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Relationship-based practice has become an influential theory through which social work practice is understood. However, much more critical attention needs to be given to the kinds of relationships involved. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of long-term social work that spent 15 months observing practice with service users and organisational life to find out how social workers establish and sustain long-term relationships with children and parents in child protection cases, or don't. The paper introduces into the literature the concept of a 'holding relationship', which was present in several of the cases we studied, especially where therapeutic change occurred. The aims of the paper are to document the nature of a holding relationship and to develop it as a concept. A 'holding relationship' involved social workers being reliable, immersing themselves in the service user's day-to-day existence and developing their life-skills, getting physically and emotionally close to them, and practicing critically by taking account of power and inequalities. The concept of a 'holding relationship' draws on psycho-dynamic and sociological theory to provide new ways of thinking that can help make sense of the practical and emotional relating involved in social work and promote the development of such helpful relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this autoethnography, BW and I explore the various ways in which my experiences of lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic are not altogether different from my everyday experiences as a visually impaired person. Further, we make sense of my experience that, notwithstanding the social world's expression of feelings about lockdown and social distancing, my own reactions to disability-imposed lockdown remain unrecognized, invalidated and unseen. Making sense of these experiences of invisibility is essential, since it is only when our experiences are truly contemplated by others that we can have the hope of being fully known. In this paper, my co-author and I explain the various ways in which my experiences of lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic are not altogether different from my everyday experiences as a visually impaired person; I provide examples to illustrate that there are anxiety-provoking challenges lurking outside my home; Yet, giving in to these anxieties and being confined to my home is too painful to give in to; While my everyday experiences are, too some extent, what the world is experiencing at the current moment with social distancing and lockdown, my feelings about disability-imposed lockdown remain unrecognized, invalidated and unseen; It is important to voice and make known these realities, For it is only when our experiences are truly seen—when we are completely known—that we can move towards self-acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a crime prevention methodology that focuses on deviant beliefs and behaviors. Situated between developmental and environmental crime prevention approaches, this empirical study utilized ethnographical methods to identify potential and active deviants and their support networks. Interventions were implemented through the community program of Neighborhood Watch, which focused on the identified deviant communities before the actuation of a burglary crime. Comparison between the pre-intervention period and intervention periods show the incidence of burglary crime reducing by 42%. If validated through replication, other fields that engage with active actors, such as insurgents, gangs, and terrorists, may have similar success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on recent doctoral research examining how students aged 12–14 make sense of the Holocaust during their history lessons on the topic. The research was ethnographically informed, and explored, through observing the 'real life situation' [Yin, Case Study Research, 2] of their history lessons, how students' ideas about the Holocaust developed over time. The author is a former history teacher, conducting an ethnographically informed study in classrooms which were not their own, which required transitioning from teacher to researcher. This article is a reflexive [Brewer, Ethnography, 130–133] discussion of the challenges experienced making this transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how diaspora youth is impacted by and deals with the legacies of the violent conflict in their parents' homeland of Bosnia. Based on the analysis of narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Bosnians in Switzerland and ethnographic observations in diaspora spaces, this paper highlights the repercussions that Yugoslav disintegration wars and, particularly, the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) have for young people who were raised in Switzerland. First, it demonstrates that instead of a coherent picture about the past, young people receive fragments and pieces of personal memories and experiences that their families went through. Second, the history of conflict has repercussions for the ways young people establish and articulate their sense of attachment and belonging to the homeland of their parents. Third, while second-generation Bosnians rarely reproduce the conflict dynamic themselves, they move in spaces in which the legacies of conflict continue to be an important discursive and structural force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diaspora communities use school education as a central way to reproduce their identity throughout generations. However, religious institutions, clubs and specific events can also perform a role in reproducing the groups' cultural identity, working as non-formal spaces of education. We examine how diasporic Armenian families in Brazil perceive the roles that formal and non-formal education play in supporting the conservation of their Armenian identity. The paper draws from an ethnographic study conducted in Armenian ethnic institutions in Sao Paulo. Participants expressed having ambiguous feelings towards these organisations, valuing their educational features distinctly. While they do not perceive the everyday practices of the Armenian school as having a central role in reproducing cultural identities, they acknowledge that non-formal educational spaces and one-day events are pivotal to celebrate these identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Nepali youth expectations about political equality in the 'New' Nepal following the promulgation of a constitution in 2015. It discusses the outcome of seven deliberative youth assemblies held across the country in 2018 and 2019, in which youth debated their priorities for the governments at the local, provincial, and federal levels. These assemblies revealed that youth were committed to