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

Ethnography is often considered as a suitable methodological approach to explore childhoods, nevertheless, there is limited reflection on ethics in the field in the Global South educational settings, such as China. Previous China-based fieldwork studies suggest complex field relationships as a major ethical challenge. Although the issue is especially prominent in research that contests "normative" Chinese childhoods, it hasn't been sufficiently discussed due to a culture of silence surrounding researchers' emotions and positionality. This paper uses emotional reflexivity as a lens to revisit two Chinese female researchers' experiences of fieldwork, respectively, with left-behind children and disabled children in Chinese primary schools. The analysis examines how we identified ourselves and negotiated complex relationships with school members and unpacks experiences of "sameness" and "otherness" and the vulnerability and creditability impacted by our fluid identities. The paper adds insights into ethical considerations of school-based ethnographic research with diverse children in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The aim of this paper is to provide an insight into the lessons learnt as the primary researcher during an instrumental ethno-case study research project that took place in a mainstream secondary academy that set out to examine the physical education (PE) experiences of adolescent, white, pupils in a 'typical' working-class secondary school (Ayrefield Community School – ACS). With the term instrumental ethno-case study used to reflect the non-continuous nature of the 34 days spent in the school over a 16-month period, the structure and content of the paper aims to provide a greater theoretical and practical understanding of this relatively nuanced and contemporary approach to qualitative research in education. Determined that the study design remained based in ethnography, consideration is also given to the impact of professional and personal time constraints on an ability to engage in a truly immersive ethnographical study. In this regard, the paper also aims to provide additional guidance on the design and implementation of the study and the recording and interpretation of the data for any researcher with similar aims and/or time constraints. In addition, the paper also utilises Norbert Elias' sociological concept of involvement and detachment as the lens through which the juxtaposition between objective researcher and experienced mainstream secondary school teacher was explored and managed throughout the duration of the study. Overall, therefore, the paper aims to provide a theoretical justification for the use of the term instrumental ethno-case study design, additional guidance and lessons learnt on the design and implementation of this approach, and further detail on the extent to which the potential conflict between objective researcher and former school teacher was acknowledged and managed. The project itself primarily set out to examine the physical education (PE) experiences of adolescent, white, pupils in a 'typical' mainstream working-class secondary school (Ayrefield Community School – ACS) and in doing so also sought to explore the attitudes of the pupils in relation to their views on qualifications and education generally, how they spent their leisure time, and more specifically, how their own actions and relationships with their male PE staff came to influence the content and delivery of their PE provision. Therefore, reflecting on the use of the traditional case study methodologies of covert and overt observations, informal guided conversations, and focus group interviews with male pupils and school staff, the paper highlights and examines the practicalities and considerations associated with the selection of, and access to, a 'typical' white, working-class school, how care was taken to encourage 'natural' behaviour during covert and overt observations, the specific nature of informal guided conversations with pupils and staff, and the techniques utilised in order to facilitate focus group interviews with these male adolescent pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

This paper develops and applies a methodology of qualitative inquiry that equips researchers to capture how social actors produce and contest accepted forms of knowledge at the margins of mainstream globalizing discourses in times of crisis. Standing at the intersection between conceptual and empirical research, our methodology builds on the common epistemological premises of 'narrative', as stories constructed and enacted in social life, and 'practice', as tasks and projects composed by 'doings' and 'sayings'. Overcoming the dualism between 'action' and 'discourse' in traditional social theory, this methodology integrates narrative theory and practice theory into a joint framework for fieldwork and interviews. The use of the narrative-practice methodology in ethnographic case studies – such as interpreters' experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar – allows researchers to gain analytical granularity on participants' storied practice and practiced stories of the crisis, to harness 'peripheral' knowledge and refashion public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational research has increasingly recognized violence as an instrument for achieving compliance and maintaining the existing order. However, resisters tend to be portrayed as powerless in the face of this violence or engaging in hopeless acts of resistance. In comparison, by examining the context of violent protests, this paper discusses how activists can endure and use violence as part of their resistance. I build on a 15-month ethnography of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement to illuminate the absorptive resisting work involved in deploying resistance to and through violence. This absorptive resisting work included reducing the repressive effects of violent protests and embracing those effects to generate symbolic and discursive resources against police violence, as well as including violent protest tactics in ways that regenerated those resources. Ultimately, my findings reveal that this absorptive work allowed resisters to withstand violent protests in the short term and reframe them in the long term. This paper thus contributes to studies on resistance to violence by showing how people can effectively and collectively catalyze violence to challenge it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

