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Axel Sommerfelt's paper for the symposium organized by Fredrik Barth ahead of the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries is given a broader readership in this issue. This biography provides some background to the perspectival differences between Axel Sommerfelt and Barth, that revolve around issues of political inequality, experience and historicity. Axel Sommerfelt shared Barth's anti-essentialist view on ethnicity, but did not fully embrace the instrumentalist underpinnings of Barth's perspective. He was theoretically influenced by the Manchester school, and directed attention to political domination from the point of view of the dominated, a focus that grew out of his ethnography from Ruwenzori in Uganda. Judicial institutions constituted an important arena for the negotiation of ethnic boundaries, and specifically, Toro-Konzo relations were partly shaped in judicial contexts that Toro controlled, under British protectorate supervision. His interest in resistance was also influenced by his upbringing in Norway during Nazi occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the impact of the book People's Law and State Law: the Bellagio Papers, edited by Anthony Allott and Gordon Woodman, published in 1985. It sets out why I consider this publication to be a seminal text in establishing and developing the field of legal pluralism, which had a great impact on both the development of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and on my own development as a young legal scholar. In looking beyond the text, I consider the ways in which scholars have engaged with the book's call for legal and social science to "work from a new map". In doing so I explore a recent arena of scholarship involving international intervention. The article highlights the important contribution that empirical studies can make to research on legal pluralism, by moving beyond the binaries of state and non-state actors, as well as through pursuing how scholars are adopting a more integrated and relational approach to law, one that may involve breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I explore how concepts such as space and time contribute to a multi-dimensional, scalar perception of law at odds with a formalist, state-centred view of legal pluralism. This allows new insights to be generated into the operation of plural legal structures and constellations in which people operate allowing for a view of law that involves multiple networks of relations cutting across international, national and local boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection: By Jason M. Gibson. The collection in question in Gibson's study is that assembled by linguist and ethnographer T.G.H. ("Ted") Strehlow, now housed at the purpose-built Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. This brings me to the second innovation that Gibson makes in approaching Strehlow's archive: his decision to focus on the work that Strehlow did with the Anmatyerr. [Extracted from the article]

Following my original paper on the history of the concept of the chaîne opératoire, Audouze and some colleagues responded by accusing me of being biased and defamatory in my exposé. In my response here I offer further evidence in support of my argument and, most importantly, suggest that the concept of the chaîne opératoire (1) is not the creation of a single man – André Leroi-Gourhan – but should be considered as the product of a time and a state of mind shared by many researchers; and (2) was introduced to prehistory (and lithic studies) by Jacques Tixier and Daniel Cahen in the late 1970s, independently of the complex filiation from ethnology to prehistory on the side of Leroi-Gourhan's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue offers a substantial contribution to the field, outlining how materiality and embodiment offer insights into science learning with respect to argumentation, use of diagrams and gestures to understand abstract concepts, the role of materiality in digital learning and the importance of material and embodied interactions in investigations, plurilingual settings and in the positioning and identities of learners of science. This paper responds to the special issue by outlining a distinctive theoretical framework for understanding materiality and embodiment in science education: a conceptualisation of material-dialogic space. Contrasting this framework with the multimodal, social semiotic and narrative ethnographic frames used in the studies in this special issue, this paper argues that by examining materiality as voices within a material-dialogic space, new insights into dialogic learning and 'becoming' in science are possible. In this paper, I discuss the papers in this special issue using the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space, grouped according to three areas of interest in science education: methods of analysing materiality, meaning-making in science through 'doing' and 'thinking' science, and science identities. A means by which material-dialogic space might be examined empirically is proposed, and how this enables an approach to think about thinking and doing science that focuses on the relationality of materials, bodies and language in science meaning-making is explored. The notion of becoming, changing and being changed through participation in a material-dialogic relational space is proposed as an approach to thinking about 'being' in science and science identities. The role of material-dialogic space with respect to spaces of science learning is raised as a key question. This paper highlights the lively open questions in the field of materiality and embodiment in science education, whilst offering the concept of material-dialogic space as an important avenue for studying these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teach for Australia was announced by the Australian Government in 2008, at a corporate dinner sponsored by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, hosting New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Conceptualising Teach for Australia as a polycentric policy network anchored in venture philanthropy, this paper examines how networks mobilise major government reform, drawing upon both market and state. As an organisation founded, staffed and registered by a major global consultancy firm (Boston Consultancy Group), the paper critiques and questions representation, divisibility and immutability. By drawing upon network ethnography, following people and policy, the paper traces the beginnings of Teach for Australia through inaugural founders, focusing upon co-affiliations. Mapping