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On Fieldwork
The chapter discusses the findings of new fieldwork conducted in a ‘deep end’ coastal community in the UK. The changing fortunes of the town are introduced and also its present-day circumstances. The importance of place is highlighted as well as how the town’s medical practice has attempted to meet the acute needs of its patients. Leisure and pleasure in coastal towns emerges as a key finding here and the chapter concludes by examining the promenade as a zone for pleasure and place-making.
Scholars have focused on the relationship of food with social processes and identities such as caste, class, ethnicity, gender, race and religion. However, in recent years, one can observe the growing impact of digitalisation on food, and today one cannot understand the consumption of food without being aware of digitalisation, particularly in urban areas. This article examines the effects of digitalisation in the form of social media platforms and online reviews on how food is presented by sellers and consumed by buyers. Food is a particularly ‘generative space’ to understand the impact of the digital on human lives. Exploring how the social life of food has been influenced by digitalisation in New Delhi, I argue that the digitalisation of food is a rich site to explore how new ideas of social life itself are constructed. The growing intersection between food habits and digital modes, particularly in urban India, has larger implications on ideas of caste, class and labour.
In this paper, I employ feminist ethics of care and critical perspectives on affect to study grassroot solidarity operations for rescuing refugees in Greece in the wake of the Syrian Civil War. Drawing on an eclectic dialogue between Rosalyn Diprose and Judith Butler’s ethical perspectives, I conceptualize an ethical organizing of solidarity rooted in recognition of vulnerability as a shared social condition, embodied affectivity, and intercorporeal generosity. This conceptualization contributes to business ethics debates on the potential of embodied care and relationality to ground an ethics of feminist solidarity that meaningfully challenges the dominant orders marginalizing precarious lives. I reflect on ethical and epistemological questions encountered in this research, stressing the need to reframe business ethics research around care, affect, and reflexivity, especially when studying vulnerable contexts.
Qualitative empirical analyses of interactive digital testimonies within Holocaust Education do not benefit from a specific and long-established theoretical and methodological tradition since the use of interactive digital testimonies is relatively new itself. Hence, there is a need to discuss qualitative methodological approaches to better understand the field itself along with proper analytical research instruments. For this reason, this article discusses qualitative methodological approaches to highlight the analytical capacities within a qualitative methodological framework when it comes to investigating interactive digital testimonies in Holocaust Education. Therefore, it focusses in a first step on the key characteristics of a qualitative empirical approach in general and its potentially favorable traits for investigating digital testimonies in Holocaust Education (1). The various qualitative empirical approaches and perspectives and their application in the specific field of Holocaust Education is subject of the second step (2). Thirdly, light will be shed on the possibilities as well as the limitations for further research in the new and specific field of digital interactive testimonies (3). The concluding remarks, however, center on the vital role of observational approaches when investigating interactive testimonies within Holocaust Education (4).
Our contribution to this thematic issue, focused on the social construction of expertise, examines the coding of qualitative data, specifically, fieldnotes. Coding is central to the process of doing inductive fieldwork. It generates the categories fieldworkers use to focus mid- and late-inning research strategies, develop analysis, and write ethnographies – coding is a central pivot upon which fieldwork turns. Coding is not obviously “personal” or interesting as an experience, and yet, the act of coding, at least in the immersive pedagogical circumstances we observed, can occasion responses indicative of intrapersonal struggle: provoking a set of emotional and cognitive responses. We find this particularly interesting in the context of the fully self-conscious fieldwork that Emerson et al. (1995, 2011) platformed as ethnography’s staging area in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, and instructive in the broader sense of what expertise now invites. Rather than dismiss these “struggles with coding” as unworthy of serious consideration, because students will eventually develop fieldworker competence, we view these challenges as representing a key, self-reflexive dimension of fieldwork that highlights what ultimately gets “baked” into sociological expertise. This article discusses the authors’ reflections on how student ethnographers reacted to the coding experience during an immersive course, in the hopes of encouraging fuller accounts by sociological ethnographers of what can be awakened when we – students and sociologists – code our fieldnotes, and to encourage greater appreciation for coding as a form of qualitative expertise. Specifically, we advance two points having to do with a sociology of expertise: (1) that the coding of ethnographic fieldnotes is a genuine, though undervalued, type of expertise, entailing the development of craft-like skills that include not just interpretive finesse but also the ability to engage moments of self-reckoning; and (2) that such expertise can be developed via a pedagogy of immersion under the guidance of supportive practitioners.