In the context of debates about organizational space, this paper undertakes a multidimensional spatial analysis of everyday organizing. Drawing on an extensive ethnographic study of a housing estate, we use the territory, place, scale, network framework to reveal processes of everyday spatial production that occur through territorial, place-based, scalar and networked organizing. Foregrounding the interplay of these dimensions, we identify four resulting tensions at work in everyday organizing: conflict and resistance, boundaries and (un)boundedness, stasis and movement and alterity and diversity. We propose that centring attention on these dynamics manifest what might be termed 'organizational geographies'. Thus, we contribute an empirical demonstration of the ways in which organizing as a sociospatial process occurs during everyday life in a more 'informal' site, thereby extending the contextual repertoire of organization studies. We also contribute a methodological approach for organization scholars to analyse everyday spatial production as a multidimensional process, pointing to the potential for greater cross-disciplinary fertilization with human geography in future organization research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In this paper, we examine the relationship between space and entrepreneurship, understood as organization-creation, by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's spatial theorizing. Building on an ethnographic study of the Nordic Start-Up Incubator, we focus on the ongoing material, discursive and affective reconfiguration of space to promote entrepreneurial 'buzz'. We show how emancipatory promises (smoothings) are entangled with a logic of enterprise (striations), and how this ambiguity is enacted (folds) as organization-creation emerges spatially. This allows us to problematize the distinction often made between entrepreneurial spaces of emancipation and managerial spaces of control and to consider how they may co-constitute each other through subtle twists and turns. We conclude by discussing this multiplicity and ambiguity with regard to the politics of entrepreneurial spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how violence is mobilised for control purposes in organisations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at the total institution we name Arrival – a German refugee reception centre – we develop how private security guards engage in practices of signalling and exerting violence vis-à-vis Arrival's residents to enforce rules. Our research contributes to the extant literature in three ways. First, we elucidate how practices of violence, following a logic of escalation and deterrence, work for organisational control purposes. Second, our research shifts the extant focus from discursive to embodied forms of invisibilisation by showing how violence is made simultaneously visible and invisible in its very enactment. Third, it provides insights into situational interactions rather than conditions of violence in total institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper recommends a values-driven regeneration of research ethics for ethnography. In contrast to the current regulatory version of research ethics we propose a more subtle, field-oriented and traditional version, grounded in ethnographic experience. The paper is in three parts. The first part highlights the tacit assumptions of current systems of ethical approval for social research and their unintended and even perverse effects. Ethnography is the focus of the second part, where we highlight the distinctive issues for ethnographic research of current practice. In the final part we argue for a culture of ethnographic work grounded in an ethnographic understanding of social conduct and an ethic of generosity. Defined as a key-value for social sensitivity, this implies abandoning a procedural logic in favour of a values-based research culture faithful to the spirit of ethnographic and qualitative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I make two points about the role of threats for ethnographic fieldwork in contexts suffused by interpersonal violence. First, the experience of implicit and explicit threats operates as a powerful cultural agent that significantly transforms fieldworkers' relationship with the field. Second, subjecting oneself to threats can become a central component of the ethnographic immersion into the field. The notion of "threat wisdom" connects these two points by capturing the emerging competence to handle threats and resulting from "becoming threatened," "becoming threatful," and "becoming threat wise." To develop this argument, I discuss insights from my fieldwork with homeless people using cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, in Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people living with dementia have difficulties at mealtimes, which can result in serious complications for physical and mental health, leading to hospital admissions and even death. However, current training in mealtime care for staff working with this population has been found to be poorly reported, with variable effectiveness. It is essential that care home staff are able to provide good care at mealtimes. This study used ethnography to explore current practice in mealtime care for this population, identify good practice, and understand the factors influencing mealtime care. Approximately 28 h of mealtime observations were conducted in two UK care homes with diverse characteristics. Observations focused on interactions between care staff and residents living with dementia. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were carried out with care home staff, family carers, and visiting health and social care professionals, to explore mealtime care from their perspectives. A constant comparative approach was taken, to probe emergent findings and explore topics in greater depth. Key thematic categories were identified, including: tensions in mealtime care; the symbolic nature of mealtime care; navigating tensions via a person-centred approach; contextual constraints on mealtime care; and teamwork in mealtime care. The findings indicated that a person-centred approach helps carers to find the right balance between apparently competing priorities, and teamwork is instrumental in overcoming contextual constraints. This evidence has contributed to development of a training intervention for care home staff. Future research should investigate the feasibility of mealtime care training in care homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we are interested in how togetherness in workplace friendships is experienced in the absence of physical co-presence. We explore practices through which we-experiences, that is, shared experiences that produce feelings of togetherness, are realized and maintained across time and space and how different we-experiences constitute different modes of togetherness. Findings from our autoethnographic phenomenological study suggest four modes. Transactive togetherness as vivid and intense we-experiences in the face of tight deadlines but little genuine we-experiences at other times. Retrospective togetherness as re-lived we-experiences when shared memories or stories are retold, recalled, and 'brought back to life'. Associative togetherness as we-experiences that emerge in the light of immediate emotional and personal challenges that are addressed collectively. Projective togetherness as anticipated we-experiences that emerge from a compelling vision of each other in our work and personal life. We add to the current conversations on the continuous entanglement and interlocking nature of we-experiences, the temporality of togetherness at work, and how friendships are actively accomplished through individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In carrying out research, qualitative scholars routinely struggle with having to navigate between planned and emergent research design strategies. Pressure from funders and gatekeepers to plan research can be high, but too much planning can interfere with the ethos of discovery that characterizes inductive qualitative research. On the other hand, study designs that are overly emergent present their own array of risks. In this essay, I argue for the integration of planned and emergent approaches to qualitative research design. I outline strategies for making planned research designs more reflexive and emergent, and strategies for making emergent research designs more directive and planned. I present two competencies—conceptual nimbleness and methodological reflexivity—that can be helpful for designing studies in this way and discuss how these deliberately emergent designs should be reported, with a view to enhancing the transparency and trustworthiness of qualitative research methods more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates on the significance of humor and playful interactions in an ethnographic research project among 14- and 15-year-old teenagers in an international middle school in Finland. First, it discusses the role of humor among students and their teachers in the school. Second, the article elaborates on the role humor played when an adult ethnographer was negotiating her role and actions with these teenagers; humor and playful interactions provided useful tools with which to negotiate the researcher's role and made the project a fun and enjoyable experience for the researcher and participants alike. The article employs the concept of reality play when analyzing everyday interactions in a school context, and it argues both that the use of humor can contribute to forming meaningful and ethically sound relationships between researcher and participants and that elaborations on research and ethics should pay more attention to the significance of humor and playfulness as essential parts of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I describe two fieldwork experiences dealing with traumatic subject matter: a three-month trip to the Russian Federation, researching the crimes of Stalin against the Soviet population, and a two-week odyssey across Poland, researching memorialization of the Holocaust as it occurred there. I had a much more difficult time on the Polish trip. These trips took place at different times, and my positionality had changed dramatically between the two experiences. The other relevant factor in each case was the nature of the material itself and the extent to which I was exposed to it. The Stalinist Terror is much more submerged in Russian society, for example, and it was often challenging to find evidence that it had occurred, as this involved travel to often far-flung Gulag and mass execution sites. In the Polish case, however, the Holocaust narrative and evidence of its occurrence was front and center in my experiences there, to the extent that the ubiquity of sites where terrible events occurred became overwhelming. The interaction of my positionality and the extent to which I was exposed to different types of traumatic experience, led to widely differing emotional tolls on my psyche in each case. I hope an analysis of this interaction, and the differing effects it produced provides information about planning and executing research on traumatic subjects that is valuable to others preparing to undertake it. (Or perhaps it will provide a cautionary tale about what to avoid). This article adds to the literature on personal negative outcomes experienced by those researching traumatic subject matter, particularly in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman is one of sociology's most influential thinkers. Scholars debate the extent to which he worked in competing theoretical traditions (e.g., interactionist or structuralist), yet few acknowledge his intellectual indebtedness to animal ethology. This