a conception of meritocracy that prioritizes individual achievement over cultural ascription as a basis for social and economic justice. Current efforts to introduce equity through ethnic, caste, and gender reservations were seen as useful instruments to achieve this equality but also distrusted as they appeared to contradict meritocratic principles or as tactics to sustain Nepal's existing cultural barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development and evaluation of the video Observation Tool for Interprofessional Skills (VOTIS). We describe the development of an authentic interprofessional assessment tool that incorporates video reflection and allows formative and summative assessment of individual learners' interprofessional skills within an authentic interprofessional context. We then investigate its validity and reliability. The VOTIS was developed using a modified Delphi technique. The tool was piloted with 61 students and 11 clinical educators who completed the VOTIS following team meetings where students interacted about their interprofessional clinical work. The following were calculated: internal consistency; students' proficiency levels; inter-rater reliability between students and clinical educators; and inter-rater reliability between clinical educators and an independent rater. Results indicate that the VOTIS has acceptable internal consistency and moderate reliability and has value in evaluating students' interprofessional skills. Study outcomes highlight the need for more explicit wording of tool content and instructions and further clinical educator training to increase the utility and reliability of the VOTIS as a learning and assessment tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of a clear interest in ethnography and institutions, the method of institutional ethnography has been underexplored in the planning field. This paper looks at its critical potential in the renovation process of the high-rise social housing estate of Peterbos, Brussels. By doing, it sheds light on its transformative capacity. Using multiple approaches of institutional ethnography enabled us not only to develop a better understanding of local communities in planning processes, but also to argue for an increased self-reflexivity and responsiveness of institutions, essential for creating a more critical planning practice. We conclude institutional ethnography can inform planning practice in two ways. First, the approach can help planning scholars reveal power relations and explore grounded collaborative practices, based on everyday concerns of inhabitants and institutions. Second, any actor operating within and beyond the institutional field of planning can strive for ways of knowing that are embedded in everyday life experiences. However, this requires to embrace open-minded perspectives and open-ended inquiries in those locations where institutional policies and practices are being felt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setter colonialism is dedicated to the elimination of the native, not just from territory but from the past. This form of elimination comes from the mistranslation or misunderstanding of names and terms that identify individuals and communities, which the colonists then use to separate Indigenous peoples from their own pasts. Many researchers have argued that the modern Mapuche are the result of ethnogenesis in the late eighteenth century, in part from misuse of the Mapuche language mapuzugun in describing communities in the past. This paper argues that, based on ethnographic, archaeological, and historic evidence, Che is the correct autonym to use for the Indigenous inhabitants of Wajmapu, the territory comprised of southern Chile and western Argentina, before the Che themselves began using the autonym Mapuche in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of Airbnb on the everyday lived experiences of residents in London. We focus on three spatial scales – the city, neighbourhood, and an individual building. Short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb have transformed socio-cultural urban landscapes by turning homes into informal hotels. We argue that many of the consequences of Airbnb echo and support those of gentrification; this includes indirect displacement, buy-to-let investment, and transient communities. Using mixed-methods, including geodata, online surveys, focus groups, resident diaries, and auto/ethnography, we explore the impact of Airbnb across London, in Kensington, and inside a specific building on Kensington High Street. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nominal category of stage-of-life words used in English address practices and presents an analysis of their interactional uses and meanings made adopting the principles and methods of ethnopragmatics. The paper has a twofold aim: (i) to highlight the polysemous nature of English stage-of-life words and make a clear distinction between their reference and address meanings; and (ii) to show that the address meanings of stage-of-life words reflect their sociopragmatic function in discourse. Using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) methodology, separate semantic explications are produced for the meanings expressed by each address noun in different interactional contexts. More generally, the present study highlights the interface between semantics, pragmatics and cultural assumptions, showing how this connection can be used as the starting point to conduct a proper ethnography of speaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to reflect on some ways of learning present in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion, and the relations between making, knowing, and being that compose this system. Based on an ethnographic experience carried out in Salvador, Bahia, the paper aims to explore the notion of path (caminho), as a way of articulating being and making, gift and initiation, to com'pose a partial and situated knowledge. In this sense, it argues that the learning system of Candomblé is a transformative process that involves a hesitantly know-how that is constituted by practical experiences and dealings with unknown forces, in a game of visibilities and invisibilities that, playing with Tim Ingold's work, we could call an 'education of distraction'. Finally, the paper proposes to reverberate this way of learning into anthropological practice itself, thinking of it as a partial, hesitant and transformative process that is constituted in the very experience of the encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretically influenced discussion of methodological issues in carrying out ethnographic work at Peartree Academy. Food is central to our sense of identity. It draws on notions of the school restaurant and presents an account of the complexities surrounding the disorderliness of fieldwork