a heterarchical and polycentric network of non-state and state actors, it highlights indivisible flows of people, money and policy. Thus, this paper seeks to indicate how policy networks embedded in venture philanthropy mobilise policy, whilst being reliant upon formal bureaucracies. This is governance with government. Teach for Australia highlights the nexus between private and public, and fuses together critical connections between market and state, bolstering a major venture philanthropic network that chiefly impacts public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Play is a highly valued pedagogy in early learning settings around the world. Supporters of play have emphasised the benefits of this approach in promoting children's development and learning and their alleged freedom to choose, explore, and follow their interests. Feminist research, however, has shown that play contexts can be key sites that perpetuate gender inequalities. Building on this scholarship, I apply a critical feminist lens to examine the gendered effects of a recent shift in a Canadian province towards full-day play-based learning in kindergarten. Analysis of ethnographic data collected in two classrooms reveals that not all children may benefit from play-based learning. Instead, the findings show that the play settings in this study implicitly propagated patriarchal values that upheld hierarchal gender divisions and legitimized sexist practices among children in play. Specifically, in this paper I examine the subordination of girls through role allocations in the big blocks center. Given these findings, I discuss the need for critical gender literacy and transformative action among early education stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While methodologies are often presented as standardised procedures which, under specified conditions, should lead to the same conclusions, this case study presents the complex and deeply personal process of research (Addey and Piattoeva 2022). We analyse our application of network ethnography – an approach presented by Ball (2016) – to the study of contractors developing international large-scale assessments, exploring how we, as scholars, become with our methodology and navigate the 'messiness' of research (Law 2004). Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand the constitutive role of methodology and performativity of knowledge-making (Law and Singleton 2013, Rimpiläinen 2015), we show how methodological decisions construct what is studied and ourselves. Finally, we discuss challenges of visual representation, applying Galloway's (2011) 'conversion rules' to examine what was unrepresented – or unrepresentable. This paper shows the complex, subjective, and provisional nature of knowledge, theorising 'heterogeneity and variation' (Law 2004) as an inherent part of methodological application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heritage is defined and maintained through complex and changing processes. In what ways might heritage scholars and practitioners understand dynamic complexities theoretically, methodologically and ethically? Through reflections on involvement in environmental and cultural heritage initiatives with Maya communities in southern Belize, this paper argues for an explicit forefronting of community aims and goals in heritage-focused project design and implementation. It demonstrates how cultural anthropologists involved in collaborative projects with archaeologists, non-governmental and/or community organisations may use ethnographic approaches to push collectively towards decolonial, community archaeologies. The challenges of ethnographers and archaeologists working together to document heritage past and present are critically and reflexively analysed, using frameworks rooted in environmental anthropology to capture the fluid and negotiated nature of heritage constructions by exploring what it means to live a 'good life' in Maya communities in Belize. The insights generated for developing a decolonising approach for future work of this type are also considered. By challenging what constitutes project 'success', and discussing the questions simultaneously posed and revealed by the long-term community projects detailed here, the paper argues for a more collaborative, nuanced and fluid conceptualisation of what constitutes heritage, and who is served by its documentation and dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on migrant youth's school transitions has focused on the country of residence, ignoring migrant youth's pre-migration lives in the country of origin. Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between Ghana and Germany, this paper instead analyses school transitions through migrant youth's mobility trajectories, encompassing all geographic moves and concurrent family constellations over time and space, both before and after migration. A mobility lens shows how resources gained in the country of origin – including confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability – help migrant youth navigate their school transitions in the country of residence, thus becoming forms of transnational cultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we are interested in how ethnographic research can contribute to the promotion of public deliberation. We do not use ethnography only to study deliberative processes but rather we intend to interpret ethnographic research as a social practice, and we research conditions under which ethnographic research might have deliberative consequences. The paper summarizes the results of the multidisciplinary research project Stories of Drought, which combines natural and social sciences in its approach. The project aims to understand how people in Czech rural areas respond to localized effects of climate change, especially drought. Following a systemic approach to deliberative democracy, we study how ethnography contributes to fulfilling three deliberative functions: (1) the epistemic function; (2) the ethical function and (3) the democratic function. In the context of irrigation disputes in South Moravia, we map the arguments of main actors and critical tensions in local discourses. We conclude that ethnographic research, due to its hybrid position between different sources of knowledge, its institutionally recognized expertise and its ability to establish an ethnographer as a trustworthy actor, can outweigh local critical power imbalances blocking deliberative capacity in local policy systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that power promised to England's teachers by the 2010 'Importance of Teaching' white paper has rather played out as a reformulation