article traces how naturalistic studies of paralinguistic animal communication influenced Goffman's corpus and specifies the ideas he built on from that field, especially territoriality and ritualized display. Goffman's comparative approach to animal and human interaction reveals the shortcomings of sociologists' lingua-centric approach to interaction; elevates animals to social actors, capable of metacommunication, reading others' intentions, and adjusting their behavior accordingly; and humbles humans, who he finds enacting rituals of civility for the same reason animals engage in ritualized display: to manage threats and facilitate bonding. Goffman's thesis on the similarities between animal and human social behavior compels sociology to consider animal studies, and his use of ethology helps reconcile his interactionist and Durkheimian tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes an unexpected methodological shift made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during doctoral research, and exemplifies reflexivity in action whilst negotiating my complex positionality as both a researcher and a social worker. The first UK national lockdown was announced after I had conducted 3 months of ethnographic data collection in a local authority adult social work team, thus halting my research. As society shut down, face-to-face research was paused overnight, however, the local authority continued to provide essential services and support. Forging a path forward, I successfully gained a job practising as a social worker within the team and completed a supplementary ethics application to include auto-ethnographic data which would complement the existing ethnography. Although practicing reflexivity and analysing positionality are established and encouraged parts of ethnographic research, how a researcher actively conducts them varies and usually remains unseen. Methodologies are often presented in a sanitised and polished manner, depriving the reader of the messy yet informative reality of research. This article draws upon fieldnotes to practically illustrate and bring this reflexivity on positionality to the fore. As I move from participant-observer to complete-participant, the findings zoom in on my experience of navigating positionality, revealing a micro picture of the details and subtleties of this process. This unexpected research journey enhanced my level of intimacy with the phenomenon, the research site, and the participants. Overall, this example of enacting reflexivity helps to bridge the gap between how positionality is theorised and how it actively practiced. Finally, this article is a call for more open, deeper, and continual reflexivity on our positionality as researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional entanglements developing between researchers and participants are an unavoidable experience in qualitative research, whose methods largely rely on emotions, intimacy, and relationships. Despite urged to exercise reflexivity, researchers rarely have the opportunity to deconstruct the emotional aspects of their investigations, which are often perceived as problems rather than as resources. Drawing on feminist methodology, this article argues that emotional entanglements should be considered neither as methodological "troubles" that must be avoided at all costs nor as strategies to gain richer data, but as important ethical moments that can help researchers reconsider, re-adjust, and update the tools they employ to collect and disseminate data. Using "confessional tales" written during qualitative studies I have conducted with young people involved in a variety of subcultural practices, I explore strategies for dealing with emotional entanglements in a meaningful and ethical way. In so doing, this article aims to add to the literature on the tensions between formal ethics and ethics in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and policymakers have consistently argued for the importance of coherence in teacher education (TE). Despite this attention to coherence, challenges of fragmentation and disconnect remain, and little research exists on how study program leaders (SPLs) in TE work to achieve coherence. This article explores how SPLs in two selected TE institutions in Norway perceive coherence and what strategies they use to create coherent TE programs. The two case studies use an ethnographic approach and report on repeated qualitative interviews with seven SPLs, supported by short-term observations over a period of one academic year. The analysis contributes to the small but emergent literature on how SPLs conceptualize coherence and identifies six strategies that SPLs use to navigate persistent barriers within a diverse and autonomous faculty in their ongoing efforts to strengthen coherence in TE programs. Implications for study program leadership in TE are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly inquiry into the experiences of women researchers engaged in ethnographic fieldwork is a growing area of study. While important to feminist criminology, most of the literature addressing this topic comes from sociology and anthropology. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research in the United States, conducted in gendered, sexualized and "taboo" spaces, this study examines two women's experiences. Findings indicate that women researchers engage in significant emotional work to not only gain access to these research sites and spaces, but they rely on several different techniques to mitigate potential harm to their person, including situating the experience outside of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What sounds and noises does a future building make? How do architectural acousticians listen to a building in the making? How do you measure something that is not yet there? What is the epistemological status of approximations? Following the listening practices of acousticians as they measure a future experience of sound through a mock-up and of noise through an incomplete simulation, this article explores the challenge of fixing sound and noise as elusive objects of knowledge. Based