme, stance, utterance design (taxis) and utterance relation (lens). Three brief transcribed extracts of elites-at-talk are reproduced from one ethnography to illustrate the scope of a fine-grained analysis of elites' assembly of emotional displays--two are abstracted from the ebb- and-flow of interaction to illustrate everyday `mini-speeches' of `great' oratory and the third specifically illustrates the intricate nature of interaction revealing the ways emotion can be likened to a `barometer of moral and relational ethics'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the experiences of an interdisciplinary research team that engaged in a qualitative research program for over 5 years, beginning with the grant writing process through to knowledge dissemination. We highlight the challenges of constructing shared understanding and developing research synergies, embracing vulnerability and discomfort to advance knowledge, and negotiating risks of legitimacy and transcending disciplinary boundaries. Based on critical reflections from the research team, the findings call attention to the politics of knowledge production, the internal and external obstacles, and the open mindedness and emotional sensitivity necessary for interdisciplinary qualitative research. Emphasis is placed on relational and structural processes and mechanisms to negotiate these challenges and the potential for interdisciplinary research to enhance the significance of scholarly work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]