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This paper introduces 'Displacement', a special themed issue of Contemporary South Asia with contributors and a guest editor who are all members of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS). The paper outlines the use of the notion of displacement as a way of understanding aspects of the politics of South Asia and its Diaspora. Displacement is presented as both an empirical and conceptual category that may be used to describe the movement of peoples and geographies, as well as analytical vocabularies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a call for Latina/o plays to be selected for a special issue of "Text and Performance Quarterly." The editors compare the work of Performance Study and Latina/o Studies are both drawing from theoretical and methodological perspectives to articulate life experience with deeper understanding. Submission in the categories of everyday life, performance ethnography, popular culture, performance art, personal narrative and theatre will be evaluated for how they challenge traditional academic canons and how latinidad is shaping the way performance can be understood. Submissions will be accepted through October 1, 2007.

In the last decades, different scholars have focused on how political participation has been transformed by digital media. Although insightful, current research in the field lacks a critical understanding of the personal and affective dimension of online political participation. This paper aims to address this gap by looking at the interconnection between digital storytelling, identity narratives and family life. Drawing on an ethnographic research, the paper shows that activists construct their political identities online through complex practices of digital storytelling that involve the reinterpretation of early childhood and family life. These processes of digital storytelling have an un-intended consequence: they enable the political profiling of different family members. The paper argues that these digital practices, which produce politically identifying digital traces, are transforming political socialisation in family life and introducing new ways in which we can think digital citizenship across the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While there is a growing body of scholarship on the neoliberal content of global English textbooks, the ways in which these commercial materials come to life in teaching and learning practices are still under researched. Drawing on a critical ethnographic account of two English courses for unemployed students in a private language school in Serbia, this paper examines the beliefs and actions of teachers and students in regard to English language education and the global textbooks they use. The results suggest that many views about the English language courses and their textbooks in this case study are deeply shaped by the broader socioeconomic context of neoliberalism. Furthermore, the neoliberalism featured in the textbook motivates students to learn English and to transform themselves into suitable citizens and workers for the current economic order. In this way, the global textbook becomes one of the many tools that neoliberalism uses to reproduce itself. This paper argues that the present state of affairs is not an inevitable and desirable one and calls for implementing alternative approaches to the dominant neoliberal conception of English language education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on iatrogenesis that does not limit it to medical explanations alone, nor locate harm in singular points in time. These papers attend to iatrogenesis' immediate and lingering presences in socialities and structures within and beyond medicine, and the ways it reflects or reproduces the racism, sexism, and ableism built into medical logics. [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]

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]

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]

Copyright of GeoHumanities is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

Initial teacher education faces the challenge of training future teachers to lead the change in schools towards inclusive education based on social justice. However, the literature reveals that preservice teachers may view inclusive education through the lens of special education. This paper presents a contextualised ethnographic study centred upon data production from the author's own institution and teaching space, working with ITE students in a university in Northern Spain. Within this reflective article, the aim is to identify the practices and intellectual requirements that contribute to educating preservice teachers acting in the interest of social justice and inclusive education. Data are obtained from participant observation, text analysis and interviews. The analysis emphasises three conditions to consider. These are: (i) destabilising common sense, (ii) generating spaces for theoretical reflection and, (iii) training experiences and research scenarios to re-think possibilities of inclusive education. The article concludes by highlighting key aspects and implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper highlights that social inequality in some rural regions can substantially and harshly affect school coexistence. The present study is carried out in a Spanish rural school, and it aimed to understand which factors affected coexistence and generated situations of exclusion. Participant observation and the different voices in contrast – students and teachers – reveal how the environment has generated a situation of exclusion in some families who have recently settled in the village. Furthermore, the unfair socioeconomic situation of the outsiders, legitimated at school by a punitive model of coexistence, turns teachers and students into approving actors of structural violence resulting in the rejection and isolation of some students. Together with the value of ethnography, these results