of methods of policymaking to more indirect modes of government control. I trace the growth of government control in English schools, promised front-line power in 2010 and a rise in non-statutory guidance after this point. Taking an actor–network theory approach to ethnographic data I then describe how a school takes up one such non-statutory educational initiative – 'Maths Mastery'. Focusing on early stages of the school's adoption of the initiative, I trace associations of actors which problematize existing practices for the teaching of maths and how the initiative is imbued with authority in relation to these. I argue that the ways in which certain actors – statutory education policy and government funding – associate with the 'optional' initiative reveals a 'back door' control of teacher agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derived from an ethnography of working cultures and practices at a bike shop in the North of England, this paper rests on a critical application of social practice theories of literacy (Literacy Studies) in order to explore the complex and heterogeneous literacy practices of cycle technicians. Drawing on a series of vignettes constructed from the ethnographic data, the paper demonstrates the variety of experiences of both formal and informal learning that underpin the literacy practices of the cycle workshop. In addition to providing an account of a qualified and specialist workforce that is under-represented in extant research literature, the paper also provides an exemplar for ethnographic research as a vehicle for exploring literacy practices. The paper also suggests that ongoing debates concerning transferable workplace skills can be enriched through considering situated, contextualised literacy events. The paper concludes by arguing that for cycle technicians, and perhaps other occupations as well, Literacy Studies can generate rich and complex accounts that unpack the textual practices found alongside the occupational expertise and competence being observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In seeking to explore the meaning of chronic and chronicity, the association with infertility is neither immediate nor evident. However, this paper explores this relationship by analyzing the idea of infertility in relation to chronicity. In the linkages that come forth the idea of chronic lifestyle emerging from certain ways of being and living, as well the imaginings associated with the chronic body become important nodes of exploring the relationship between infertility and chronicity. Most importantly, the role that time plays in marking the chronic state is seen to be especially potent in the practice of infertility treatment, and the narratives that emerge around its temporal inevitability. The rhetoric that marks the diagnosis and prescription of treatment is often based on the identification of the body as susceptible to reproductive decline and failure, due to the contingencies of modern living. This often translates into a more sustained involvement with ARTs, which may or may not fulfil the required desire for a child. In this paper I seek to analyse the ways in which practitioners of infertility medicine create an image of an affliction that borders on chronicity. In the process, I question the idea of both chronic diseases and chronicity by looking at how illness is imagined in narratives that IVF specialists create in public, and through the idea of a cure for infertility. By analysing data collected through ethnographic fieldwork, this paper aims to build on the idea of the chronic as inevitable within clinical discourse and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand journalism, we need to understand how people understand journalism. We need to examine what I define as “folk theories of journalism”, actually existing popular beliefs about what journalism is, what it does, and what it ought to do that people use to make sense of journalism across sources of news, means of accessing news, and ways of engaging with news. In this paper, I use data from interviews and focus groups to identify different and sometimes contradictory views of the role played by a local newspaper in Denmark to develop the notion of folk theories of journalism. I reconstruct three different folk theories in the case community around conceptions of relevance and place, one defining the local newspaper as relevant and local (“our newspaper”), a second defining it as relevant, but geographically or politically biased (“their newspaper”), and a third defining it as neither relevant nor local (“what newspaper?”). I show that the nominally “same” newspaper means different things to people depending on which folk theory they see it through and argue that journalism studies need to pay more attention to the different ways in which people interpret journalism to understand it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper assesses the relevance of the knowledge base conceptualization and the relationship between the symbolic knowledge base and the spatiality of knowledge flow in the context of the animation industry in Ireland. The paper draws on findings from a study of four innovation case studies. In broad terms, the findings provide further support for the applicability of the knowledge base approach and the association of the animation industry with the symbolic knowledge base. However, in relation to the spatiality of knowledge flows, the findings contradict the theoretically deduced postulations. Nearly all of the knowledge sources are located overseas. In addition, the study finds little support for the role of local buzz in knowledge flow. The local animation community “buzzes globally” at international events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: The aim of the synthesis was to develop a new understanding about the influences on communication in interprofessional teams from therapist and nurse perspectives. Methods: Six electronic databases were searched, combined with citation tracking and hand searching, yielded 3994 papers. Three researchers were involved in screening and quality appraisal, resulting in 18 papers for synthesis, using the process of meta-ethnography. Concepts were identified, compared and translated under five category headings. Two researchers mapped interpretative summaries and a line of argument was created. Results: The line of argument is that four inter-related contingences underpin effective communication between therapists and nurses. Effective communication depends on there being a genuine need to give and receive information for patient care, the capacity to attend to, hold, and use information, and opportunities