Search

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]

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]

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]

This paper gives a history of the Oxford Ethnography Conference. Over more than three decades, a regular conference of sociologists of education and ethnographers has met and produced a series of academic writings. The paper describes some of the interrelationships between developments that occurred within the conference and external changes to the academic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has long demonstrated the exclusion and Othering experienced by young people with disabilities in education. This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study conducted in an 'elite' sixth-form college in England, set against the backdrop of a shifting social, political, and cultural landscape, where neo-liberal discourses of dis/ability and healthism—centring on mental health and wellbeing—are becoming further embedded in educational policy. Drawing on theoretical work by Bourdieu and Foucault, we demonstrate how the students in this study appeared able to re-make disability as a liberal intellectual identity marker and use it as a form of capital within the bounded college sub-field. However, we argue that these empowered disabled subjectivities were strongly middle-classed and precarious. The findings have implications through advancing current understandings of young people's complexifying relationships with disability in education, of enduring inequalities around disability, and how social class is implicated in this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an academic subject of study, death has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Yet unlike other topics in the social sciences, death occupies a rather unique status as a research topic. A universal concern that affects everyone, this paper asks whether it is therefore ever possible to achieve a scholarly 'critical distance' from studying a place or people associated with death. Drawing on the author's experience of undertaking an ethnographic study of a London cemetery, the paper reflexively recounts the ways in which the author managed their own critical distance both in and outside of the field. The paper concludes that it is somewhat unrealistic to suggest that a scholar researching death can maintain a complete sense of detachment in light of their awareness of the mortal human condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how Liverpool's year of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) with a focus on altering the image and perceptions of place allowed a heightened sense of awareness of local identity. Drawing on data gathered through ethnographic approaches at a small-scale arts workshop in the city centre and through considering visual imagery, stereotypes and myths of the city, the paper argues that image and identity are relationally different. Using theories of performativity and performance it finds that local people, due to the rebranding of the city and concerted efforts of promoting Liverpool during this year, are able to cite aspects of their cultural identity whilst leaving space for creativity and improvisation. The emergent process of identity performance and imaging a city are able to reflect upon one another creating a nuanced understanding of lived identities in the midst of a large-scale cultural event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from an ethnography of the economic and cultural life of Rye Lane, an intensely multi-ethnic street in Peckham, South London. The effects of accelerated migration into London are explored through the reshaping and diversification of its interior, street and city spaces. A ‘trans-ethnography’ is pursued across the compendium of micro-, meso- and macro-urban spaces, without reifying one above the other. The ethnographic stretch across intimate, collective and symbolic city spaces serves to connect how the restrictions and circuits of urban migration have different impacts and expressions in these distinctive but interrelated urban localities. The paper argues for a trans-ethnography that engages within and across a compendium of urban localities, to understand how accelerated migration and urban ‘super-diversity’ transform the contemporary global city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Excellent social work can transform people’s lives. The Munro Review of Child Protection reinforced this message by advocating higher practice standards, and the development of organisational learning cultures. One of Professor Munro’s recommendations was the appointment of principal child and family social workers toward this end. The authors of this paper discuss the setting up and delivering on this new role in two very different English local authorities. The first two years’ experience of being in post is drawn on to show that this is one of the most exciting opportunities and developments for English social work in some time. Bridging the practice front line and senior management domains offers a unique contribution to understanding how social work is delivered and experienced. Suggestions for systems change to enhance social work are thus empirically informed and practice-driven. The principal child and family social worker can bringgravitasto practice debates at a time of unprecedented fiscal challenge. In the paper, we reflect on the role and consider our successes and challenges. Any new role benefits from debate about its set-up, the promise and opportunity, and aims and outcomes. This paper starts the debate about the principal child and family social worker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks why spatially separated school departments might exhibit, in different ways, very similar practices. Data from an ethnographic study of three secondary school geography departments in England are discussed through a concept of ‘isomorphism’ (homogenising forces), drawn from neo-institutional theory. Similarities across these departments are analysed in terms of coercive isomorphism, including the strong regulatory role played by examination boards and Ofsted; mimetic isomorphism, in which similar approaches are adopted in response to situations of high uncertainty, based on spreading good practice; and normative isomorphism, including the implications of closely guarded educational routes, the professionalisation of teaching, and wider social trends including the increasing use of Google as a source of knowledge for lessons. It is argued that evidence of homogeneity across spatially separated departments raises interesting questions about teachers’ practice, with implications for departmental and school leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of male strip shows marketed towards heterosexual