are discussed to transform the teachers' beliefs and perceptions about coexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analysing public policies, an implementation gap is often attributed to unclear or irrelevant goals, implementers' disobedience and/or the numerous layers of government involved. This paper focuses on the multi-layer problem, wondering whether aspects other than the number of layers have an influence on the implementation gap in federal contexts, for example, the layers' degree of autonomy or the competencies 'allocation. It addresses the following research question: from an organizational point of view, to what extent does federalism, as a specific institutional configuration, influence the constitution of an implementation gap as part of a public policy implementation process? This research focuses on the implementation of public policy in the Belgian health sector intended to integrate care for chronic patients. It highlights the blockages that may occur in a multi-layer federal country like Belgium, showing that federalism can become dysfunctional if the allocation of competencies was made in an incoherent manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health care systems as well as bodies of medical knowledge are dynamic and change as the result of political and social transformations. In recent decades, health care systems have been subjected to a whole assemblage of regulatory practices. The local changes undertaken in Denmark that are being explored here are indicative of a long-term shift that has occurred in many welfare states intended to make public services in the Global North more efficient and transparent. Departing in prolonged field work in Danish general practice and the anthropological literature on audit culture, this paper suggests that the introduction of regulatory practices has enhanced the need for triage as a key organising principle. The term triage literally means separating out and refers to the process of sorting and placing patients in time and space. The paper suggests that an increasing introduction of triage feeds into a reconfiguration of diagnostic work, where the clinical setting is gradually becoming more intertwined with the governing domains of policy, and the work of the secretary is gradually becoming more intertwined with that of the doctor. Finally, the paper argues that an increasing regulation of general practice poses an ethically charged challenge to existing welfare politics of responsibility between the state and the public, as it makes it increasingly difficult to negotiate access to care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anthropology Southern Africa (2332-3256) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study examines citizenship education in Israel from the point of view of Arab teachers, as they rework and negotiate the content and boundaries of their Israeli citizenship. Specifically, the paper studies how teachers of citizenship education in Arab high schools in Israel perceive their sociopolitical reality, how they respond to it in their classrooms, and how they conceptualize Israeli citizenship for their pupils. In doing so, the paper ponders the pedagogical strategies and emphases of these teachers, as they mediate the citizenship education curriculum, with its heavy emphasis on the ethno-national character of Israel, to their Arab pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper forms a Foucauldian analysis of police reforms in Montenegro. Drawing on interviews with police officers at all ranks in 2004, undertaken as reform was commencing, and on interviews undertaken in 2010, after Montenegro's independence, the paper explores the biopolitics of liberalisation. The paper aims to demonstrate norms of internal security liberalisation that operate beyond a legal understanding of state power. It illustrates the operation of a rule of police that produces norms conducive to the governance of a dynamic market state. It argues that the rule of police subsists within but also subverts the rule of law and the human rights approach to democratic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public health there is increased focus on evaluating 'complex' interventions for health improvement, examining how their multiple components interact dynamically with the contextual system in which they are delivered. Amid this complexity framing are calls for methodologies that can facilitate contextual understanding as part of the evaluation process, including ethnography. However, while ethnography's attention to 'context' has been recognised as valuable for evaluation, few questions have been raised about the possible tensions of aligning what are quite different expectations for knowledge making in evaluation and in ethnography. This paper introduces a special section illustrating empirical examples of conducting ethnography for and with evaluation of 'complex' health interventions. Central to these experiences, this paper argues, are the concepts of time and temporality through which experience, change and knowledge making are invariably structured. It considers the different expectations for time and temporality in ethnographic and evaluation research, and how the 'long conversation' of ethnography aids interpretation of an intervention's interaction with the pasts, presents and possible futures of people's health experiences. Furthermore, in understanding time not as linear and constant but experienced through a series of encounters, ethnography highlights the spaces in between action and change, vital for understanding the complex dynamics of a health intervention in context. Through temporality, this paper and the related empirical papers present an intricate exploration of the challenges and productive opportunities posed by the use of ethnography for and with evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As digital data become increasingly central to education, hopes for educational equity are pinned more strongly on educational technology providers. This paper examines the data practices of edtech providers who are not simply making token gestures towards justice and equality. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and Berlant's notion of cruel optimism, it presents three data stories. The paper suggests that datafication in education provides a showcase of cruel optimism, i.e., when the object of desire is blocking one's flourishing. The conclusion considers the constitutive paradoxes of datafied education, and implications for the current phase of edu-technical transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management devices from industrial sectors are proliferating in the public sector, a trend now being accused of undermining the proper values of public organizations. A prominent example of such a management device is lean management, which is a set of principles and tools employed by contemporary management consultants to eliminate waste and promote value - often for the sake of efficiency. While lean management has been particularly welcomed in the healthcare sector, healthcare professionals are increasingly resisting attempts at leaning their work processes. Applying the notion of trials of valuation, this study empirically unfolds the conflicts arising when lean management is used to reorganize the task of distributing patients to beds in a children's hospital. Following the turn to value and the pragmatic tenet of studying values as the outcome of work, this paper suggests that the effects of a management device on the values of an organization can fruitfully be investigated for its ability to organize. Further, the paper contributes to the field of valuation studies with a heuristic to undertake such an investigation, directing attention towards the object of valuation, the temporal and spatial dimensions of the valuation situation, and the knowledge used to inform that valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a Critical Race Theory perspective to explain the everyday racisms - racial microaggressions - directed towards students of African and Caribbean descent during a non-statutory Black History unit, at an English secondary school. Applying a racial microaggressions framework to ethnographic data, this paper finds that experiences of studying Black History by students of African and Caribbean descent are dominated by various types of racial microaggressions including: micro-invalidation, micro-insults and micro-assaults. These experiences are symptomatic of wider racist structures and processes within the National Curriculum for History, based upon the ideology of white supremacy. This paper concludes that the racial microaggressions framework allows for useful ways of thinking about the function and purpose of Black History Month and Black History in schools, and its opportunities for exposing wider institutional and ideological underpinnings that legitimate deficit understandings about black people in school classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the subtleties of exercising embodied agency within two contexts shaped by ideals and norms: ballet and fashion. Here, we focus on how dancers and models rehearsing offstage towards onstage performances negotiate their potential and limitations for achieving agency over and over. Whereas a ‘turn to embodiment’ has occurred within organization studies, less is known about how embodied agency is choreographed and practised between visible front stages and ‘hidden’ offstages, or in relation to the various human and non-human agents present in the field. The empirical material of this paper is derived from two separate ethnographic studies. By combining insights from the two contexts, we make a joint effort to explore a complex phenomenon in more detail. This paper develops our micro-level understanding of embodied agency as a relational endeavour, and offers insights into the surprisingly ‘a-mobile’ discussion of embodied practices within organization studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Peace Studies has always incorporated different research methodologies, large-N quantitative methods and state-level findings have dominated the literature and had most influence on policy and practice. Today, however, the limitations of peace interventions are commonly identified with the institutional, state-centric, and technocratic approaches associated with such limited understandings and their resultant policies. This paper argues, therefore, that the inability of these methods to examine local experiences of conflict, transition, and peace in diverse sociocultural settings contributes to inadequate policy formation and, thus, to problematic interventions. Indeed, the recent ‘local turn’ and its focus on the everyday, resistance, hybridity, and friction demands research that can better interpret local experiences of conflict, transition, and peace and, thereby, discover more locally salient practice. While this paper argues that an Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) agenda must be central to such efforts, it also argues against applying the ethnographic label to work that is more suitably described as qualitative (site visits, interviews, focus groups, etc.). The paper argues that long-term fieldwork and close engagement with the subjects of peacebuilding must be required within any EPR agenda. The underappreciated benefits of such fieldwork are illustrated with examples from research in northern Sierra Leone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship oninternational studentmobility (ISM) oftendraws on Bourdieu to interpret such mobility as a strategy of capital conversion used by privileged classes to reproduce their social advantage. This perspective stems from and also reinforces a rationalistic interpretation of student mobility. A shift of focus to interAsian educational mobilities involving non-elite individuals and institutions can reveal logics of behavior and of social interaction that are at discrepancy with the dominant perspective, thereby