in researching children's food space. The aim of this paper is to explore how researcher identity needs to be considered within the relationship between discipline and social learning spaces for eating. Foucault's concept of discipline is introduced in conceptualising the study. Key reflections place emphasis on the messiness of researching such spaces and offer recommendations for navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experience of researching food in schools. Food is personal. It is an ingested symbol of culture, family, tradition, ethnicity... What does this mean as a researcher? How do we navigate food relationships? How is this relationship shaped by the rules of the school? This paper examines how I went about doing food research in primary schools, and the various incidents that occurred that revealed food was something more than that consumed. It outlines the ethnographic approach adopted, paying attention to the sensory in research. I explore researcher identity, explaining how my own identity was multiple, and shifting, depending on where I was at a particular "food moment". I draw attention to several events that, on reflection, serve to reveal the importance of food in everyday life, and helped understand both the field site, and the wider context of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing interest in mobilities among social scientists over the past two decades has generated new research approaches to deepen the understanding of people's diverse movements. These methods have focused on capturing research participants' mobilities, but also led to new ways of thinking about researchers' mobilities as a strategy to collect data. In this paper, we explore the relationship between researchers and research participants' mobilities through the idea of 'following'. Drawing on insights from the Moving Marketplaces research project on eight markets in the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight the lack of beginnings and endings of following. This leads us to a reflection on what to actually follow as well as an analysis of the doings of following. This paper examines some of the unexplored terrains in the conceptual and methodological debate around following and argues that it is essential to reflexively engage with the implications and practicalities of this approach. We argue that it is more productive to regard following not only as the physical process of following people, objects, knowledge, etc., but also as a theoretical and methodological openness that embraces and articulates the dynamic and non-linear character of ethnographic research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper provides an introduction and overview of Ethnography as a qualitative research methodology and outlines its usefulness in understanding the experiences of patients and service users during their healthcare journey. Ethnographic research provides an insight into the group being studied. In this paper that author suggests that ethnography can provide an insight into the behaviours, thoughts and feelings of a patient group. Research methods used in ethnographic research have been outlined and discussed along with some of the possible methodological and ethical issues that might occur when carrying out an ethnographic study with a group of patients. This paper discusses some of the potential results of an ethnographic study with patients and how ethnographic research can be used to study the experiences of patients. the author draws together some lessons that can be learnt and some possible applications of ethnographic research in healthcare settings with patients. Implications for rehabilitation are also proposed. Ethnography is a simple and effective qualitative research methodology for studying groups of people with a common enterprise or experience, ethnography studies the culture, behaviours and norms of the group. Ethnography is a useful research methodology to understand the experiences of patients and service users during their healthcare journey. It can provide information about what it is like to have a particular medical condition or diagnosis and the norms and behaviours of patients with this condition. Ethnographic data allows the patient's voice to be heard. Data from ethnographic studies of patient groups can be used for service improvement within health and social care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This methodological commentary focuses on the use of ethnography for health and rehabilitation practitioners. In recent years, ethnography has become a methodology of choice amongst diagnostic radiography researchers at uncovering phenomena pertinent to the clinical setting. This paper adds to the evidence base by providing not only a methodology account from two experienced researchers, but also offers a paradigmatic approach to ethnography that incorporates qualitative and quantitative approaches. It details an alternate ideological discourse in alignment with the role of a diagnostic radiographer, which can be replicated in other disciplines and thus offering an array of empirical opportunity for prospective health and rehabilitation practitioners. This paper provides an introduction into the use of ethnography for health and rehabilitation practitioners. The authors reflect on the value of ethnography in order to satisfy a researcher's aims and objectives. The authors provide an "umbrella strategy" that can be used by other prospective health and rehabilitation researchers. It is argued here that this methodology offers an alternate strategy of uncovering new ideas and research data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possibilities of using alternative forms of analysis when thinking about "dementia friendly communities," a recent if not by now historic phenomenon. Using ethnographic methods, I ask the question: what remains beyond, in excess of, and is never quite captured in discourses around such communities, if they exist? Dementia is an elusive concept, often appearing as personal disruption, and often threatening the ways that contemporary lives are ordered. I ask whether there is value in questioning the fragmentary remains of researching dementia friendly communities from a different angle, by approaching the disparate assemblage of materials, fieldnotes, photos, recordings of ordinary practices, of state practices, through more creative means? Taking inspiration from the avant-garde techniques of William S. Burroughs, in particular cut-ups and collage, the aim here has been to pay attention differently and move beyond what is already known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious minority schools are seen to take on the task of transmitting the normative image of a community, its ideology and culture. Through pedagogy and daily routine practices, schools seek to shape