women has called into question the idea that only men can 'gaze' or be 'sexual scrutinizers' in public leisure spaces. This paper details the findings of an ethnographic study of a male strip event 'Cheeky's',1 located in the Midlands, England. Utilising observation, informal interviews and photography, the paper describes the physical environment and the atmosphere of the event, and analyses interview data with female customers. The paper questions what spaces such as Cheeky's mean for female sexualities, sexual roles and desires. The findings are twofold. On the one hand the club was a relatively novel sexual space, as some women spectators experienced it as an 'empowering' space in which they could be 'sexually aggressive'; on the other hand, the character of the club was actively and adeptly manufactured by the Master of Ceremonies (MC), and male dancers, so as to encourage - and even to coercively elicit - extrovert behaviour from women customers. Despite shifting normative gendered expectations of women's sexual behaviour to some extent, ultimately the club structured women's sexual experiences around traditional heterosexist lines. The club did not encourage women's autonomous sexual expression, and many women claimed they had not found it a very 'sexy space'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws from two years of fieldwork investigating the social course of illness among Pakistani Muslims in East London, exploring how chronic illness is communicated and negotiated in local worlds disrupted by migrancy. It examines episodic short stories about dreams, premonitions and uncanny coincidences that were prominent within the illness narratives of migrant Pakistani Muslims, recalling and throwing light on complex questions concerning subjective constructions of misfortune, the personal and social meanings of illness and the relationships between narrative and selfhood. The ethnography identifies a strong normative context of communication about ill health and bad news, within which revelation through the mode of the supernatural takes on added significance. Recurrent motifs in the dreams emphasize the connectedness between family members scattered across migratory contexts, and the reawakening of moral obligations in families. Whilst medical anthropology has understood descriptions of dreams and other uncanny experiences as 'subjunctivising tactics' serving to maintain alternative plots about the source and outcome of illness, in the Islamic context the narrating of supernatural encounters can have transformative effects, re-organising praxis and conferring legitimacy to certain forms of moral selfhood. The paper therefore argues that the notion of the 'subjunctive mode' imposes the analysts' own system of logic and that there is a need to understand the interpretive frameworks present in the illness narratives in their own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from an ethnographic study of the adjustment experience of a group of postgraduate international students at a university in the South of England. Friendship emerged as a major category of research, an aspect of which was the formation of a friendship group unified by a shared faith, namely Islam. Muslim students were drawn to create this network of friends by a desire to share the re-enactment of ritual associated with home, to reassert and to celebrate religious identity and to provide a bolster against a climate of Islamophobia. Acts of Islamophobic abuse are on the increase throughout the West and in the UK; this paper argues that international students become entangled in unresolved tension between the Muslim and non-Muslim sections of the British population, shedding light on the vulnerability of British Muslims and on the reception offered by the host community to international visitors to the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the social factors influencing the learning of two cohorts of school students and their experience of compulsory secondary education in a city in southern England - the secondary schooling phase of a 12-year, longitudinal ethnographic study that also tracked the same children's experiences through primary schooling. We embed our report of secondary school findings within the theoretical models and understandings generated by the Identity and Learning Programme as a whole. The paper addresses three key issues. First, we trace how social influences on learning broaden as young people develop through adolescence, and illustrate why viewing learning as social activity is so important. Second, we discuss evolving processes of social differentiation in relation to gender and social class. We draw particular attention to the dangers of over-simplified models of social reproduction. Finally, we review an analysis of strategic action and identities, contrasting the differentiated experience of young people attending independent and selective schools compared with those attending non-selective comprehensive schools. Overall, this analysis seeks to complement studies of differentiated educational outcomes by suggesting possible social processes that could help to account for them. The Identity and Learning Programme, both in its secondary phase and as a whole, shows clearly how individual agency enables young people to cope with their circumstances. However, in so doing, they both reproduce elements of constraint/opportunity and construct others anew. This has significant implications for policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnography is increasingly being used in the evaluation of quality improvement and change initiatives in healthcare settings, particularly in the form of 'focused' and 'rapid' ethnographies. This new ethnographic genre is tailored to suit narrower enquiries within clinical pathways. However, the application of ethnography to the evaluation of quality improvement is not straightforward or free from reductionist bias, particularly in hospital settings where interventions take place during a limited period of time and instigate change in busy and sensitive settings. This paper discusses problems and emergent solutions involved in conducting an ethnographic process evaluation of co-design projects in lung cancer and intensive care unit services in two hospitals in England. The mixed-methods ethnographic evaluation consisted of observations of the co-design process and triangulation of findings with interviews, questionnaires, participant reflective diaries and service improvement logs. Limitations of observational time and distance from 'the field' were overcome by making most of the pre- and post-event observational periods, situating quality improvement within the wider context of clinical practice, achieving attunement with local clinical cultures and engaging participants in collaboratively guiding observational and interview design. This approach led to a focused ethnographic evaluation that accommodated ethnographic principles to obtain rich insights into quality improvement processes despite the limitations of short-timeframes and the hospital setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using visual ethnography as a participatory method that places children's and young people's everyday experiences at the centre of research is discussed in this paper. The strengths and challenges of using participatory visual methods as a way of eliciting the thoughts, feelings and identities of young people within various education and training contexts in England are presented through the reflection of two ethnographies' that encouraged the use of participatory visual techniques to facilitate the gathering of data. Participatory visual approaches capture meaningful child-centred and child-generated perspectives of their everyday lives in situ [Oh, Su-Ann. 2012. 