advancing the theorization of educational mobilities. This paper examines a case of Indian youths of less affluent backgrounds pursuing Englishmedium medical degrees (MBBS) at a provincial university in China. Through ethnography, the paper illustrates how various parties -- individual, organizational and institutional -- to this somewhat 'unlikely' project of knowledge mobility follow the discrepant logics of compromise and complicity to seek to realize their educational desires, social aspirations, and organizational objectives amidst realities of class disadvantage and resource inadequacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the regulation and management of dogs in the mexican municipality of Isla mujeres. It shows how dogs, on Isla mujeres, are managed under a neoliberal framework of a decentralized government which relies on the personal responsibility of citizens and the outsourcing of essential services to non-government and private organizations. In so doing, this paper demonstrates some of the political and organizational contexts within which human-dog relationships are situated. In particular, it analyzes the ways that humans relate to dogs within a regulatory and socio-political framework. this paper is based on a six-week period of ethnographic research, primarily situated within an international non-government animal rescue organization. From this vantage point, this paper shows how neoliberal approaches to dog management within the municipality creates tension between personal and governmental responsibilities and fosters reliance on the third sector to provide animal welfare and wellbeing services. Within this network of distinctly human relationships, the wellbeing of animals is obscured, leading to a series of animal welfare crises within the municipality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of mapping as part of an ethnographic research project exploring food experiences in primary schools. Whilst the main data collection instrument was participant observation, the project made use of a creative social mapping activity. Towards the end of fieldwork, children were asked to draw maps of the food spaces at school. This paper discusses how the creation of the maps and simultaneous conversations that took place both around the maps’ construction and in relation to questions asked revealed particular knowledges and spatial perspectives of children’s food experiences. This paper argues that the appearance of certain spaces on the maps caused me to re-evaluate my understanding of the foodscapes at school. This paper concludes by highlighting some of the challenges encountered but argues that the mapping activity provided a wealth of additional information. This paper shows the importance of including children’s perspectives when examining questions of spatiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research conducted with Bardi and Jawi people, two Indigenous groups from the Northwestern Kimberley region of Western Australia, the aim of this paper is to approach the complexities related to Indigenous tourism in Australia through the politics of knowing and not-knowing as embodied by Indigenous tour guides and non-Indigenous tourists. It examines the notion of knowing (or not-knowing) and its usages by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the context of their tourist encounter. ‘Knowing’ represents an important aspect through which Aboriginal people and their non-Indigenous guests negotiate their interactions. In particular, the paper shows how Indigenous and non-Indigenous expectations from tourism lead actors to adopt divergent positions and to assert renewed claims in relation to knowledge or knowing, casting new light on issues of self-representation and empowerment in the domain of Indigenous tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter, dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis. Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’ of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity conservation. The review is structured through three questions: How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis? Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of world-making encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing - as problems both for anthropology and conservation science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a culturally based discussion of the role English as a foreign language (EFL) plays in shaping the ideological positions of those involved in teaching, learning, and planning English in Israel. The English curriculum is uniform for speakers of Hebrew (the majority) and speakers of Arabic (the minority). Furthermore, the English curriculum states that EFL pedagogy should take a global rather than an Anglo-centric approach. This situation constitutes the paper’s main assumption regarding the cultural content of EFL materials being ideologically oriented toward: (1) reproducing and perpetuating dominant Western hegemonic ideologies; (2) maintaining social misrepresentations and inequalities regarding the Other. By employing critical discourse analysis (CDA) to uncover Westcentric cultural biases in EFL discourse and cultural discourse studies (CDS) to reconstruct the role of Eastern and local Arab discourses in EFL pedagogies, I examine a new culturally critical way of observing EFL discourse and linking it with social change. I suggest a holistic, ecological EFL pedagogy that constructs EFL discourse as cultural practice. Promoting an EFL ‘ecological discourse’ prioritizes narratives emphasizing positive multicultural values, respect, and acceptance of the Other and encourages learners to consider cultural differences as the source for reading EFL texts about the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, there is no clearly delineated field that could be described as ‘the anthropology of morality’. There exists, however, an increasingly visible and vocal interest in issues of morality among anthropologists. Although