students' ideas of a religion and ways in which it is to be performed. This paper, based on ethnography of a Sikh school in Delhi, explores such schooling spaces and practices that attempt to establish and promote a homogenous religious identity among students. The school rules make it mandatory for Sikh students to adhere to the Sikh identity that it supports. However, interviews reveal that they interpret the religion differently from what is being projected to them through the school's pedagogy. The meaning-making process in the school is complex because while this is a religious institution, it caters to students from other faiths as well. The article argues that religious schools often overlook the diversity of beliefs among students and educational ethnographies can be helpful to explore such institutionalised practices and students' agency in identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bodywork describes the work people perform on their own and other people's bodies. Often, this work is performed in an effort to meet cultural, symbolic body norms. The aims of bodywork in fitness for older exercisers are said to serve as a means of controlling and resisting the aging process. Given the popularity of group exercise for older exercisers, this paper focused on three forms of bodywork undertaken by/performed on older exercisers in group classes: assessing, monitoring and directing clients' bodies. Using an Institutional Ethnography approach, I explicate how instructor training is connected to the bodywork practices that take place in group exercise classes. Methods consisted of a textual analysis of 8 Canadian and American instructor training curricula; observations and interviews with 22 group fitness instructors; and go-alongs and interviews with 14 older exercisers. Findings revealed that some topics included in the explicit curricula taught to fitness instructors lie outside their scope of practice. The hidden curricula uphold ageist sociocultural norms, as well as conflate (older) age, (greater) weight/(larger) size and bodily (dis)function, which are then materially codified in what is considered (age) appropriate fitness apparel. Finally, the null curriculum, or what is left out of the training, has the potential to cause harm, marginalize and stigmatize older exercisers. To conclude, I argue that group exercise instructors and the organizations that develop fitness curricula, could benefit from engaging in a reflective practice that investigates: (1) how some of the sociocultural and discursive representations of older bodies in training curricula might be problematic and stigmatize older people; and (2) how the null curricula might cause harm to exercisers, especially exercisers like older persons who are already marginalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the idea that the world is broken and beyond repair, ongoing care and maintenance are primary concerns of people learning with technologies. This paper advances a perspective that an ethic of care has epistemic significance and locates families' caring practices in technologically-mediated home learning environments. I develop this perspective on human-technology relations, which I call "cherished world thinking," as a response to social-ecological perspectives on "broken world thinking" (cf. Jackson). I frame family learning through critical care studies and feminist epistemologies, focusing on sociotechnical dimensions of care and maintenance. As I consider how families enacted care for and with their cherished technologies, I interrogate the social-ecological conditions that are simultaneously held in place through maintenance. Drawing from ethnographic data of 13 families in 2 US cities—including fieldnotes, informal interviews, and video collected in homes and neighborhoods—I found that families engaged in "cherished world thinking." I develop this concept through interaction analysis of two cases where families caring for each other and their environments were sociotechnical achievements, calling attention to forms of learning that emerge when people care for that which they hold dear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents' hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary to reveal how undocumented parents advocate and dream across disjunctures in search of access to educational supports and humanizing futures for their children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. Findings reveal how intersecting forms of undocumentedness, or exclusion from papers for access and belonging, constrained families' access to movement across geopolitical borders, schooling and health-care institutions, and documented diagnoses needed to access learning supports. In the implications, we explore what approaches to policy, education, and research might look like if they centered the experiences, subaltern knowledges, and humanizing dreams of transborder parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As COVID-19 has spread globally, so too has public knowledge about the virus, through social media. In multispecies ethnography and health communication, this open and free flow of information has led to a phenomenon called the Tragedy of the Open Society. Located in the Kampung Laut community, this study collected data through in-depth online interviews to explore this interaction between multispecies ethnography and health communication perspectives in analyzing socio-cultural and health phenomena in a dynamic global ecological system. Information circulating among the Kampung Laut community is a valuable resource that is used by some actors to gain profit even though it harms others. As fear, prejudice, and discrimination circulate in the community, the Kampung Laut community fight on the basis of a contextual and flexible multispecies ecological system to survive. This paper raises awareness of the interdependence of humans and nature within the same ecological system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant contextual differences between semi-nomadic herders in Kyrgyzstan and sedentary peasants in Mexico, a comparative study, based on ethnographic fieldwork, of the impact of patrimonialization on the two groups reveals similar processes of heritage marking. However, within this similarity this cross-analysis identifies two contrasting modes of domination that occur as a result of this analogous heritage process. By examining the local application of the heritage concept, as well as the connections that exist between the type of society, its history and the ethno-cultural management at work, this paper demonstrates how patrimonialization can stimulate divergent political mechanisms in the relationship between the State and the social groups concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that love is not only compatible with validity in social