In this editors' introduction to the special issue honoring the work of Lyn Lofland, we familiarize the reader with Lofland's scholarship and outline the themes taken up by this project. We argue that because Lofland's scholarship exemplifies a particular tradition within late 20th‐century American symbolic interaction, it serves as a model for those of us working in the same vein, while also offering a steelman case against which we can consider the downsides of our tradition. Thus, this special issue allows us to consider how we, as contemporary scholars, attend to tensions in our work related to the nature of social structure and social process, generalization, and the politics of knowledge.
Research on political performance has typically addressed macro-level performances, such as highly visible protests and demonstrations from progressive organizations. Using ethnographic data from various conservative organizations in Southern Nevada, I demonstrate how conservatives perform their ideology with a small-scale, generally like-minded audience. The activists I observed strategically created places filled with conservative symbolism to demonstrate the ideas and practices they welcome and support. They embodied a conservative style through their self-presentation, signaling their political commitments. They perform their ideology through the talk they engage in with others in the political spaces. I pay particular attention to the role of place in ideological performances, detailing how activists strategically create and transform ordinary spaces into conservative places, setting a specific tone, mood, and message for their performances, and enhancing participants’ experiences. In these conservative places, activists display and forge their collective identity, demarcate boundaries between themselves and others, and sustain their participation.
This chapter is entitled “Decolonial Feminism, Civil Rights Refutation of ‘Colonial Mentality’”. Through primary observations, intellectual pursuits and conversations with Nigerian feminist allies such as the Afrobeat legend Sandra Izsadore, I define decolonial feminism as a praxis borne from resistance to the continued pervasion of gender-racialised colonial discrimination in a regional context that has long since dismantled the perpetrating architecture of colonialism. Françoise Vergès [(2021), A Decolonial Feminism, Trans. Bohrer, A., London: Pluto Press, p. 10] expresses poignantly what it means to be a decolonial feminist, stating that it is an embodied experiential praxis, dissuaded by nihilistic “empty ideologies” because it is to affirm the fidelity of the material and cultural conditions of struggle of the women in the Global South who have proceeded us in their fortitude and resistance. In this respect, decolonial feminism “means recognizing that the offensive against women that is now openly justified and acknowledged by state leaders is not simply an expression of a brazen, masculine dominance, but a manifestation of the destructive violence generated by capitalism” (ibid.). Consequently, decolonial feminism calls for the building of alliances across colonial difference, and in Black music cultures such vivacity nourished and inspirited the feminine soul of Afrobeat enabling its revolutionary mobilisation, by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. This chapter identifies and explores principal areas of mobilisation which are specifically pertinent to aspect of my wider case studied theme, in respect to an analysis of decolonial feminist influence on Afrobeat.
Lyn H. Lofland is an exemplary symbolic interactionist. I support this claim by considering her research contributions and their continuing significance for interactionists. This discussion is organized around a comparison of Lofland's scholarship in her many articles and books ( A World of Strangers , The Craft of Dying , and The Public Realm ) against the ideals presented in her own evaluation of the work of Spencer E. Cahill. I further contend that Lofland's research program demonstrates how interactionists should operate with curiosity and humility. In closing, I argue that her work provides guidance for how interactionists can contend with perennial concerns that our work is astructural and irrelevant.
The 100th anniversary of Erving Goffman's birth was in 2022. Drawing on his work, the Goffman archives, the secondary literature, and personal experiences with him and those in his university of Chicago cohort, I reflect on some implications of his work and life, and the inseparable issues of understanding society. This paper seeks to make some sense of the highly varied, often conflicting, characterizations of Goffman. He was the ultimate Rorschach test in a kaleidoscope, ever ready to be turned (or turning himself) to a different angle, which, even then, does not guarantee that observers will draw the same conclusions. I identify 14 contrasting characterizations of his work (e.g., map maker‐theorist/hypothesizer; structure functionalist‐symbolic interactionist; conservative‐liberal; outsider‐insider) and note ways of connecting, or at least making sense of, diverse perspectives. I explore two of the categories—politics and outsider‐insider—in detail and discuss an appendix on sociology of information issues involving privacy and publicity with respect to intellectual biography.