'Photofriend: Creating Visual Ethnography with Refugee Children.' Area. 44(3): 382-288. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01111]. The participatory visual method is a powerful instrument within the plethora of methods available to the ethnographer. By offering reflexive accounts of doing ethnography in an unobtrusive and child respectful way the power of ethnography is revealed via its versatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the appearance and subsequent disappearance of ‘Barrow Man’ and uses anthropological and social psychological theory to examine the socio-cultural, psychological and economic conditions for the existence of the phenomenon. It argues that these conditions were the result of both specific local labour market circumstances and of the effects of global political changes, and argues that to talk about ‘Barrow Man’ as if it was a psychiatric diagnosis was to identify a moral construct as a mental disorder. It also argues that at the same time the phenomenon was expressive of certain core values that were not readily acknowledged in everyday clinical practice and that it might therefore best be understood as an institutional category. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to examine the experiences of pupils and professionals who are affected by actual or threatened permanent exclusion (what used to be called being expelled) from school. An ethnographic study based on the writer's employment within secondary schools and the Children's Services department of an urban local authority in England explores the idea that professionals may be forced to make decisions about pupils in the face of powerful competition between the politically unchallengeable concepts of tolerance, inclusivity, attainment, and choice. The paper argues that the tensions of multi-agency working are focussed within what will be called the contested space of the pupil's 'extended body'. Permanent exclusion, along with its tendency to prompt a pathological reading of a pupil's issues, is therefore seen as an authoritarian strategy designed to ameliorate the inherent paradoxical tension experienced by the various professionals working within an education system dedicated to the concept of 'full inclusion' but measured and funded on the grounds of academic league tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the research on which this paper is based is to find out what impact Liverpool 08 will have on local cultural habitus, and how the sustainability of this impact can be measured and monitored. Too often, evaluation became a box-ticking exercise for decision makers to demonstrate transparency and to objectively prove results. However, evaluations are usually ephemeral, and do not systematically integrate inputs from the end-receivers/consumers of public policies. Decision makers prefer quantitative indicators, that are well known, easily applied and comprehensible to a broad audience, but leave out emotional and participatory aspects. Introducing a hermeneutical approach to understand the impacts of cultural policy allows access to the emotional and qualitative experience of policy impacts on everyday cultural life. This paper suggests that cognitive mapping turned into an evaluation method promotes residents as local experts on everyday construction of cultural space, and gives them an opportunity to participate in the evaluation process. The geography of the local population's interaction with urban space as a creative force conveys emotional attachment to particular parts of the city, determines the essential elements for cultural life and space and its comparison to the city's legitimised cultural space shows how far the bottom-up and the top-down approaches match: the smaller the gap between them, the higher the sustainability of cultural policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of Romani Gypsy groups in England (1996-2000), along with data from follow-up work involving original and additional participants (2005-ongoing), this paper explores several ethical issues that arose. It traces developing relationships across a 13-year period, identifying the problems of attempting to construct a 'research community' consisting of individuals with diverse lifestyles, and at times, conflicting agendas. It problematises issues concerning the negotiation and maintenance of access, and considers, also, the prioritisation of certain voices at the expense of others, and the difficulties of 'openness' when the researcher is unsure where a project is heading. Rather than engaging with a full literature review of the themes discussed, this paper seeks to highlight the situated negotiation of ethics within a specific research context. The focus is on shifting events in which official codes of practice do not seem to provide an adequate means of navigation. The paper argues that it is not sufficient for the researcher to pay lip service to superficial guidelines, calling, instead, for deeper reflection that might lead to greater honesty with both oneself and the community/communities involved in research. It implies a need to react quickly to events in the field, informing participants about any perceived flaws and ambiguities in the original research design that may have emerged during data collection and led to changes of direction. Finally, it recommends that participants are fully involved in processes, including those that are interpretive, and that they, too, share any benefit of considering the research study, retrospectively, as an historical artefact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on ethnographic and historical research on the formation of Highlife in a 'trilocal' setting: Ghana, Nigeria and England in the 1950s and 1960s, the time when Highlife evolved as one of the most popular forms of modern music of (anglophone) West Africa in the twentieth century. It tackles the issue