to share space to enable communication to occur. The fourth contingency is good quality relationships and this is the glue that holds the contingencies together. Conclusion: This synthesis has provided an opportunity to illuminate how therapists and nurses accomplish interprofessional work through communication. The contingencies of need, capacity, opportunity, and quality of relationships create a new structure for understanding what underpins communication between these two groups. Need, capacity and opportunity should be understood as contingencies that underpin effective communication about patients, strongly centered on the fourth contingency, quality of relationships between professionals. Therapists and nurses should examine what information they genuinely need from each other to effectively conduct integrated care, from the perspective of both giving and receiving information. Consideration should be given to whether a culture of reciprocity might expand the capacity of professionals to attend to, hold and use the information they share about patients. Therapists and nurses should examine how the way they share space on the ward creates or limits their opportunities to communicate about patients and develop relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses collaborative ethnographic work investigating multilingualism within education in Botswana, Tanzania, and Zambia. The paper takes a reflective perspective on how research is conducted and the role that multilingualism and collaboration can play in the research process itself. As a team of thirteen individuals, working across four countries, we bring a range of multilingual repertoires to the project. In this paper we discuss three principles which have been important in guiding our thinking and practice. These are: researching multilingually; researching collaboratively; and researching responsively. We discuss the rationale behind these principles and the role they play in our work. We then discuss challenges and successes which have emerged from implementing these principles in practice and use these to outline a framework that those interested in conducting similar work can use to guide their own thinking and practices. The data discussed in this article consist of a corpus of vignettes from members of the project team. Ten vignettes have been collaboratively analysed adopting a thematic analysis. Tasked with reflecting on, and evaluating, the principles the vignette data provide insight into the opportunities and challenges of working multilingually, collaboratively, and responsively within a team with diverse linguistic repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One proposed strategy to overcome labour shortages in male-dominated jobs is to attract female workers. This has been the case for lorry driving in the UK. These efforts, however, often work to reproduce binary gendered stereotypes, or seek to include women without questioning how working conditions and everyday embodied work itself constructs gender roles and difference and is differentially experienced. In this paper, we highlight differentiated lorry driving bodies at work, centring lorries as an essential part of global logistical systems. Empirically drawing from interviews and mobile ethnographies with freight drivers in England, we tell a series of composite stories which uncover gendered ideals of worker-bodies, and embodied experiences of mobilities. With the gendered, embodied life's work of lorry driving remaining largely invisible and poorly understood, we illustrate the complex intersections between places, people, materialities and forms of work. Through this paper, we show how (gendered) narratives and bodily difference are both reproduced and disrupted through lorry driving work. We argue that only through recognising – and destabilising - the gendered re/production of mobile work will other logistical futures be made possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leisure-led regional development refers to leisure as a mechanism to achieve broad societal goals within a region: economic revenue, employment and service levels but also cultural or conservationist ambitions. Engaging in such leisure-led regional development proves a complex matter. Based on ethnographies of leisure in the Dutch province of Fryslân conducted over a five-year period between 2013 and 2018, this paper argues that combining theoretical understanding of complexity theories with analyses based on both evolutionary and discursive approaches results in enhanced understanding of the interactions shaping uncertainty in leisure development. Results of field observations, interviews, participation and document analysis show that planning for leisure-led regional development should consider autonomous and evolutionary processes, whilst focusing on purposefully influencing the interactions and perspectives of actors in leisure. More precisely, this means shaping the narratives and practices in these institutions which make specific interactions more likely to develop. This can be undertaken by including in planning efforts the individual perspectives and emotions among actors in the regional leisure sector. To cope with uncertainty at the heart of leisure-led regional development, an adaptive strategy should be adopted, both in the planning efforts taken and in how such efforts are monitored and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on ethnographic research, explores the material conditions of price realization, in the context of a poverty-reduction intervention implemented in rural areas of an East African country. It describes a pricing experiment conducted by development economists on people living in extreme poverty, with real money. Using pricing as an analytic prism, I discuss the politics of a market-based poverty-alleviation project. The goal of the experiment was to identify a price that ultra-poor, off-grid consumers would be willing to pay to acquire a solar light. It consisted of testing different prices simultaneously and led to a situation in which participants within the same village were offered to buy the same object at a randomized price. The paper details the operations through which prices were turned into experimental objects and analyses the consequences of the particular way in which prices were materialized. As a result of the experimental pricing process, prices were carefully detached from the solar lights for sale, and carefully attached to randomly selected people. I show that beyond testing the villagers' ability to pay a given price, the experiment aims at testing their ability and stimulating their desire to behave as payers