This paper is a study of the decisions that researchers take during the execution of a research plan: their researcher discretion. Flexible research methods are generally seen as undesirable, and many methodologists urge to eliminate these so-called ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ from the research practice. However, what this looks like in practice is unclear. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in two end-of-life research groups in which we observed research practice, conducted interviews, and collected documents, we explore when researchers are required to make decisions, and what these decisions entail.
An abductive analysis of this data showed that researchers are constantly required to further interpret research plans, indicating that there is no clear division between planning and plan execution. This discretion emerges either when a research protocol is underdetermined or overdetermined, in which case they need to operationalise or adapt the plans respectively. In addition, we found that many of these instances of researcher discretion are exercised implicitly. Within the research groups it was occasionally not clear which topic merited an active decision, or which action could retroactively be categorised as one.
Our ethnographic study of research practice suggests that researcher discretion is an integral and inevitable aspect of research practice, as many elements of a research protocol will either need to be further operationalised or adapted during its execution. Moreover, it may be difficult for researchers to identify their own discretion, limiting their effectivity in transparency.
This study analyzes the methodological implications of organizational ethnography in organizations. It is theoretically assumed that background expectations from a historical approach and methodological proposals of reflexive and interpretive organizational ethnography lead to inferred and providing new analytical tools in contexts for the study of organizational and managerial studies. The method employed in this study is the meta-analytical and reflexive based on the conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature. It is concluded that their organizational ethnography offers new qualitative research tools for the study of managerial and organizational studies.
The aim of this article is to explore how the relationship between ethnographic research and the mental health of its practitioners is represented in formal anthropological writing and methodological training. Drawing on my recent ethnographic research in Japan, I first reflect on my own mental health and the ways in which I coped with the challenges and difficulties in my professional and personal life since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. I then focus on how ethnographers’ mental health is treated in anthropology, in particular, and other social sciences in general. I find that the long-standing inclination of neglecting mental distress during and after fieldwork is beginning to change, with researchers, especially female anthropologists, beginning to point out the pitfalls of ethnography related to mental health. However, the issue remains highly stigmatized. Although fears exist that writing openly about the mental anguish experienced during fieldwork will affect future employment prospects. I think that it is necessary we examine them, as the emotions often continue to affect the lives of ethnographers even after leaving the field.
This article discusses variations in the experiences of Dutch identity and belonging to a music‐making group in the Dutch migrant community in Melbourne, Australia. It answers the research question “Which variations of ‘Dutch identity’ are there for the participants and how does music‐making relate to this?”. Feelings of identity and belonging are shaped by federal policies and micro‐interactions. This article builds on the concepts related to migrant identity and ethnomusicology in the context of two distinct federal integration policies: the White Australia policy (which is characterised by an assimilation policy) and multiculturalism. The findings showed that community music has the potential to bridge generational, gender and class differences. Multiculturalism, enabling the participants to meet and sing in Dutch, empowered them to explore their dual identity as Dutch Australians, intersecting with disability, racial differences, age and education level. This study improves our understanding of the impact of diverse emigration and immigration resettlement policies that form part of the complexities of diverse generations and backgrounds of the Dutch‐Australian diaspora.
This study shows how, during the turbulent period of their initial months on the job, new beat reporters experience a shift in their basic approach to knowledge. This new epistemic approach encompasses two interconnected shifts: From seeing self-knowledge as a necessity to reliance on sources’ knowledge, and from prioritizing content knowledge to prioritizing journalistic knowledge. Findings suggest that reporting without knowledge isn’t a bug, but rather a major feature of news reporting; that at least during reporters’ first years, the main epistemic challenge is reporting despite the lack of beat knowledge; and that the foundations of source-reporter relations are laid down when the latter are at their weakest point in terms of power and knowledge, enabling sources’ to gain a dominant position in shaping the reported realities.