of how the formation of Highlife-music and culture was (transnationally) related to the formation of an African Diaspora in the colonial centre London in the post-World War II decades, how West African cultural formation in the diaspora affected Highlife as a popular and transnational culture, particularly evident in the so far neglected 'diasporic memory/ies' on Highlife. The approach seeks to emphasise the critical role of travelling music/ians from West Africa and the Caribbean to London and back in the formation of both, African diasporic and transnational identities as well as African popular music, in that important phase of its history. In the final part of this paper I am reflecting upon methodological issues related to my study on Highlife, focussing mainly on the relationship of living memory, archive and qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit (WRERU) at the University of Warwick regarding an educational programme, which is based on what are perceived to be universal values. The programme aims to contribute to the spiritual development of children in schools, which is one of the statutory requirements of mainstream school provision in England and Wales. The Sathya Sai Education in Human Values (SSEHV) offers material which seeks to promote 'human values'. The paper explores what these values are and why they are perceived to be of a universal nature. The focus on values introduces spiritual dimensions which are examined with reference to the educational contexts in which they are conveyed. The contents of the programme and the development from its inception are described. The paper is based on ethnographic data collected in classrooms and other educational environments where the programme has found application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While increasing attention from academics and the media focuses on the lives of Muslim communities in the west, little attention has so far been given to insiders' own perceptions of their social lives. This paper, borne out of broader research on their perceptions of crime, aims to analyse some internal discourses on moral education. The ethnographic data, collected between October 2004 and July 2005, is used to try to show the potentials and the pitfalls of formal (in mosques, madrasahs and schools) and informal (in family and community) means of provision of moral education. The paper argues that prevention of deviance through moral education seems to be neglected in favour of punishment, retrieval or rehabilitation. Female deviance, however, seems to be addressed by prevention strategies that are based on protection and the limitation of certain interactions, rather than on moral education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore everyday life on acute psychiatric admission wards, focusing on the experience of patients. Using a grounded theory approach, data were collected by ethnographic methods on three wards in London, UK. This paper is concerned with the issue of how patients manage risks arising from their interaction with other patients on the ward, such as assault and sexual harassment. Patients were observed doing this in various ways including: (a) avoiding risky situations or individuals; (b) de-escalating potentially risky situations; (c) seeking safety interventions by staff or increased surveillance; and (d) protective involvement with other patients. These findings show that patients routinely take an active role in making a safe environment for themselves, partly because they cannot rely on staff to do this for them. Mental health professionals should consider how to build upon what patients are already doing to maximise ward safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives:This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study exploring White and British Indian informal stroke carers’ experiences of caring, factors contributing to their stress, and strategies used to overcome stress. Design:A qualitative approach involving in-depth interviews was used to explore informal carers’ experiences of caring for stroke survivors and the stress of caring at one and three to six months from the onset of stroke. Interviewers bilingual in English and Gujarati or Punjabi conducted interviews with carers. Socio-demographic data of carers and stroke survivors were collected at one, and three to six months by dedicated stroke research nurses. Results:A total of 37 interviews with carers caring for stroke survivors with a wide range of physical and mental impairments were completed. A majority of carers had assumed the task of caring within a few weeks of the stroke. Irrespective of ethnicity, carers’ emotional and physical well-being was undermined by the uncertainty and unpredictability of caring for stroke survivors, and meeting their expectations and needs. The strain of managing social obligations to care was common to all carers irrespective of gender and ethnicity, but the higher levels of anxiety and depression reported by Indian British female carers appeared to stem from the carers’ pre-existing physical ailments, their cultural and religious beliefs, and household arrangements. Carers’ strain in extended households was exacerbated by the additional responsibility of caring for other dependent relatives. Conclusion:Since the role of carers is clearly indispensable in the successful rehabilitation of survivors, it is vital to ensure that their well-being is not undermined by a lack of information and training, and that their need for professional support is prioritised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reporting about a project with male home carers, this paper presents some of the interactions, which took place between the participants as they got to know each other, becoming part of each other's lives. Presenting information from the artist's personal diaries as someone who has lived in the participating community all his life, he attempts to reveal the importance of seemingly insignificant data by making diary entries after each event and reflecting on them at a later date. These have been selected to compare the similarities between Tim Ingold's descriptions of creativity and Grant Kester's model for a dialogical aesthetic, which highlights key points in the engagement processes of a socially engaged artist. These reflective notes, made while the experiences were still fresh in his mind, help to illustrate the impact not only on the participants but also upon the artist as a participant in the social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the differences between experiences of family role in in-patient rehabilitation in Turkey and England. The literature predominantly assumes family presence in rehabilitation as positive, because it draws upon Western cases, where care is delivered fully by professionals, and patients