there has been a lack of explicit study, it has become clear that anthropologists have, in fact, been concerned with issues of moralities all along. The purpose of this special issue is to bring this interest to ethnographic studies of childhood, and explore how and why children or young people act in a particular way and are making certain choices, how these are valued or contested by their families, peers, and communities. The papers in this special issue highlight the contestations that arise as multiple moralities collide, and the effects this may have for the persons involved. Collectively, the papers illustrate a notion of moralities as multiple, contested, and mobile, and the consequences this may have in a globalising world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the knowledge constructs that professionals draw upon when engaging in marketing work. Our conceptual approach stems from a critical analysis of marketing work foregrounding the practitioners' professional knowledge and practice of marketing work. We identify 13 pertinent knowledge constructs-some of which are illustrated by vignettes-showcasing the shared and multifaceted nature of professional knowledge in a small- and medium-sized enterprise. By exploring how practitioners deploy their knowledge of marketing in practice, we conclude what the marketing discipline can learn from professional knowing. We contribute to the marketing work literature by considering the ontological role of professional knowing in dereifying marketing work from textbook knowledge along with its implications for the critical understanding of the perceived gap between marketing theorising and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper challenges current dominant thinking in Universities about the processes of ethical appraisal of research studies in the Social Sciences. It considers this to be founded on unjustifiable and inappropriate principles, the origins of which are presented before discussing alternative, more inclusive and ethically defensible approaches. The latter are based on dialogic processes to sustain respectful and empowering ethical reviews which appreciate the situated nature of research. The empirical evidence for this comes from papers about ethnographic studies with children and adults in various educational spaces in Western Europe, originally a symposium on the practice of ethics in educational ethnography at ECER, 2017, now forming a book published by Routledge, 2019. The dialogic processes help researchers to carry out culturally-appropriate research with the demonstrable ethical integrity that participants and stakeholders reasonably expect. The authors argue that currently risk-averse Universities need to change their research cultures to support all research methodologies and fieldwork practices that have ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial, to enhance their lustre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on fieldwork carried out in 1981–82 with the Warlpiri women in Willowra, Northern Territory. The basis of discussion is the documentation of women's ceremonies and the return of the data many years later to this community. My role as an ethnographer in the past, and the potential outcomes of the reintroduction of ethnographic data, indicates there is much of value in the documentation of Indigenous cultural and intellectual heritage. Documenting religious ceremonies reveals a variety of values: that of the ethnographer in the documentation of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property; the intrinsic value of these material renditions to the tradition-bearers themselves; and the value of these contributions in applied community contexts. In regard to the community benefits of research and documentation, the paper addresses archival documentation for revitalisation of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical analysis of the Comparative Case Study (CCS). While CCS provides a holistic methodological framework for case-based research, it is not free from drawbacks. One criticism the approach may receive, ironically, is the lack of criticism it encounters. Another critique can include its naming, as the name 'comparative case study' may not sufficiently represent its vital feature of transversal, vertical and horizontal axes. Lastly, the paper examines the qualitative approach traditionally associated with CCS deriving from its roots in anthropological and ethnography-oriented concepts and methods. We argue that the use of mixed methods can strengthen the CCS approach. This article is intended to stretch out the applicability of CCS through an empirical example with mixed methods on learner-centred pedagogy in Tanzanian primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007 Argentina passed the 'Federal Law 26331 on Minimum Standards for the Environmental Protection of Native Forests', often referred to as the Forest Law, aimed at curbing and regulating the expansion of the agricultural frontier causing deforestation and the loss of native forests, and amid increasing social conflict. The law mandated provinces to develop and-use planning and zoning of their native forests through a participatory process, and to classify different uses of forestlands. In the province of Neuquén, the application of this regulation –along with its equivalent provincial norm, Law 2780-triggered much debate among environmental and social organizations, unions, small-scale rural producers, and Mapuche indigenous organizations, leading to an increase in conflict and disagreements between the different sectors involved. The application of the Forest Law in the region of Los Lagos and Lacar departments, which are forest areas with high landscape attractiveness and increasing tourism and real estate activity, generated considerable controversy, mobilizations, and debate in the local arena. Research for this paper involved methodological triangulation through ethnography and legal hermeneutics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the