The qualitative method is an indispensable instrument for researchers who aim to adopt an open, indirect methodology for data collection. Only qualitative methods are capable of providing access to participants personal experiences and to the interpretation of their actions. This chapter aims to highlight the importance of qualitative methods for both researchers and professionals in the management sciences. It will present the theoretical and methodological contributions of two fieldwork methods applied to qualitative research in the management sciences, namely the ethnographic method, insofar as its application requires the use of several data collection materials, and the dyadic approach, which emphasized the link uniting two actors: how and why different transactions are created, supported, or avoided between the members of the duo. This chapter will start with a presentation of the main advantages of exploratory research, then it will outline the foundations of the ethnographic method and the dyadic approach, followed by an explanation of the data collection apparatus.
How do we make sense of our place in the field as researchers and as sexual, spiritual beings? Ethnographic fieldwork is central to several disciplines, including geography. It involves the researcher encountering and gathering stories and meanings through interaction with people's lived experiences in settings that are often not the researcher's own. Although rarely strain‐free, fieldwork is seen as a transformative experience, both from the personal and the academic point of view. This paper, situated at the intersection of geography, queer/ing practices, and ethnographic methodology, explores poetry as a form of self‐care in the field. In recent years, poetry has emerged as a creative and productive mode of representation and (co‐)interpretation of qualitative data. Based on my own spiritual experience(s) while conducting fieldwork in Spain, I consider prayer cards as a poetic form and a means through which issues of self‐care and spiritual self‐preservation are made visible, particularly when experienced within a social environment that is hostile to LGBTQ+ lived experiences of faith.
In the social sciences, belongingness is among the individual core social needs. Institutionalization is a powerful mediator in the individual search for belongingness, as it establishes agency among group members. Using a conceptual framework that borrows from theories of institutionalization and group membership, we examine the lives of incarcerated military veterans and their choices in group affiliation during incarceration, especially in the context of American Legion posts behind bars. We use interview data from 43 incarcerated veterans to interpret patterns of belongingness, group trust, and group affiliation as developed within and across institutions. Five themes related to American Legion involvement emerged: (1) brotherhood and camaraderie; (2) serving others and the community; (3) creating a routine and improving quality of life; (4) creating community; and (5) leadership and conflict. Research on belongingness, group membership, and participation in peer-led prison programs is critical for improving knowledge on prison adaptation. It also provides a foundation for innovative approaches to post-release integration and desistance from crime among justice-involved veterans.
KEYWORDS: Veterans incarceration American Legion group membership belonging
This article considers the role of the researcher’s emotions in ethnographic research. The topic originates from the epistemological turn that since the 1960s has dealt with the researcher–subject studied relationship. The first part of this article analyzes the pivotal elements of the epistemological debate on the researcher–studied subject relationship. It is defined through a dialogical relationship in which the researcher puts into practice their reflexivity while being aware of the elements that characterize it, including emotions. The second part of this article uses two research experiences to show how emotions in ethnographic research are a valid tool for entering into dialogue with the subjects studied. They provide a better understanding of the social cutaways and enrich the reflexivity that characterizes social research, without affecting methodological rigor. The possible risk when considering emotions is to fall into excessive relativism and enter a sort of spiral of reflexivity due to the plurality of possible interpretations. It is a risk that is mitigated by the procedures the researcher uses to explain the personal observer–author equation. Writing is one of the tools that allows the researcher to account for the construction of a meaning of the results. It gives a ‘probative’ narrative that must contain all the methodological choices that guided the research.
Erving Goffman's concept of framing is one of his most enduring contributions to social science. Despite the canonical status of Frame Analysis (1974) in multiple fields, few acknowledge its intellectual engagement with animal studies. It was Gregory Bateson, in an analysis of animal play, who first posited the idea of frames as metacommunicative propositions that signal the meaning of behavior. In this paper, we show that Goffman did not just opportunistically borrow the idea of framing from Bateson, but also advanced Bateson's thesis that nonhuman animals are capable of (re)framing the meaning of behavior. He emphasized that animals and humans could meta‐communicate with each other as well. Goffman polemicized against human exceptionalist theories of cognition and communication—not only in Frame Analysis , but also in unpublished remarks he delivered at a controversial conference on animal communication, and he suggested that the ability to meta‐communicate is a more appropriate index of mind than language. Although new research indicates that many species use “significant symbols” and have a “theory of mind,” most interactionists have not reckoned with the sociological implications of animals as “minded” social actors capable of metacommunication with each other—and with people.