may feel isolated during hospital stays. Analyses of other contexts provide a more nuanced view. This qualitative research included in-depth interviews (Turkey: 42, England: 18) with people with disabilities (n = 39), their families (n = 8) and hospital staff (n = 13); hospital ethnography (Turkey), focus groups (England: 3 groups involving 4 doctors, 5 nurses, 6 therapists), and participant-observation (England: 5 families). Thematic analysis highlights experiences of family involvement across different contexts. Families are differently integrated in rehabilitation in England and Turkey. In England, where family presence is regulated and relatively limited, people with disabilities feel more isolated and see family as a major form of support. In Turkey, where family presence is unregulated and intense, they enjoy family as an agent of intra-hospital socialising, but find it disabling when it implies a loss of privacy and individuality. Family involvement in rehabilitation should support social interaction but allow people with disabilities to remain independent. Family involvement in rehabilitation can be both enabling and disabling. Existing literature draws upon rehabilitation practices, where family presence is limited and perceived as positive. An analysis of cases, where families are integral to the health care system (e.g., Turkey), can provide a nuanced view of family integration, which can be both enabling and disabling. Rehabilitation processes and health professionals need to integrate families in ways that will enrich social interaction, but still allow people with disabilities to retain their independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2010 I began an ESRC CASE Studentship in the School of Education, University of Manchester, and Kingswood High School, UK (anonymised name). This paper presents a reflexive analysis of the first year of the studentship, with a particular emphasis on working both inside and outside of the university and school. I worked with my supervisor and school personnel to design and implement a baseline data collection process, and using this data I reported to the school on key findings to support policy making and to begin negotiations on my PhD project. I will use my research diary to provide a thematic account of the first year, specifically I will examine both practical and philosophical issues regarding learning about my identity as a researcher who moves between similar and different institutions, professionals and organisational purposes. I will present a theorising of what it means to be simultaneously in and out, and between, and what this means for the development of a coherent project that meets the requirements of the school, university and the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of 'aspiration' influencing contemporary education policy and practice are framed almost exclusively in terms of individual - or, at most, familial - ambitions towards economic prosperity. The failure to achieve 'social mobility' in British society is often posed as being due to the 'low aspirations' of working class children, particularly in formerly heavily industrialised areas. In a classic case of 'blaming the victim' the social exclusion that undoubtedly exists in such areas is blamed on those who suffer it. Things would be different, the argument goes, if only people aspired to 'get on'. This paper looks at material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of some former coal-mining communities in the north of England which are often popularly characterised as insular and lacking in ambition. In contrast to this stereotype, however, the data suggests that working class teenagers growing up in the impoverished and abandoned geography of Victorian colliery model villages, rather than suffering a failure of aspiration, often angrily and powerfully aspire - but for something contrary to the dominant model. Reviewing the ethnographic data in the light of a sociological and historical literature that attests to the exceptional nature of coal-mining communities, I suggest that such exceptionality impacts on young people's dispositions towards the educational project as a whole through a complex process of cultural transmission. A historically and locally situated notion of counter aspiration - that I call, here, resistant aspiration - is evident. I propose, in conclusion, that an acknowledgement of such resistant aspiration might help understand the widespread 'school disaffection' of working class youngsters not only in these former coal-mining communities but also in other post-industrial settings - nationally and internationally - that are similarly characterised by contested histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By often taking as its focus the experience of illness in itself, medical anthropology has sometimes neglected the meanings that patients may assign to the diagnostic procedures that they are expected to undergo. This paper puts into anthropological perspective the author's experiences working as an assistant psychologist in two British memory clinics for the detection and treatment of dementia, using comments by patients to illustrate the significance that one aspect of these procedures - cognitive testing - had for them. These comments suggest that the meanings that patients construct with regard to such testing are complex and cannot be understood if one persists in seeing it as a neutral diagnostic tool without broader implications. It is argued that a strong association made by many patients between the cognitive tests and their childhood school experiences informs their reactions for better or worse. It is important to acknowledge the implications of this active interpretation of medical procedures if the memory clinic experience is not to become an alienating and infantilising one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rugby league is part of the white, working-class (male) culture of the north of England, and is a sport that is used by its supporters to (re)produce both an imagined community of nostalgic northernness and an imaginary community of locally situated hegemonically masculine belonging. The invented traditions of its origins link the game to a white, working-class twentieth-century culture of mills, pits, terraced houses and pubs; a culture increasingly marginalised, re-shaped and challenged in this century. In this paper we use two medium-term, ethnographic research projects on rugby league (one from Spracklen; the other an on-going project by Timmins) to explore northernness, blackness, whiteness and our own roles in the ethnographies as 'black' and 'white' researchers researching 'race' and identity in a community that remains (but not exclusively) a place for a working-class whiteness to be articulated. We argue that our own histories and identities are