inquiry but is an essential part of it. The work of coming to know others is similar to the work of emotional relationship, and the two overlap. In the ethnographic tradition, validity, or trustworthiness in research is established through practices like transparency about one's position, careful listening, detailed sensory description, time in the field, participant feedback, participation in daily activities, acknowledgment of impermanence, willingness to set aside assumptions and an attempt to engage readers with the community being studied. We argue that these activities are core both to valid studies and to love. The epistemological understanding of love in our ethnography goes beyond rational and objective notions of research. It includes them but it acknowledges, too, that affect and recognition are fundamental to how we make sense of the world. We invite qualitative researchers to enlarge the scope of academic discourse by including love explicitly; both as a rationale for research and as a support for the trustworthiness of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using multidisciplinary literature, this paper takes a multispecies approach to human-termite interactions across the tropics to demonstrate how termites exploit ecological effects of human behaviours and in turn provide humans with significant ecosystem services. These provisions are deeply entangled within cultural practices and ideologies. Conceptualisations of human and landscape fertility, and the role of termites in facilitating life, create gendered interactions that are manifested in ecological knowledge and praxis relating to termites and termite mounds. The strong association between termites and farmers in particular, may offer insights into past human settlement patterns and their relationships with ecosystems. This paper proposes the use of geomorphology, thin-section ceramic petrography, and stable isotope analysis to investigate these relationships across the tropics. A multispecies approach creates new possibilities for a diachronic understanding of human ecology and raises important questions for the Anthropocene and the future of farming in the tropics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the outsourcing of immigration and border controls to economically struggling states. Infrastructural projects around controlling migration are transforming localities in the Global South: from shifting legal and political economic systems to altering socialities between migrant and local populations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, this paper considers how past and present infrastructural forms give shape to the ways that (in)justices are created. Nauru, the world's smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry by importing Australia's maritime asylum seeking populations. In this paper, I examine the material life of infrastructure around managing migration in Nauru's 21 km2 locality, including the toxic interrelationships between phosphate and refugee processing, the industries' built environments, and the people who live and work in them. I explore how Nauru's refugee project has reconfigured colonial infrastructural forms, practices of dependency, and socio-legal affiliations as the country is refashioned as a company town in line with new forms of human production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern anthropology has used the claims of reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and recognition of differences in individual experiences in its attempt to unsettle the authority of traditional anthropology. This has led anthropologists to assert that ethnography is a cultural construct, whereby 'fieldwork' is conceptualised as 'embodied spatial practice'. Drawing on village studies from India, this paper argues that the recognition of different embodied practices of ethnographers from diverse social locations has not necessarily led to the democratisation of the discipline. Conversely, insufficient engagement with hierarchical, overlapping power relations within the ethnographic field, as well as within the disciplinary establishment, has led to the standardisation of disciplinary articulations of research ethics, the terms of which privilege hegemonic groups within the discipline. The articulation of the concerns of scholars from marginalised social groups often remains difficult within such disciplinary frameworks. This paper argues that establishing a critical tradition in ethnography in the true sense requires the postmodern sensibility of recognition of the differences in experiences, supplemented with feminist and subaltern critical interrogations of power and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for another perspective on cockfight and the symbolism of masculinity. Previous research on cockfighting has its own perspective and interesting findings, one such work on the matter was that of Geertz who focused on the symbolism of cockfighting within the context of Balinese culture. I argue that, as anthropological studies develop a number of anthropological approaches that produce a more holistic ethnography also evolve. One of them is multispecies ethnography. This approach places culture and nature on one equal level of analysis. This research involves Kampung Laut People in Segara Anakan, Indonesia. The data is collected through observation and in-depth interviews through the 'art of noticing' method. The findings of this research show a different perspective in understanding the practice of cockfighting through interspecies collaboration. In terms of scientific contributions, this paper introduces a multispecies ethnographic approach as another approach to understanding the socio-cultural phenomenon of cockfighting and human interactions with non-human species. This perspective complements Geertz's symbolic cultural perspective. In terms of its contribution to humanitarian issues, the holistic multispecies perspective employed within this research advocates for a balanced interrelation between humans and other species in creating a sustainable ecological system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applied communication interventions call for detailed knowledge of the scene and the cultural assumptions that inform the communication taking place. This paper shows how Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) was used to study the practice of 'conversation' in English language learners (ELLs) groups at a public library in the Western United States. The analysis demonstrated that 'conversation' is a culturally specific practice requiring elucidation. This led to the design of storytelling workshops that helped participants improve their language skills and cultural knowledge. Data were collected in a three-phase project: (1) a preliminary ethnography(2) a design phase to create a strategic