in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the emergence of venture philanthropy in public schools in Australia, focusing on policy networks and policy mobility. It seeks to analyse how policy is mobilised and leveraged via networks, focusing on the initiative of a national education charity with deductible gift recipient status, and a national research education institute. By drawing on network ethnography, and following people, things, and money, the paper studies the restructuring of traditional government and its relationship to, and with, policy networks. Policy networks, as shown in this paper, are highly diverse in shape and form, consisting of powerful human actors, but also influential non-human actors that take on lateral scope including government reports, policy documents, and parliamentary legislation. The restructuring of the state apparatus is not a hollowing out of the state, but rather the state performs a central node within a policy network, challenging the notion that non-state actors supersede the role of the state. Policy networks represent highly valuable commodities and tend to be characterised by their reproductive values. These networks are tangibly reshaping the way money and commodities are circulated, offering a transactional currency and commodity within a marketplace, and reaching into public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western liberal media theories often neglect to recognize "news translation" as one of the journalistic practices. This paper problematizes this dominant understanding of journalistic practice and expands the Bourdieusian media sociology project beyond western media systems by applying it to Indian agency journalism. A case study of the United News of India Urdu (UNIU) serves as the basis for this examination, drawing on an ethnography of news production practices, and supplemented with in-depth interviews conducted with Muslim journalists from 2018 to 2020 across four major Indian cities. Through this investigation, the paper asserts that "news translation" is indeed a vital but contested component of media work within the sphere of Indian-language journalism. The paper uses "media work" as a key concept to demonstrate that UNIU's journalists are anchored in the field of journalism, as is evidenced by their institutional-cum-organizational location and their application of the elements of journalistic practice to their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a situated analysis of infrastructures of surveillance and control in Rotterdam through Latour & Hermant’s concept of the oligopticon. Oligopticons are networked devices and their supporting infrastructures that render the city in extremely narrow but very clear representations, in this case as a city of waste hotspots. In Rotterdam, public management is designing data-hungry oligopticons that map, control and intervene in the illegal disposal of waste and litter. An analysis of two vignettes from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork finds that these oligopticons do more than simply make visible and control these practices of waste disposal: they instead engage in punitive politics that frames those who illegally dispose of waste as exceptions to a normalizing way of life, fighting not waste but difference. Through ethnographic comparison, this paper aims to evoke thought, imagination and reflection in readers regarding the consequences of infrastructures of surveillance and control and the intimate knowledge that may escape these infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sweat, meaning to sweat, is a moniker attached to prearranged but unorganised and informal sport and physical activity within local communities in Trinidad and Tobago. Explained as a culturally significant phenomenon, the sweat is a space of community cohesion and radical questioning through its resident attendant ole talk where the critical deconstruction of social reality readily occurs. Using Paolo Freire's pedagogical ideas of problem-posing dialogue, this ethnographic paper, explores three main areas. Those being, the sweats and ole talk; the radicality of the sweats displayed in individual agency against the structured restrictions of formal sports participation; and the sweats as a site for cross-cultural integration and interaction in an otherwise ethnically diverse country. Through the experiences of eight individuals associated to the sweats, Freirean ideas of love, radicality and hopefulness are prominent in the description of the sweats. To this end, this paper adds to the growing body of literature on informal sport participation as a site to negotiate and reconcile differences in local communities, as well as a site for social and sport-for-development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social justice protests that began on 18 October 2019 in Chile were greeted enthusiastically around the globe. The mobilisation 'woke up' society and contributed to the collective drafting of a new constitution for the country. Building on ethnographic insights gathered in January–February 2020, this paper analyses forms of violence together with relations of care and solidarity that emerged within the mobilisation. It walks the reader through central Santiago de Chile and discusses the praxis of conducting research in a non-war conflict site, embedded in relations of claiming space (both figuratively and concretely) and creating practices that contribute to greater social justice. Simultaneously, they are enmeshed with manifold forms of violence that need to be addressed for peace to become possible. This paper seeks to contribute to debates on the entangled forms of everyday peace and violence, drawing on feminist research and connecting these with critical geographies of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with a young female refugee-background student, attends to the evolution of the student's math identity shortly after arrival to the U.S. More specifically, it highlights the ways in which the student's background knowledge and competence with the subject impacted her performance and consequently her confidence and recognition by others as a competent math learner. The data showcase the transition from a pseudo-confident math identity in year one to the loss of confidence and increase of negative emotions in year two. The paper concludes with recommendations for practitioners who work with newly arrived refugee students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arranged marriage is associated in Western political discourse with “forced”, “sham” and transnational. Such discourse holds it to be an anachronistic practice in which parents are portrayed as misguidedly clinging on to “traditional customs” and understood to be premising ethnic and religious cultural reproduction above the needs and happiness of their children. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork including 44 semi-structured interviews, this paper analyses how an understudied yet implicated “group”, Somali Muslim parents, talk about spouse selection of/for their children. Building on the substantial scholarship on the marital practices of British Asians, this paper provides evidence which contradicts and complicates political assumptions and academic conclusions about the role of religion, “tradition”, and ethnic and cultural reproduction in arranged marriages, and brings into focus and problematizes the ongoing operation of “groupism” in relation to both ethnicity and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of assemblage, drawing on the posthuman theorisations of Deleuze and Guattari, delineates a dynamic and new materialist approach to an event. In this approach, desires, material agency and (de)(re)territorialisation emerge as key concepts, and open ways to understand the school classroom in early childhood as a territory where lines of flight challenge the boundaries of normative education. This paper focuses on a classroom assemblage and aims to cartography the material relations between human and non-human bodies, where (de)(re)territorialisation forces are constant. We draw on diffractive ethnography in order to think-with-theory, making use of a vignette and a diagram containing its material relations. Our analysis highlights the agentic relations of matter in the assemblage, the role of desire as a dynamic force and the ever-changing flow of (de)(re)territorialisations that emerge in it. This study shows the complexity of material experience in early childhood, where desire and deterritorialisation frame creative and unexpected processes that defy the idea of education and classroom activities as linear processes controlled by adults. On the contrary, the cartography depicted in this research supports an idea of education as a space for the emergence of creative lines of flight, material relations and non-linear meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the processes of educational ethnography and questions the traditional use of the field notebook and research relationships. It forms part of an ongoing collaborative study analyzing university students' learning trajectories. Guided by inclusive ethics, the study proposes that researcher–participant collaboration is fundamental in defying traditional research methodologies. Post-qualitative inquiry enables an inclusive ethics perspective by providing a critical view of the usual ways of conducting research. The paper presents three cases of collaborators taking a field notebook and self-observing their learning. Participant agency facilitates our immersion in different worlds and produces new, non-standardized perceptions that enable the transformation of educational ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a qualitative research project examining the dating narratives of single migrant men residing in Sweden and Italy. The study, analyzing 48 interviews with individuals from Syrian, Polish, Bangladeshi and Romanian backgrounds, along with ethnographic observations, employs a theoretical framework rooted in sexual capital theory and critical studies on men and masculinities. The analysis sheds light on the challenges faced by heterosexual single migrant men in their pursuit of intimate partners, attributing these difficulties to lower levels of social, economic and cultural capital, as well as the influence of their specific masculinities, which may be perceived as less attractive within the host societies. The paper argues that the migrant experience can be viewed as a distinctive sexual field wherein individuals encounter unique dynamics and obstacles in the realm of intimate relationships. The implications of these findings extend beyond the personal experiences of migrant men, offering insights into the broader socio-cultural landscape of host societies and the complex interplay between migration, masculinity and intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper narrates an induction process about how adolescents and young men are drawn into living and practising a distinctive and often violent cultural form of street masculinity on an inner-city estate in London. The paper sets out to counteract dominant discourses which often portray young black men from working-class and impoverished backgrounds as ‘hypermasculine perpetrators of violence’. Developing the concepts of caring and personalized masculinities shows that, in the right conditions, young men exercise agency to perform different masculinities in different contexts and times, fashion more inclusive identities, and create new trajectories and lifestyles. The ethnographic fieldwork took place over nine months in 2019. It involved around 50 young men who were Black, Asian and minority ethnic. The paper focuses on two particular young men, aged 19 and 22, who appear as exemplars of ways of enacting different patterns of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the rise of mobility platforms, this paper explores the practices and politics of mobility arising from the everyday infrastructural functioning of Baemin, the largest food delivery platform in South Korea. While the literature on food delivery platforms centres on changing labour relations, platform workers do not merely represent a new type of labour; they likewise form a critical conduit in the urban logistics system. Platform-mediated food delivery can be therefore conceptualised as a moving assemblage of heterogeneous entities that constitutes an urban infrastructure. Having emerged as an urban mobility regime, food delivery platforms increasingly enact a form of governance, enabling a particular mode of circulation and movements. Engaging with the mobility framework, combined with critical infrastructure scholarship, this paper seeks to uncover the politics of im/mobility involved in the creation of a ceaselessly flowing city envisaged by Baemin. It identifies three forms of mobilities—connected, programmed, and immobilised—produced through contingent interactions between moving bodies, technologies, and the environment, which could amount to tethering effects. Integrating empirical materials from multimethod mobile ethnography in Seoul, it presents on-the-ground accounts of practices, interactions, and sensations gathered around the Baemin-mediated food delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a historical and