pivotal in how we are accepted as legitimate ethnographers and insiders, but those histories and identities also pose a critically real challenge to us and to those in the community of rugby league with whom we interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of assessment practices on one university-led teacher-training course in England, delivered across a network of further education colleges. After establishing that assessment practices are bound up in texts of different kinds, this article draws on two theoretical frameworks - institutional ethnography and actor-network theory - in order to explore how the work done by tutors and students on the course is mediated by texts. Through analysing the ways in which texts are used and the ways in which students and tutors respond to them, the paper suggests that assessment practices are in fact characterised by complexity and contingency which are masked by the dominant discourses of quality assurance and managerialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interaction between fieldworker and “tradition bearer” over an extended period of time, in the context of an ethnographic study of singing traditions in the southern Pennines of England. Using examples, it examines the negative as well as the positive aspects of the exchange, with particular emphasis on mutuality and reciprocity. It charts the development of key relationships and the ways in which they have come to maturity and achieved equilibrium. Careful thought is given to the role of the fieldworker in respect of active/passive, interventionist/non-interventionist stances. Aspects of performance, commercialisation, networking, promotion, and media relations are discussed. Following a consideration of ethical and moral issues, including exploitation and advocacy, the paper suggests a working model of partnership as a way forward for future productive field-based research into traditional expressive arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how people involved in 'local' protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformation in collective identity boundaries towards a more inclusive definition of 'community'. Analysis of participants' accounts before and after involvement in the eviction of a tree suggests the role of conflict with the police in producing an oppositional definition of the collective identity, facilitating links to other groups in resistance to illegitimate authority. Finally, biographical material indicates the implications of transformed identity boundaries for co-action with wider social groups. It is argued that the same intra- and inter-group processes that determine how identity boundaries extend to include a broader community might account for how people come to see themselves as part of a global social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses aspects of the English planning system in England. He is critical of the measures undertaken by the government of Great Britain on the significant differences in approach between the devolved administrations with the English system. Also investigated is the establishment of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 as the requirement for English planning for development values enthroned in the state.

In 1910 Roger Casement was sent by the British government to investigate the alleged humanitarian abuses of the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo, a disputed border zone in North West Amazonia. Casement brought more than verbal and written testimony back to London. On 26 June, some six months after he returned from the Amazon, Casement collected two Amerindian boys - Omarino and Ricudo - from Southampton docks. This paper will reconstruct the brief period that these young men spent in Britain in the summer of 1911 and assess, in particular, to what extent they were treated as 'exhibits' by Casement, who not only introduced them to leading members of the British establishment but also arranged for them to be painted and photographed following contemporary ethnographic conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban ethnographic work is still relatively rare in mainstream urban studies and yet it may be an essential component. Some of the promise of such work is indicated by this paper. Inspired by the Mass Observation movement of the late 1930s and a recent challenge by Kevin Robins as well as work by Henri Lefebvre and Zygmunt Bauman, it enacts a search for the modalities of community in the south London district of Peckham. Starting with media tales, Stanton encounters iconic buildings, ethnic dimensions of meat, consumption worlds, religious tales, and ends with an explicit relic of Empire. Of some of the black churches he comments that they represent religious globalization and their cries for an end of ethnic suffering through redemptive love of Christ say much for histories which remain hidden and untold. What is in effect an essential companion piece for this emerging take on the cultural complexities of ‘glocal’ realities is Elisa Joy White's ‘Forging African diaspora places in Dublin's retro‐global spaces: Minority making in a new global city’, City 6(2), 2002, pp. 251–270. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the work of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Major Thomas Moody and John Dougan regarding indentured labor problem on the small Caribbean Island of Tortola. The article try to achieve a better understanding of the conflict of racial ideas in early Victorian England. Dougan and Moody were appointed as commissioners to discover whether slaves in Tortola could be safely liberated. The mission was plagued from the beginning by problems from two distinct sources, one was Tortolas plantocracy, who were hostile to the investigation as they were naturally suspicious of its likely effects on their own 6,500 or so slaves. The other was the relationship itself between Dougan and Major Moody, which steadily deteriorated beyond repair. Differences in opinion of three men concerning the Blacks work attitudes was largely due to the impact of Evangelicalism, a spiritual force which had emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, possibly as a reaction to the atheistic sentiments of the Enlightenment and the moribund rituals of the established church. Macaulay and Commissioners to Tortola have provided the modern student of race relations with some valuable insights into racial attitudes in the period immediately preceding slavery abolition. Dougan wrote two parliamentary reports heavily weighted against slavery and racial discrimination. Moody wrote two reports attacking the ideas of abolition and racial equality, and Macaulay wrote a hostile but distorted critique of Moody's arguments which could perhaps explain some of confusion in present day discussions of ethnic relations.