itinerary of the objects and the agencies involved in the construction of the collections of ethnographic artefacts gathered by German ethnographer and priest Martin Gusinde during his fieldtrips to Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile), carried out between 1918 and 1924. In order to study the formation processes of these collections, we will trace the agencies of the Selk´nam, Yagan and Kawésqar Indigenous people in the making, selling, trading or withholding of their material culture, showing the differential impact these had on the collections. We retrace the dispersal of these Fuegian collections into five museums located in Chile, Austria and the Vatican, presenting a reservoir unknown until now. Our exploration of the complex networks of social and material interactions involved in the dynamic biography of these Fuegian ethnographic collections sheds light on the active role of the Indigenous people in their construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Austria in wider discussions around the repercussions of colonial violence on a global scale. It focusses on the ways in which anthropological disciplines fashioned specific ideas of racial and ethnographic belonging both within and outside the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Understanding how Austrian knowledge production relied on and participated in colonial expropriation sheds light on the significance of the post-colonial for a nation that did not establish formal colonial rule overseas. The unearthing of the mortal remains of people and other forms of colonial exploitation such as geological extraction were deeply intertwined; they were often conducted within the very same expedition. These processes of colonial dispossession continue to be operative today. Anthropological and other 'collections' from colonial contexts that are housed in European institutions speak to the currency of these issues. This paper argues that different conceptions of time – of the relation between past and present – complicate ongoing negotiations of the meaning of Austria's colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science literature contains a thread of theory on the experience and function of fear within society. However, despite rising global concerns about antisemitism, Jewish experiences of such fear within a multicultural framework, such as that in Australia, remains largely unexamined on a qualitative basis. Jewish individuals and organizations speak in specific ways about their fears of antisemitism, both inwardly to their communities and outwardly to the public. While experiences and attitudes differ between different countries, this discourse can be interpreted as a performative act which produces, regulates and constrains the identities of Jewish communities, perpetrators and societies in relation to antisemitism. Culture is a factor telling individuals what to fear and how to respond, and fears reflect not only people's firsthand experiences but the collective social norms, values, and moral codes their group wishes to promote. This paper examines Jewish attitudes to antisemitism through the lens of anthropological theories of fear. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Jewish community of South East Queensland, Australia, it explores how contemporary antisemitism fears and threats to safety are commonly spoken about within the community and to outsiders, particularly with regards to popular antisemitic stereotyping, "alt-right" activity and radical Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to "map the margins" (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that everyday life in housing contains the possibility to shape and transform its material, cultural, and social conditions. Mobilizing a materialist ontology and insights from human geography, we examine how shared spaces manifest practices of togetherness which prefigure the enactment of socioecological degrowth. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork on a housing estate in Manchester (UK) to identify practices that characterize everyday housing geographies, including reappropriation, commoning, accepting limits, and territorializing tendencies. These constitute a therapeutic assemblage, facilitating wellbeing while simultaneously enfolded with(in) the political possibilities being realized on the estate to form a contingent, yet durable, instantiation of everyday degrowth. We thus contribute to revealing how transformative degrowth politics are sustained in everyday housing contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his study Storycraft, the veteran American journalist Jack Hart asks the following questions about reportage, memoir and other forms of nonfiction writing that proceed from the first-person perspective of their author: 'Where's the storyteller standing? What can he see and hear? Whose story is it, anyway?' (Hart, 2021, Storycraft: The complete guide to writing narrative nonfiction (p. 39). University of Chicago Press). The questions are suggestive of the formal and creative decisions reportage practitioners must make, but also of their ethical obligations to fairly represent their human subjects, especially if they are vulnerable, underprivileged and/or marginalized. The hinting at viewpoint – 'whose story...' – might also make us think about how identity is constructed from the stories we tell about ourselves and about our interactions with the world. This paper addresses all these issues primarily, though not exclusively, through the prism of Coast of Teeth, a practice-based visual and textual reportage project we completed in late 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a critical ethnography of literacy practices experienced by a group of university students, who perceived them as promoting social exclusion in the Colombian educational system. It also gives an account of their views about how this educational system could be more inclusive and contribute to peacebuilding in the country. Inspired