plan for addressing concerns, and (3) an applied communication intervention consisting of storytelling workshops for ELLs. The paper provides a model for conducting applied communication research using an ethnographic, culture-centered approach, and demonstrates the value of storytelling as a practice for improving English language education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on care in Chinese transnational families often rely on bi-generational exchanges, failing to capture how care circulates within the families from a fully-generational perspective. The so-called 'elderly' is a key group for understanding care and mobility in these families; nevertheless, the existing research focuses either on their role as children caregivers or sees them as dependent people, resulting in a polarized perspective which also fails to understand the fluidity of care roles along the life course. Moreover, the generic term 'the elderly' may refer to one of several generations (grandparents/ great-grandparents). Based on qualitative data from a multi-sited ethnography (in China and Spain), this paper explores the circulation of care within four-generation transnational Zhejianese families. In these, the gendered construction of care work is the norm, despite the fact that new spaces for challenging specific gendered roles and practices are being created. In contrast, a high level of plurality and fluidity in care exchanges and care roles across generations, time and space has been observed. These factors are shaped, to different degrees, by local and transnational contexts, with the Chinese culture-system playing a key role. Finally, the paper highlights the contributions of the grandparents' generation to families and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the challenges and possibilities of combining archival and ethnographic methods in the field of 'communal' violence studies in India. Drawing insights from debates among historians and anthropologists on the multifarious interactions between archives and ethnography and reflecting on the empirical case of persistent violence between Muslims and Christians in southern India, it argues for a creative synthesis of these two modes of inquiry for an adequate understanding of 'communal' violence and riot inquiry commissions in India. First, the paper critiques how colonial and postcolonial Indian archival reports problematically inscribe violence between any religious communities (such as Muslims and Christians) in the same narrative as the predominant case of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Second, it illuminates how archival ethnography can be an effective way of studying violence between religious communities and thus transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the paper introduces a nuanced approach, called 'ethnography of archiving', to detail the judicial and nonjudicial discourses and bureaucratic manoeuvring involved in the creation of an archival report, thereby unravelling the power relations, mediating processes, manipulations and bureaucratic performances that make commission reports problematic even today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most previous research on sexual minority migrants focused on those who move from places where there are fewer legal rights for sexual minorities to where there are more. This paper distinctively fills a research gap through a focus on a subset of sexual minority migrants: sexual minority expatriates. It presents a five-year ethnographic case study of a judicial review in Hong Kong QT v Director of Immigration and other lesbian and gay couples who moved to Hong Kong, and business organisations that advocate for immigration equality. First, the analysis highlights that both subjective cultural assumptions and objective legal conditions play an important role in sexual minority expatriates' assessment of gay-friendliness of the work destination. Second, this paper uncovers the agency of gay and lesbian expatriates' impact on the local legal sexual landscape and illustrates how sexual citizenship could be reclaimed by relying on the homonormative logic that the same-sex couples are productive labour and beneficial to the economy. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of sexual minority migration by theorising how sexual minority migrants may not only be constrained by the legal and social environments in the migration destination, but they may also actively change and shape them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PhenomenonCadavers have long played an important and complex role in medical education. While research on cadaver-based simulation has largely focused on exploring student attitudes and reactions or measuring improvements in procedural performance, the ethical, philosophical, and experiential aspects of teaching and learning with cadavers are rarely discussed. In this paper, we shed new light on the fascinating philosophical moves in which people engage each and every time they find themselves face to face with a cadaver. ApproachOver a two-year period (2018/19–2019/20), we applied ethnographic methods (137 hours of observation, 24 interviews, and the analysis of 22 documents) to shadow the educational cadaver through the practical stages involved in cadaver-based simulation: 1. cadaver preparation, 2. cadaver-based skill practice with physicians and residents, and 3. interment and memorial services. We used Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of becoming and acts of creation to trace the ontological "lifecycle" of an educational cadaver as embedded within everyday work practices. FindingsWe delineated six sub-phases of the lifecycle, through which the cadaver transformed ontologically from person to donor, body, cadaver, educational cadaver, teacher, and loved one/legacy. These shifts involved a network of bureaucratic, technical, educational, and humanistic practices that shaped the way the cadaver was perceived and acted upon at different moments in the lifecycle. By highlighting, at each phase, 1) the ontological transitions of the cadaver, itself, and 2) the practices, events, settings, and people involved in each of these transitions, we explored questions of "being" as it related to the ontological ambiguity of the cadaver: its conceptualization as both person and tool, simultaneously representing life and death. InsightsEngaging deeply with the philosophical questions of cadaver-based simulation (CBS) helped us conceptualize the lifecycle as a series of meaningful and purposeful acts of becoming. Following the cadaver from program entry to interment allowed us to contemplate how its ontological ambiguity shapes every aspect of cadaver-based simulation. We found that in discussions of fidelity in medical simulation, beyond both the physical and functional, it is possible to