ethnological review about the Anioma people of Nigeria. The popular narrative regards the Anioma land as Benin kingdom territory, and generally describes the people as Benin immigrants or refugees in their present locale. This brand of thought has been amplified to the extent that their past is distorted, and they are now experiencing crisis of identity and with time, they will be as little informed about their past. The paper deploys the critical historical analysis method to interrogate the origin of the Anioma clans. It depends on primary source materials which consist of archival and oral testimonies obtained from the field and supplemented with available secondary materials. The paper argues that any workable hypothesis on Anioma identity in the present time must begin with a plausible explanation of the original groups. It shows that the current identity crisis among Anioma people has much to do with the event of the Nigerian civil war. It concludes that although there were external stimuli into Anioma area, such had been absorbed linguistically over time, the innovations they came with reinterpreted completely in the climate of the aboriginal Igbo culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the lived experiences and roles of children under Boko Haram's two factions. Unlike case studies of Islamic State "cubs," children in Boko Haram have been neglected in the literature. Filling that gap, this article analyzes more than thirty videos and photograph sets from the two factions. Visual ethnography is utilized to examine material depicting children in both "staged" and "unstaged" roles in Boko Haram, and in ways to maximize impacts on viewers. The four main activities of the children in videos and photographs include combat and training with weapons as well as participating in Islamic education; gathering for prayer; using technology to create media content, including filming battles; and, in the case of the Chibok schoolgirls, being filmed as hostages or, eventually, as loyal members. The videos of the Chibok girls also reveal how children are gendered in Boko Haram. Child soldiers is an issue at the forefront of the paper's framing. Given the depictions of children in our data, we move beyond labeling child soldiers as all those under eighteen and differentiate between those under fifteen and those between fifteen and eighteen years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a methodological paper that seeks to encourage thought about the nature of auto-ethnography and which types of auto-ethnography might be most worthwhile within educational research. It reviews the various types of auto-ethnographic writing within education, focusing initially on the accounts of the process of doing educational research which started to be published in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper discusses the merits and potential problems of such accounts, drawing upon examples of such work. During the 1980s and 1990s other forms of auto-ethnography in education started to be published that focused more on a contribution to knowledge through providing new data related to education. The paper discusses the merits and potential problems of this type of account, again drawing on various published examples. The paper argues that worthwhile auto-ethnography, of whatever type, should meet the criteria set for worthwhile ethnography as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on some of the findings of an ethnographic doctoral study on ESD in a Jamaican school and community. The research study explored the interaction between local knowledge, values and practices and dominant Western approaches to education for sustainable development (ESD). Accordingly, the paper focuses on the challenges and lessons revealed by these diverse perspectives and how they can inform academic and policy ESD discourses locally and globally. Imbued with eco-pedagogical and postcolonial perspectives, it proposes that encompassing a Rastafarian spiritual ethos within ESD pedagogical approaches in Jamaica represents a potential to address some of the shortcomings that emerge from a critical review of the international literature on ESD, as well as the drawbacks of ESD implementation in the island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how in-service teachers enrolled in an MA in TESOL program demonstrated critical language awareness (CLA) as they designed and implemented ethnographic action research projects anchored in funds of knowledge. The action research project aimed to introduce teachers to school-based ethnographic research and to provide an opportunity to incorporate community funds of knowledge into their unit plans. Drawing from program documents such as the in-service teachers' research proposals, papers, and unit plans, the study highlights how awareness of the intersections of language and local power dynamics in their schools informed their decision-making about their research and curricular designs. At each stage of the research process, the teachers narrated how they restructured their interactional roles within established classroom routines, school-playtime, community, and family-school events for purposes of inquiring about student and family funds of knowledge. By integrating theories of funds of knowledge and CLA, the analysis shows how teacher understandings of sociopolitical and sociolinguistic contexts shaped which, how, and whose knowledge became resources (or not) in their curricular plans. The study suggests the benefit of professional development that includes CLA for purposes of supporting teachers as they aim to incorporate and leverage funds of knowledge of students, families, and communities in their curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative theory in translation studies has been mostly used to examine how translators mediate and refract meaning as they contribute to circulating political agendas across contexts and audiences. Building on this heritage but extending narrative theory beyond cross-language analysis, this paper proposes an ethnonarrative methodology to enquire and write about contemporary activist networks. It provides an epistemological-theoretical framework to explore identity, action and space in prefigurative transnational social movements, and a set of narrative methods and analytical techniques to conduct an ethnography of communication. Drawing on my on-site and online ethnography of Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters, the paper first discusses the ethical and political questions raised by my practice in, and by my writing about Babels, in the interdisciplinary context of social movement studies and interpreting