Search

Highlights • This paper mobilizes primary material evidence and analyzes spatiotemporal trends to explore the role of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in enforcing the contemporary border, particularly in terms of the trend known as the migration funnel effect. • Enabling a comparative view of migration and border security, the variables considered include the left behind belongings of undocumented migrants, migrant death records, and the physical infrastructure of border security. • Three distinct periods associated with the increased walling and shifting migration patterns are proposed. • This paper utilizes an intertwined theoretical framing building on theories of sovereignty and materiality. • This innovative analysis combines ethnography, document analysis, archaeological survey, and GIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper argues that older adults living alone in the U.S. face a set of unique challenges, as they are likely to experience a sense of precariousness. The term precariousness points to an intrinsic sense of instability and insecurity stemming from a lack of, or difficulty to, access essential resources. During a two-year ethnography of 47 older solo dwellers, this term captured one of the distinctive traits of the experience of living alone in older age in the U.S. The findings from semi-structured interviews and participant observation highlight the emergence of the notion of precariousness along three levels of analysis. First, on the micro and subjective level of analysis, older solo dwellers may struggle to perform the chores related to their household as they may deal with a failing body, faltering memory, and fixed if not shrinking income. Second, on the meso and institutional level of analysis, older adults living alone need to navigate the complex, scattered, and ever-changing landscape of services and understand their eligibility criteria, accessibility, fees, and conditions. At the same time they may have to deal with family issues. Finally, the macro level examines the pressure on older solo dwellers of a prevalent ideology that prizes independent behaviors and personal responsibility. In conclusion, the notion of precariousness illustrates the unique position of older adults living alone as they face different type of challenges on a micro, meso, and macro dimension. The paper ends with an invitation to create social policies that accommodate the needs of a growing number of older adults living alone. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In a recent paper, Luc Faucher and others have argued for the existence of deep cultural differences between ‘Chinese’ and ‘East Asian’ ways of understanding the world and those of ‘ancient Greeks’ and ‘Americans’. Rejecting Alison Gopnik’s speculation that the development of modern science was driven by the increasing availability of leisure and information in the late Renaissance, they claim instead—following Richard Nisbett—that the birth of mathematical science was aided by ‘Greek’, or ‘Western’, cultural norms that encouraged analytic, abstract and rational theorizing. They argue that ‘Chinese’ and ‘East Asian’ cultural norms favoured, by contrast, holistic, concrete and dialectical modes of thinking. After clarifying some of the things that can be meant by ‘culture’ and ‘mentality’, the present paper shows that Faucher and his colleagues make a number of appeals—to the authority of comparative studies and history of science, to the psychological studies of Nisbett and his colleagues, and to a hidden assumption of strong cultural continuity in the West. It is argued that every one of these appeals is misguided, and, further, that the psychological findings of Nisbett and others have little bearing on questions concerning the origins of modern science. Finally, it is suggested that the ‘Needham question’ about why the birth of modern science occurred in Europe rather than anywhere else is itself multiply confused to the extent that it may express no significant query. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Multi-disciplinary research projects are increasingly common in the social sciences, but melding diverse methods and techniques together, especially in the often chaotic data collection phase, has received little attention from office-bound quantitative researchers and qualitative researchers obsessed with issues of reflexivity. As an ethnographer and ‘junior partner’ on a multidisciplinary study of HIV risk among youth in Brooklyn, New York, this paper examines some of the unanticipated problems and surprising outcomes encountered in trying to combine the two research approaches. The complex issue of constructing an identity in the field—survey researcher versus ethnographer—is discussed in light of experiences from this project. The researchers had expected the ethnography to facilitate the survey component of the research, and it did, but an unexpected outcome was how the survey helped later ethnographic work by decreasing ambiguity about the ethnographer''s identity and purpose in the neighbourhood. The paper also examines a single, unpleasant event that occurred while administering the structured survey to underscore the hypothesis- and theory-generating potential of ethnography. While fieldwork may clearly be risky in a variety of ways, the paper underscores the idea that the fieldwork process is often essential to the development of theory. A seamless fit between quantitative and ethnographic approaches to research remains a distant goal, but ethnographers must continue to exercise flexibility, persistently and creatively carving out their unique niches within the larger field of social science research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