conceive of a third type: ontological. The humanness of the cadaver makes CBS a unique, irreplaceable, and inherently philosophical, practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Tidepools (Card 2017) a film-based ethnography produced to explore Black and Latino student experiences at community college. Tidepools (Card 2017) offers an innovative visual approach to data presentation and illuminates the importance of faculty and student relationships for Black and Latino successful academic experiences. Data were collected and analysed in two stages. Firstly, a short documentary film (N = 10) was produced using participant led visual methodology and a process-oriented analysis applied to understand student experiences at community college. Secondly, a discussion and pre- and post-survey (N = 50) were completed after screening Tidepools (Card 2017) at the National Consortium on College Men of Color Working Group, 2017 to assess the impact of the film on faculty members. Tidepools (Card 2017) reflects on and illuminates the importance of faculty and student relationships for Black and Latino student achievement at community college and has implications for the use of visual research and the professional development of faculty and policymakers to support Black and Latino students at community college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an examination of Chinese language textbooks for Tibetan ethnic students in the Tibet Autonomous Region of mainland China, this study scrutinises the representation of Tibetan images and the official attitude towards Tibet embedded in the textbooks. Using multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), the paper investigates how government perceptions of Tibet are constructed through the co-deployment of visual and textual semiotic resources in Chinese language textbooks. This study suggests an overall positive attitude towards Tibet shown in the textbooks. However, the references to Tibet or Tibetans are usually situated as topics of the 'past', which indicates a sense of their being uncivilised or backwards. The positive yet stereotyped portrayal of Tibet is in line with national identity construction to ensure a unified nation-state. This study examines both text and image in textbooks in order to understand state ideologies and official attitudes towards a minority group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent demand for reservation quotas in India has come from the regionally dominant castes of the Jats and Patidars in the arena of education and employment. However, given their status as 'dominant' castes, it is paradoxical that these castes are claiming a 'backward' status. This demand raises questions of two kinds. Firstly, what is the nature of caste identity that they wish to leverage for purposes of gaining access to state quotas? Secondly, what are the different ways in which identities, expectations and mobilisations are shaped by electoral politics? The paper argues that ethnic identities are fluid which take on newer features and markers as they interact with categories of recognition that the state establishes. These negotiations have been exacerbated by electoral politics and the policy of economic liberalisation which have together upset dominant caste equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnography explores the experience of societal meanings of suicide from the perspective of people bereaved by suicide. The research focuses on three autoethnographic stories of everyday experiences in which personal meaning making and societal meanings of suicide intersect in contemporary Australian settings. Personal perspectives are positioned alongside broader discussions of suicide taboo to consider the implications for agency and meaning making. Key differences between conventional notions of stigma and structural stigma, and ways in which suicide taboo influences meaning making for people bereaved by suicide are explored. The paper proposes a recasting of action previously framed as internalised stigma as proactive self-preservation by people bereaved by suicide. It concludes by arguing that building capacity to see the societal taboos of suicide creates opportunities for strengthening agency in personal narratives of bereavement by suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and illuminate the global circulation of ECEC practices and ideas. Based on reflections on four major comparative international studies I have led, in this paper I describe effective strategies for conducting comparative ethnographic research in ECEC settings, explicate the rationale for doing so, and provide examples of how this approach can impact research, practice, and policy. Issues I address include the rationale for selecting countries for comparison, the formation of a research team, and distributing interpretive voice and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ethnodrama that explores the school experiences of one transboy. To do this, the author weaves a series of life-history interviews into a single performance script that may create unique opportunities for examining different learning environments and support structures while offering insights into the school experiences of one transboy. The manuscript includes a performance script that invites the reader to engage in the participant's story as he navigated school. Drawing from the potential of dramatic performance, the playscript may offer possibility for affective and actionable reader responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper contributes to Internet-distributed television research by illustrating the results of a qualitative empirical study carried out in October 2019: by originally combining the tools of social research and ethnosemiotics, the study investigated how a panel of sixty Italian Netflix viewers perceived the platform's recommender system and its impact on their autonomy of taste and choice. The ethnosemiotic analysis confirmed, through direct observation of user practices, the generally favourable perception of the 'Netflix experience' as an adequate balance between personalised recommendations and freedom of choice. At the same time, it also highlighted its problematic features, showing that synchronised and collective experiences remain important values in 'streaming culture' and that subscribers adopt a variety of tactics to circumvent the recommender system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an East London Kickboxing/Muay Thai gym, this paper explores how fighters at Origins Combat Gym seek to reject race as a discursive category in favour of constructing each other as the same, bonded by years of intimately training alongside one another. Drawing upon Bourdieu, I conceptualise a racial habitus to argue that such processes are constrained; my field-site is not a racial utopia, even