on an ethnography of a building project, we see how architectural acousticians rely on what they call "approximations," both the inscriptions and inscriptive work used to give traces of reality to future lived experiences of sound and noise that they hope "would be" there. Bringing together sound studies, ethnographies of architectural practice and science and technology studies accounts of inscription practices, the article argues for attention to be placed on the ephemera of knowledge and design practices, which allows analytic focus to remain upstream between the possible and the actual. Situated within the practices of the acousticians, we can witness some of the ways that sound and noise take shape within a building project, grosso modo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Eduards Volters (1856–1941), an important ethnographer working in the first part of his career with the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, helped demonstrate the value of first-hand observation, social connection, and social context to ethnography through his research in Lithuania from 1882 to 1918. He did so at a time few of his contemporaries embraced his methods. The article seeks to show Volters' developing theoretical and political strategies during a period of developing Lithuanian nationalism in an emerging Lithuanian nation—a nationalism with which he was in deep sympathy. I focus on the following questions: the meaning of Volters' travels to Lithuania Minor and Lithuania; his contributions to what are now called borderland identities studies and his critical methodological and theoretical approach to the ethnography of his day. That critical approach involved ethnography as a part of political activism on the part of both researcher and research subjects. The piece will contribute to the critique of centralization of imperialism studies and will explore by comparison Volters' relationships with both intellectual predecessors and his contemporaries in Lithuania, Europe, and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective reflection, which has become a de rigueur activity in teacher training and professional development, is predicated upon Schön's theory of reflective practice. This concept, according to which people learn to be reflective-in-action through reflection on practice, relates primarily to individual and one-on-one mentorship processes. The shift from individual to collective processes has gone largely unstudied and unproblematized. This study of collective teacher reflection in a professional development workshop calls prevailing assumptions into question by bringing an alternative lens, textual trajectories, to bear on this ubiquitous activity to better account for oft-ignored issues of context and identity. Using linguistic ethnographic methods, it traces textual trajectories of key ideas indexed in a collective reflection event. Key findings include the nonlinearity of the reflective process and the centrality of identity-work in collective teacher reflection. This study thus reveals functions of this ritual that belie its ostensible purposes and suggest a rethinking of this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formerly preferred, but increasingly required, a college degree has become a prerequisite in a competitive job market. For Black undergraduates who continue to face systemic disparities in college completion, gaps in hiring are exacerbated by unequal access to leadership positions and professional training, such as internships, during college. Since informal connections and social networks heavily influence occupational access, this research article presents a relational, ethnographic approach to better understand the opportunities and constraints of networking for Black undergraduates in an urban campus context. This study advances prior social capital research by not only offering where networks exist but also presenting how they form and develop over time and across space. The findings show how Black students attending an urban, selective, and historically White institution (HWI) do not merely discover connections but deliberately construct them, illuminating the process through which social capital is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immersive ethnographic tradition has strong potential to contribute to a deeper sociological understanding of the construction, maintenance and processes of powerful groups. However, ethnography as a method – and sociology as a discipline – has tended to focus more on developing techniques and toolkits for studying what Bourdieu and Wacquant call a "poverty population" rather than elites systems of power. In response, this article builds a much needed 'toolkit' for would-be-ethnographers, examining how ethnographic methodologies can be adapted to critically examine the elite cultural fields. It does so by adapting Desmond's four foci of relational ethnographic: fields, boundaries, processes and cultural conflict. Adopting a relational orientation, this article provides an illustration of how ethnography can be used in the study of powerful cultural fields, using the context of the City of London, and thereby forming the basis for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on various ethnographic procedures and findings in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), addressing the question of how EM and CA relate to ethnography. Given the obvious answer that EM includes ethnography, we also argue that CA does as well, though just how EM and CA do so needs to be qualified and specified. Ethnographic procedures have been used in EM for decades, although often in non-standard ways, and currently with some ambivalence. In CA, it is more common to disavow ethnography in favor of recorded and transcribed interactional exchanges. However, we argue that CA often makes use of ethnographic insights drawn from extended study of recordings, while also identifying "ethnographic" inquiries of a sort that take place within the organizational settings studied. Our aim is to identify the place of ethnography within EMCA by taking an inventory of ways "ethnography" has been used, invoked, produced, and/or disavowed in particular studies and to highlight what is distinctive about those various EMCA uses of ethnography in contrast with more conventional ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the authors' ethnographies in the fields of taiji, ballet, and yoga, this article outlines and reflects the theoretical and empirical scope of what we mean by "ethnomethodological ethnography." Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EM/CA) have been juxtaposed and pit against various forms of ethnography and vice versa —for example, by criticizing various theoretical underpinnings of ethnographies, viewing EM/CA as a very limited micro-sociological research method, or by critiquing (auto-)ethnography as egocentric, self-absorbed, and ill-equipped to account for the detail and sequential organization of natural occurring actions and circumstances. Contrary to such deliberations, we highlight their common interest in putting empirical social phenomena first. In getting access to and describing what social phenomena consist of, members' competencies and detailed analysis of recorded data mutually elaborate each other. In this sense, they are potentially not only mutually inclusive but, as we shall argue, the entire field of EM/CA studies depends to some degree on actually doing ethnography. Based on our own ethnographic research, we will then zoom in on the case of taiji practice to highlight the relevance of autoethnography and evaluate how ethnographic reflections of self and body constitute and may foster "uniquely adequate" qualitative research. Ultimately, the aim is to explicate how EM/CA research policies differ from textbook oriented instructions and are better considered as praxeological respecifications of doing ethnomethodological ethnography in particular cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text discusses the relationship between ethnomethodology and ethnography and sketches what can be called an ethnomethodological ethnography. To do so, it shows that Garfinkel and his collaborators work ethnographically in order to adequately describe social phenomena and make their phenomenal field properties noticeable. To highlight the distinctive features of ethnomethodological ethnography, the text first discusses other ethnographic approaches. Differences between these approaches and the ethnomethodological ethnography become apparent through two argumentative steps: first, by discussing Garfinkel's reflections on ethnomethodology and ethnography, and second, by discussing actual ethnographies by Garfinkel's collaborators. The text concludes with a general reflection on the methodological principles of ethnomethodological ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers can use data visualization techniques to explore, analyze, and present data in new ways. Although quantitative data are visualized most often, recent innovations have brought attention to the potential benefits of visualizing qualitative data. In this article, the authors demonstrate one way researchers can use networks to analyze and present ethnographic interview data. The authors suggest that because many respondents know one another in ethnographic research, networks are a useful tool for analyzing the implications of respondents' familiarity with one another. Moreover, respondents often share familiar cultural references that can be visualized. The authors show how visualizing respondents' ties in conjunction with their shared cultural references sheds light on the different systems of meaning that respondents within a field site use to make sense of the social phenomena under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with visual impairments partake in recreational running with sighted guide runners. In the Netherlands, the Running Blind foundation enables blind and visually impaired runners and their guides to experience the social and physical benefits of outdoor recreation together. While sport policies and programs in the Netherlands call for more inclusive sport practices, it is often unclear what 'inclusion' means for the people involved. This article explores how a sense of inclusion is constituted, experienced and reflected on within guided running. Based on three months of immersive, sensory ethnographic fieldwork in guided running, we argue that merely integrating disabled sports practitioners into mainstream, that is, ableist sporting contexts does not increase inclusion for people with different abilities. Instead, guided running ensembles challenge 'the language of inclusion' by showing how a sense of inclusion evolves from an empathic engagement with the environment, the people and the tethered running bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As has recently been highlighted, despite the prevalence of methodological "confessional tales" in ethnography generally, the challenges of undertaking ethnographic research specifically in institutional sports settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a 3-year ethnographic study of competitive swimming in the United Kingdom (UK), here we explore some of the practical challenges of balancing different elements of the researcher's role when undertaking ethnographic "insider" research in familiar settings. In particular, we consider the difficulties of balancing the role of a doctoral researcher and the chosen research role of a volunteer coach with a competitive swimming program. Employing the anthropological concept of liminality, we also analyze the lived challenges of leaving a highly familiar field and entering a state of liminality, where the researcher was caught on the threshold betwixt and between a return to full-time employment in the former "known" role of coach, and a move forward to embrace a new "unknown" role as a full-time member of academic staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we recount our experiences learning from and with Latinx children of immigrants in urban schools. Highlighting how insights gleaned from our respective ethnographic projects have led us to embrace more explicit commitments to