This article seeks to consider the value of critical ethnography for the study of policing. Specifically, the article explores the benefits and challenges of using ethnographic methods to explore protest policing from the perspective of the policed. Drawing upon a longitudinal study of the policing of protests against 'fracking' in England, the article examines the process of conducting research with groups who are being policed in extended protest situations. Writing from a critical criminological perspective, the article suggests that this approach to studying policing from below can help advance our collective understanding of both protest and policing. In this sense, ethnographic research can play a vital role in exploring the experiences of groups marginalised in current debates and this approach provides us with an alternative viewpoint from which to examine the development of police policy and practice. The article suggests that to make this contribution to the study of protest policing, we require research that maintains a critical distance from police forces to gain access to those groups who, due to their negative perceptions and/or experiences of policing, are reluctant to engage with research. Reflecting on the development of ethnographic research on, but not with, police, the article suggests that this critical distance brings both benefits and challenges to academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the riskwork engaged in by call handlers, dispatchers and response officers in a police force control room in England. We present a novel approach by drawing on the work of Foucault and his concept le dispositif to study riskwork in policing in a post-austerity landscape and to develop the analytical concept of 'precautionary policing'. Dispositional analysis allows us to focus on social dispositions or inclinations and to demonstrate how these arrangements affect social interaction and organisational behaviour. We draw on data collected via ethnographic fieldwork focusing on domestic abuse incidents in a police force control room in England. The findings focus on: (1) organisational technologies of risk, which guided and surfaced staff actions and decision-making; (2) riskwork to mitigate and manage threats and harm to victims and the public; and (3) riskwork relating to the professional decision-making of individual staff and officers. In addition to bringing the risk tools and artefacts 'into being' through their (inter-)actions, for staff, these technologies are a safety net to justify practices. They erode opportunities for officer discretion, particularly in relation to responses to domestic incidents. Therefore, despite policy discussions of the need to reduce officers' risk aversion and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, a risk averse culture still pervades. Uncertainty becomes a justification for pre-emptive action by officers and staff before risks become known, and demonstrates a shift to precautionary policing practices which do not follow the blueprints of risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws together a comparative sociological analysis and a political theory perspective to interpret children's views on the role of school and being a pupil, and what these tell us about their conceptual representations of citizenship and belonging in France and England. The article presents research findings from a cross-national ethnographic study with children aged 10 and 11 years in two primary schools, one in France and one in England. This article shows that children's views generally reflected national value orientations around citizenship and belonging, but that these conceptions of citizenship were not always fully understood by children, and masked, in some cases, deeper mechanisms of exclusion. This raises questions about the place of citizenship in education in France and England, and calls for a deeper understanding of the ways in which conceptions of citizenship are formed through children's experience of school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on work on post-Fordist affect, we argue that the group-based and person-centered forms of production in mining and milling, respectively, produce contingent conceptualizations of culture, identity, and personhood and, in turn, of dying and death. The “communal solidarism” characteristic of post-mining milieu engenders senses of dying and death entailing a communal merging of erstwhile individual selfhoods. In post-milling milieu dying and death are conceptualized as individuated, but subject to social evaluation. The evaluative criterion in this regard is ability to “perform” dying and death in ways that reflect the valorized essence of local culture, identity, and personhood, “resilient autonomy.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study explores the characteristics of and motivations for pauses in Chinese-English (C-E) simultaneous interpreting (SI). The data were collected from a simultaneous interpreting task in which five expert interpreters and five trainee interpreters interpreted an authentic speech from Chinese into English. A bilingual corpus was built comprising transcripts of the speech and the interpretations and pauses were codified for analysis. Retrospective interviews were conducted to stimulate subjects' recall of their motivations for unnatural pauses in SI production. The major findings are: First, pauses are less frequent but longer in C-E simultaneous interpreting than in the original speech. Second, there is a hierarchical distribution of pauses corresponding to syntactic complexity, except that pauses inside phrases are disproportionately frequent. Third, major motivations for unnatural pauses in C-E simultaneous interpreting can be attributed to SI-specific strategies such as waiting, formulating and restructuring. Fourth, compared with trainees, expert