if it does allow for new possibilities. Nonetheless, my interlocutors' attempts to reject the logic of ethnic absolutism through forging complex localised solidarities offers hope in anti-immigrant times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of pre-colonial written records, reconstruction of the history and identity of indigenous tribes has to depend on oral stories and the documentation of the 'other', while the former is subject to distortion, the latter is often glossed with vested interest. Taking the case of the indigenous tribes of the India-Burma-Bangladesh borderlands, this paper probes the representation of the Zo (Kuki-Chin) people in colonial ethnography, on one hand, and to what extent colonial knowledge was informed by 'investigative' or 'survey modality', which, in fact, was solely for administrative purpose, on the other. It argues that indigenous tribes of the India-Burma-Bangladesh borderlands were represented as completely fragmented in colonial ethnography, however, behind the colonial policy of classification one can still unearth the ethnic commonality of the various tribes when they are seen through the lens of cultural similarity or as a 'culture area.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience is a dominant humanitarian-development theme. Nonetheless, some humanitarian-development programmes have demonstrably negative impacts which encourage vulnerable people to actively resist these programmes. Based on 12 months ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan refugee settlement during 2017–18, this paper argues refugee residents articulated their refusal of humanitarian failure and corruption through active, largely non-political, resistance. I term the diverse strategies used 'resistant resilience', arguing that the agency central to these practices require that assumptions about resilience are reconsidered. I conclude that this refugee community's most important resilience strategies were active resistance, demonstrating that resilience can be manifested through marginalised peoples' desire to resist exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaches to resilience in post-war contexts prioritise systems-based thinking above everyday realities. This paper explores reconstruction through marungi (khat) in North-West Uganda. Presenting ethnographic evidence, we chart connections between marungi and resilience among growers, traders and "eaters". Firstly, we argue for a consideration of the actual resources through which individuals and households build capacity to withstand shocks following war. Secondly, we explore inequities within production lines and the effects of criminalising khat, to demonstrate trade-offs within prospects for post-war prosperity. Ultimately, we argue for process-based analyses of how resilience is negotiated in contingent circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contribution of an individual known in Wales as one of a number from humble backgrounds who rose to make significant contributions to late-Victorian and early twentieth-century civic society. Daniel Lleufer Thomas's activity in the field of sociological recording, however, has been little recognized in his own country let alone more widely. His contribution to two Royal Commissions in the last decade of the 19th century was seminal and led to Iorwerth Peate's decision to study the historical domestic architecture of Wales, thus influencing directly the growth and development of vernacular architecture as a field of study within the broader field of regional ethnology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I introduce the notion of participative epistemology and discuss how it can contribute to make social data science more accountable. I do so by offering the case of a project where ethnographic, computational and sequence analysis methods have been used in combination. By presenting here in greater detail research design and pilot results of a project using professional networking data to understand the careers of IT industry analysts, I suggest a view on the collaboration between data science and social science as coordinated labour. The application of participative epistemology to social data science is articulated in three points: (1) a more tactical view on the partnerships with commercial data where shared value system is not a pre-requisite for coordinated knowledge production; (2) an appreciation for complementarities in perspective between phenomenological sociology, expertise in computer science associated to digitalisation and the narrative positivism linked with the use of statistics and (3) a view on social data science as contributing empirical sociology with new sensitizing concepts, taking ethnography to reflectively address its own presuppositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the closure of the so-called 'Balkan Route', the western Balkan countries became buffer zones for thousands of unregistered migrants living 'in waiting' in precarious conditions. The overland route captures everyday configurations of multiple spatial, temporal and social interconnections, in their entanglement with the historicity of the cross-border areas. By analysing ethnographic accounts collected on the Italian-Austrian and Italian-Slovenian borders, the paper explores the street-level practices of public/institutional apparatus and the stories of would-be asylum seekers, with their experiences of mobility and 'involuntary immobility' shaped by power relations. Our aim is to discuss the complexity of this process which concerns patterns of (im)mobility (e.g., waithood), migration projects, rejection, violence, vulnerability and agency from the point of view of the migrants entering the European Union through this eastern passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the official closure of the passage to the EU (March 2016), the Western Balkans have become an area of transit for migratory flows overland from the East and the South. This introductory editorial sets the stage of the special issue and presents the contents of the articles which aim at going beyond an understanding of the 'refugee crisis' as a generic external threat to the EU discussing its constructive, changing dimension and exploring the fluid nature of migration trajectories which are shaped by intersecting forms of mobilities and immobilities. Through the adoption of an ethnographic and diachronic perspective, the papers further aim to understand their entanglement with the 1990s memories of migration and therefore with the temporalities of mobility, while also considering the re-emergent securitization of border areas, especially after COVID-19 pandemic, and the ambivalent pushback and hospitality policies that also occur in the Balkan countries along the route. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]