participatory engagement, we consider how young people's perspectives can and should fundamentally shift adults' understanding of their communicative practices and linguistic ingenuity. We end by articulating a utopian vision for educational ethnography and language education in urban schools, one characterized by multidirectional and intergenerational learning, and in which critical pedagogical praxis emerges as researchers and teachers engage in dialogue with Latinx children of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much should ethnographers involve themselves with the people, places, and processes they study? One answer has become increasingly popular: invert the standard method of participant observation into observant participation. This article draws on an ethnography of ambulance work to consider the trade-offs between these approaches. My fieldwork included "ride-alongs" with labor and management at a private ambulance firm in California (participant observation) and short-term employment as a novice emergency medical technician at the same company (observant participation). Beyond a simplistic distinction in "empirical depth," I identify three issues at stake between participant observation and observant participation: field positioning, analytic gaze, and data assembly. Where participant observation presents more opportunities for mobile positioning, outward gazing, and inscription, observant participation presents more opportunities for fixed positioning, inward gazing, and incarnation. In addition to justifying such contrasts, I consider the advantages of mixing these styles into a hybrid approach when feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada, different categories of nursing professionals, including registered nurses and practical nurses, often "collaborate" to provide care to patients. How their collaboration is currently conceptualized in the literature varies; and these conceptualizations are not always contextualized by the complex sociopolitical environment in which nursing professionals work. The purpose of this study was to explicate how different categories of nursing professionals (registered nurses and practical nurses) worked together to provide patient care after a provincial health authority implemented a new nursing care delivery model to "optimize" patient care. The authors used Smith's institutional ethnography to guide the study, and data collection methods included observing, conducting interviews, and identifying the texts activated through the nursing professionals' work. Data analysis focused on the social organization of the nursing professionals collaboration, while keeping the complex contexts within they completed their daily work in view. The article concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a rugby organisation, in which a distinct configuration of hyper-masculinity exists as the hegemonic one. Using three storified accounts that emerged during ethnographic research, empirics show that when a player's body fails to align him with hegemonic masculine ideals, he encounters an identity-threat and a separation from the organisational collective. In turn, a player participates in embodied remedial identity-work processes, to (re)accomplish hegemonic masculinity and (re)integrate with the organisational collective, using his body as an identity-resource to counter the identity-threat. Empirics reveals the extent to which the body underpins expressions of hegemonic masculinity, and how important the body is as a site that is used to symbolically maintain a viable organisational identity. Ontologically, it is emphasised that men whose bodies appear to fit normative organisational ideals do not necessarily encounter the embodied aspects of their organisational experiences unproblematically; rather, their bodies – like those of less normative actors – are vulnerable to identity threats and a source of exclusion. This encourages scholars to think about the relationship between embodiment, gender, hegemony and integration in organisational settings in more nuanced ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers—a phenomenon we term the "engagement as a service" market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured from the scrutiny of platforms, their users, and researchers alike. In this article, we propose a mixed-methods approach to make visible the relationship between the engagement market and platform governance, the latter of which increasingly aims to moderate account behavior in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity—what we refer to as "authenticity governance." By developing this approach, we explore the relationship between the engagement market and platform ecosystems through three case studies: (1) engagement market responses to platform governance; (2) the evolution of engagement as a service; and (3) testing the quality of engagement as a service on Instagram. These investigations allow us to comprehend disinformation as an ongoing negotiation between the engagement market and authenticity governance. Overall, our three integrated approaches can help researchers move forward with the empirical study of disinformation markets that operate at the periphery of platform ecosystems. In short, this article presents a methodological outlook for analyzing (in)authentic engagements as a form of disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean for an organization "to exist"? Building upon the philosophical notion of ontologies as theories of existence, I outline a theory of organizational ontology supported by the premise that organizations contain implicit existential conventions that provide their members with an understanding of what their joint existence is. This study aims to answer two questions. First, what constitutes an organizational ontology? Second, how can this be accessed and represented? Using a methodology informed by cultural interpretation, I ground this study empirically in ethnographic fieldwork at a not-for-profit organization devoted to teaching math to "left behind" children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]