by Paulo Freire's understanding of literacy and Hannah Arendt's political theory, the meaning reconstructive analysis of 46 stories reveals a thematic universe composed of three main categories: understandings of social exclusion from schooling experiences, types of social exclusion as lived in schooling, and social exclusion-related factors of literacy practices. Based on two discussion groups, and an analysis in the light of the theory of practice architectures, it is argued and empirically substantiated that ethical literacy, as a way of being-with-others, is a practice that must be at the core of an education for peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoliberal transformation of Delhi into a "world class city" has increasingly attracted migrants from India's North-Eastern/Himalayan borderlands, who are racialized as "Northeasterns" and face racism in the city. This reflects an emergent form of racialization in the Global South and a facet of "new racism" often overlooked within existing theorizations of "race" and racism that stems from Global North contexts. Drawing from urban ethnographic research, this paper provides a spatial analysis of the racialization of "Northeastern" migrants in Delhi. First, it examines the structural racialization of "Northeasterns" induced by Delhi's neoliberal urbanism that constructs them as the city's "service providers". Second, it explores their self-racialization through co-constitutive "race"-making and place-making practices in a distinct socio-spatial formation – the "urban village". Finally, it argues that through racial-spatial processes, the "Northeastern" emerges as a new racialized urban identity; thereby linking racialization, spatialization, and identity formation in a postcolonial, globalizing, Global South city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the notion of inclusion as an imperfect and contested project toward educational and social justice, which seeks to address social and historically constructed exclusion. It aims to problematise 'inclusion research' of school and community relationships in Mexico by examining the orientations and implications for inclusion of doing educational research aligned with a more 'Western' critical approach to social justice as opposed to research explicitly situated in a decolonial and intercultural perspective. It firstly characterises how inclusion is dealt with by critical and decolonial perspectives. Secondly, through a comparative exploration of two ethnographic research projects about school-community relationships, it analyses the implications of both approaches and explores the articulation between 'substantive power' and 'formal power' in the research, arguing for the need to include an epistemic and ontological dimension in inclusion as social-justice-oriented research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From January 2017 until January 2020, the Stormont assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended, with the Irish language being cited as the main stumbling block to the restoration of government. The continued debate around the necessity of an Irish Language Act (ILA) for Northern Ireland is bound up with more general divisions in society surrounding national identity, and as such, it divided political parties and the nationalist and unionist communities from which they draw their support. Through the analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted in various language learning centres across Belfast, I explore how this debate around legislating for the language impacted on the engagement of learners with the language in the city. By considering the role played by the media in the engagement of interview participants with the Irish language in Belfast, I aim to examine how the policy delay and political discourse affects those engaging with the language. This paper aims to address changing attitudes to the Irish language in Belfast in a period of political crisis, and what it means for those who use the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the intertwined health issues of our time, from climate change to colonialism, from mass extinction to mass consumption, this commentary argues that critical public health must grapple with relationality onto-epistemologically. In it, I offer the provocation that entangling ethnography, both as method and methodology, with critical posthumanism can offer the potential to hold the tensions, nuances and multiplicities needed to account for human-more-than-human relationality as multiple inputs of data. This argument is made in three parts: first, via a discussion of relationality within public health; second, by means of a cartography of critical posthumanism; and third, with a discussion of how a critical posthuman ethnography might disrupt anthropocentric approaches to health. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of, and potential for, critical posthuman ethnography in public health research. In summary, critical posthuman ethnography provides one way of methodologically approaching some of the intertwined health issues of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed that state agencies legitimize themselves via outputs. This paper shows that in situations of organizational crisis, state agencies may adopt new policy areas symbolically to compensate for lost legitimacy. Drawing on an ethnography within the Bundesbank, internal documents, and insider interviews, I trace how the German Bundesbank adopted financial stability as a policy area to compensate for the loss of monetary policy and banking supervision in the early 2000s. By focusing on the relationship between internal organizational struggles over the Bundesbank's identity and the boundary work it has to conduct to establish its new role, I show that the Bundesbank failed to shift the state-economy boundary post-crisis in its effort to regain its position as autonomous purveyor of macroeconomic governance. [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]