interpreters have fewer and shorter pauses and their pauses tend to be more appropriate and occur mainly at major syntactic junctions. Although both groups share major motivations for unnatural pauses, expert interpreters have remarkably fewer pauses due to formulating, waiting, conceptualising and split attention but more pauses due to monitoring and adoption of strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rex and Moore's Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook has the status of a modern sociological classic. The argument presented here is that this can be attributed in part to its methodological underpinnings. The use of a combination of methods to collect material on the lives of Sparkbrook residents in the 1960s allowed a more rounded account to be developed than would have been possible had only the originally planned survey been undertaken. The resultant study is by no means perfect, but its underlying ambition and the determination with which the project was seen through have served to inspire subsequent generations of researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of the English gentleman is regaining traction in British society. This retrograde celebration of a type of masculinity articulating various intersections in class, racial and national identity provides not just a reliable identity-complex for contemporary British males but also imaginative solutions to the current cultural predicaments – notably, how to be English/British in the era of globalisation. This article will unpack this reformation of the gentleman and its paradoxical appearance and position at present through two consumer objects: clothing and cars. By first conceptually outlining the national, class and racialised background of the ‘gentleman’ for the British cultural imagination, the article will proceed to analyse Jack Wills' clothing aesthetic and the recent Jaguar F-Type coupe, ‘Good to be Bad’, adverts. The article draws upon Lévi-Strauss and Jameson to conceptualise this paradoxical, mythical resurgence of gentry/gentlemanliness. By focusing on how two artefacts utilise an Americanised mythical narrative of Britishness, I claim the contemporary landscape sees the oxymoronic return of an archaic character-type refigured in a manner appropriate for an increasingly plural, multi-cultural global landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from ethnographic research that examined the impact of neighbourhood based community safety policies on young people living in social housing in the south of England. It begins with a brief examination of what local community safety practitioners considered the primary crime and disorder 'problem' on the estate - youth 'anti-social behaviour'. It then shows that the most significant generator of fear and insecurity amongst young people themselves was the sudden, and often violent, deaths of peers. This article examines the extent of the peer bereavements that punctured the lives of the young people in Hillview and demonstrates that these experiences left them feeling profoundly vulnerable and acutely fearful of their own safety and for the safety of friends and family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now widely accepted that the Anglo-Saxons were not just transplanted Germanic invaders and settlers from the Continent, but the outcome of insular interactions and changes. But we are still lacking explicit models that suggest how this ethnogenetic process might have worked in concrete terms. This article is an attempt to present such a model from an archaeological perspective, but with an interdisciplinary approach. The focus is on the role of the native British population and its interaction with immigrant Germanic groups. As a result, the model envisages two broad phases in the creation of the Anglo-Saxons: an ethnically divided conquest society in the 5th/6th centuries in which immigrants and their descendants practised a form of 'apartheid' in order to preserve their dominance; and a phase of increasing acculturation and assimilation of the natives in the 7th/8th centuries that laid the foundations of a common English identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, which arises from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, explores the negotiation of faith, place and social identity amongst British-Muslim youth in one inner-city community in Birmingham, UK. Narratives drawn from fieldwork are brought into a critical dialogue with theoretical discourse about the nature of culture, the built urban environment, youth identities and contextualised religious discourse within the British-Muslim community. The article suggests that a dynamic definition of culture as an open and ongoing process of meaning-making and the utilisation of ‘third space’ thinking are needed to adequately explore the multifaceted contextual religious discourse of British-Muslim youth. The article seeks to answer a key question: how do urban British-Muslim youth negotiate faith and meaning in a society that increasingly questions their presence and what might their experience have to teach wider society about the impact that contemporary urbanism has on the articulation of personal, political and religious identity? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the notion of participant observation and the possibility of obtaining meaningful data in short-term observations as part of a broader research design. It highlights the importance of the researcher role and the opportunities different roles entail for developing shared understanding and co-constructing meaning. It concludes that the observations yield important findings about the construction of identity in different sites and thus complement the interview data in enabling the researcher to reconstruct the apprentices' learner biographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]