studies in the first decade of the 21st century. It then exposes the ethnonarrative methodology developed in this context and illustrates its use through a detailed narrative account of how Babels constructed and negotiated its financial structure in and out of Babels.org. Finally, it discusses the extension of the methodology beyond 2.0 (so called participatory) web, as activist networks increasingly communicate through social media and videoconferencing platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the act of listening offered by active listening volunteers is a "gift" that requires reciprocity from elderly people. Active listening volunteers (keicho borantia) in Japan offer conversation and listening services for elderly people in local areas. Previous researchers investigate unsatisfying visits such as having boring conversations, and suggest the need for honing listening skills, or better pairing, and so on. This study, however, reveals that these solutions might not improve the situation, and, using participant observation and interviews, finds fundamental issues around reciprocity instead. First, and most importantly, volunteers do not realize that their listening functions as a "gift," which brings power dynamics, forcing elders either to stay as helpees, or to reciprocate. This paper, therefore, argues that even an act of listening in the field of volunteering can be perceived as a "non-free gift" by elderly people. Second, overemphasizing the importance of active listening obstructs reciprocity, letting volunteers cling to the role of listeners and helpers. In conclusion, this study suggests that volunteers need to understand three aspects: the importance of reciprocity; the fundamental power imbalance in caring activities; and the variety of reasons for elderly people to meet volunteers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs the concepts of heritage-making, communal identity formation, and landscape production to analyse the spaces that contribute to local, provincial, and national identities. Specifically, we examine how these spaces, now valued for their natural and historical significance, shape contemporary collective identity. Our study is located in the Andes mountain range, in an area called Manzano Histórico, in central- western Argentina, which is part of a larger nature reserve created to protect the headwaters of the basin and mountain areas from large-scale economic projects. This paper utilises a qualitative methodology that combines archaeological and historical studies with ethnographic techniques and a survey to describe and analyse the millennial occupation of the region. This continuous occupation has been shaped by multiple ways of inhabiting the world, some dominant and others marginalised or made invisible, resulting in ongoing present-day tensions. The heritage landscape proposed is a partial result of these tensions, a textured, fractured, and patched product of diverse, historically enabled practices. By analysing these spaces, we aim to acknowledge the various ways of being in the world that intersect within them, as well as the identity formations of alterity that hierarchise or invisibilise these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores post-conflict recovery in northern Uganda from the perspective of survivors themselves. Normative notions of resilience are widely critiqued as reductive, depoliticising and simplistic. Although the papers here, based on ethnographic methodologies, are largely sympathetic to this understanding, they also suggest that consideration of resilience should not be abandoned. The papers offer insights into how communities' experiences and strategies of resilience often diverge from the ambitions of international actors. They demonstrate that micro-level studies of real people's experiences of post-conflict recovery allow space for wider comparative and theoretical insights to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impacts of globalisation on small and informal businesses in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean economy has over the last two decades been dependent on small and informal businesses after the country went through a shattering economic crisis that witnessed the collapse of its once flourishing industry. In the wake of this failing formal economy, small informal businesses emerged as a strong alternative economy that has created employment and livelihoods for most of the urban populace. However, in a world that is increasingly contracting and fast becoming one, globalisation has had its impact on these businesses. This paper uses data collected in Norton and Harare through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations as well as secondary sources to explore and understand the finer details of how the phenomenon has affected small informal businesses in Zimbabwe both positively and negatively over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors try to understand the concepts of tribe and tribalism and their effect on our professional identities as child psychotherapists. Firstly, we will define these concepts and retrospectively go through the history and way that child psychotherapy developed and became a profession in its own right. Hearing about the trauma of war and the schisms within the profession between the different groups/tribes (Kleinians and Post Kleinians, Independents and Anna Freudians) motivated us to explore the defensive mechanisms that still keep us, as a profession, apart and divided. We have employed in this paper psychoanalytic and group analytic thinking, as well as some anthropological and neuroscientific perspectives, which all offer us some in-depth ideas about the processes involved and the ways that the different groups of thought within the profession are still kept apart. We will also look beyond these tribal states of mind, suggesting ways of collaborating and debating, to further enrich our theories and clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents a short ethnographic encounter with the site of the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in 2021. It communicates an experiential picturing of the site as it was assembled and disassembled, as this was recorded in notes, conversations, via phone footage and in a short talk afterwards with human geography colleagues at the University of Glasgow. The paper seeks to make sense of this short experiential encounter by drawing from scholarship on ethnography, security and events of emergency assemblage. The paper concludes by reflection on the ordinary purpose of walking sites of climate security and emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]