There is growing concern among US-based clinicians, patients, policy makers, and in the media about the personal and community health risks associated with opioids. Perceptions about the efficacy and appropriateness of opioids for the management of chronic non-cancer pain (CNCP) have dramatically transformed in recent decades. Yet, there is very little social scientific research identifying the factors that have informed this transformation from the perspectives of prescribing clinicians. As part of an on-going ethnographic study of CNCP management among clinicians and their patients with co-occurring substance use, we interviewed 23 primary care clinicians who practice in safety-net clinical settings. In this paper, we describe the clinical and social influences informing three historic periods: (1) the escalation of opioid prescriptions for CNCP; (2) an interim period in which the efficacy of and risks associated with opioids were re-assessed; and (3) the current period of “opioid pharmacovigilance,” characterized by the increased surveillance of opioid prescriptions. Clinicians reported that interpretations of the evidence-base in favor of and opposing opioid prescribing for CNCP evolved within a larger clinical-social context. Historically, pharmaceutical marketing efforts and clinicians' concerns about racialized healthcare disparities in pain treatment influenced opioid prescription decision-making. Clinicians emphasized how patients' medical complexity (e.g. multiple chronic health conditions) and structural vulnerability (e.g. poverty, community violence) impacted access to opioids within resource-limited healthcare settings. This clinical-social history of opioid prescribing practices helps to elucidate the ongoing challenges of CNCP treatment in the US healthcare safety net and lends needed specificity to the broader, nationwide conversation about opioids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to increase our understanding about the experienced value of hunting as a travel experience. Experienced value refers to the individual''s multidimensional outcome of the hunting experience. The study consists of an auto-ethnography of one hunter and diary notes, photos and memories of the other. Holbrook''s typology of consumer value has been used as the theoretical framework for analyzing the data. The findings suggest that first, numerous types of value may come into play during the course of one particular hunt, and second, that in tourism, “togetherness” should be included in the consumer value typology as a new dimension of intrinsic other-oriented. Active togetherness value refers to the person whose traveling would be motivated by the need to offer and share experiences for and with the loved ones and the reactive dimension is the reaction of those accepting this offer. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Research on labeling mental illness has focused relatively little attention on practical organizational concerns in the process of labeling in community mental health services. This paper examines this issue through an ethnographic study of two multi-service community mental health services organizations for people labeled severely and persistently mentally ill in the Midwest United States. The findings show that the labeling process is structured by cultural and policy environments in which mental health services are able to provide resources otherwise difficult to obtain. Within organizations, official labels can be applied for reasons other than clinical practice; they channel resources to both organizations and clients. Informal organizational labels regarding client mental illness are not tethered to the bureaucratic apparatus granting access to and paying for services. Instead, they reflect workers'' real assessments of clients, which can differ from official ones. These informal labels determine how organizations deal with clients when rules and routines are violated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Japan and the United States are both post-industrial societies, characterized by distinct trajectories of dying. Both contain multiple "cultural scripts" of the good death. Seale (Constructing Death: the Sociology of Dying and Bereavement, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) has identified at least four "cultural scripts", or ways to die well, that are found in contemporary anglophone countries: modern medicine, revivalism, an anti-revivalist script and a religious script. Although these scripts can also be found in Japan, different historical experiences and religious traditions provide a context in which their content and interpretation sometimes differ from those of the anglophone countries. To understand ordinary people's ideas about dying well and dying poorly, we must recognize not only that post-industrial society offers multiple scripts and varying interpretive frameworks, but also that people actively select from among them in making decisions and explaining their views. Moreover, ideas and metaphors may be based on multiple scripts simultaneously or may offer different interpretations for different social contexts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in both countries, this paper explores the metaphors that ordinary patients and caregivers draw upon as they use, modify, combine or ignore these cultural scripts of dying. Ideas about choice, time, place and personhood, elements of a good death that were derived inductively from interviews, are described. These Japanese and American data suggest somewhat different concerns and assumptions about human life and the relation of the person to the wider social world, but indicate similar concerns about the process of medicalised dying and the creation of meaning for those involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]