Environmental mega conferences have become the format of choice in environmental governance. Conferences of the Parties (COPs) under the climate change and biodiversity conventions in particular attract global media attention and an ever-growing number of increasingly diverse actors, including scholars of global environmental politics. They are arenas for interstate negotiation, but also temporary interfaces that constitute and represent world society, and they focalise global struggles over just and sustainable futures. Collaborative event ethnography (CEE) as a research methodology emerged as a response to these developments. This volume retraces its genealogy, explains its conceptual and methodological foundations and presents insights into its practice. It is meant as an introduction for students, an overview for curious newcomers to the field, and an invitation for experienced researchers wishing to experiment with a new method. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Cet article propose une contribution méthodologique à partir de récits autobiographiques de militants CGT produits dans le cadre du concours de la Troisième voie d’accès à l’ENA (1983-1986). Il démontre combien ces récits peuvent faire l’objet d’une lecture à la fois testimoniale et stratégique. Cette double lecture permet de penser les récits autobiographiques dans leur contexte de production, afin de cerner ce qu’ils disent à la fois des individus qui les conçoivent et des institutions qui les suscitent. Plus largement, cet article constitue un exemple de la manière dont les sociologues peuvent s’emparer des archives et des méthodes critiques des sources élaborées par les historiens. Il entend également montrer l’intérêt d’un croisement des matériaux d’enquête entre archives, entretiens, statistiques et observations.
Electronic forms of communication—including email, texting, and social media platforms—have increased the speed and ease of communication. Yet, a rise in non-response and ghosting (when someone ceases communication without an explanation) has been documented across contexts, from romantic dating to quantitative research studies. Surprisingly, the rise of electronic communication has received little attention in the methodological literature for qualitative researchers. Based on an analysis of virtual and face-to-face recruitment in two qualitative studies I conducted, I find that ghosting is a routine feature of digital recruitment. There are situational contexts in which ghosting is more common, including lags in the timing of communication and requests that are too overwhelming. “Old-school” methods, such as seeking sponsorship, strategizing outreach, and building rapport, can be adapted to help researchers capitalize on the benefits of electronic communication technologies in recruitment.
As ethnographic fieldwork blurs the boundaries between ›private‹ and ›professional‹ life, ethnographers always appear to be on duty, looking out for valuable encounters and waiting for the next moment of disclosure. Yet what lies in the gaps and pauses of fieldwork? The contributions in this volume dedicated to anthropologist Martin Sökefeld explore methodological and ethical dimensions of multi-sided ethnographic research. Based on diverse cases ranging from hobbies over kinship ties to political activism, the contributors show how personal relationships, passions and commitments drive ethnographers in and beyond research, shaping the knowledge they create together with others.
Generating momentum for activist campaigns on complicated economic issues is difficult, especially in a transnational context. So, how did activists get action on tax justice and create a movement that has changed global tax policy? Drawing on 20 years of para-ethnographic fieldwork with the Tax Justice Network, we suggest that activists initially engaged in ‘identity switching’ tactics to access professional or policy arenas from a footing in one identity, to then switch identities to activate policy shifts. A first-generation leveraged multiple professional identities to access forums, build credibility and introduce a tax lexicon to activists and policymakers. These tactics were not, however, replicable, leading a second generation to concentrate on ‘identity fixing’, including professionalization and a tightening of organizational strategy over access and activation points. Here we theorize identity switching and fixing as underappreciated micro-foundations of transnational activism and demonstrate their importance for global economic justice.
In 2016, an estimated 107,400 veterans were incarcerated in the U.S. (Maruschak et al., 2021), comprising part of the population known as “justice-involved veterans,” veterans involved in the criminal justice system. The current study explores the influence military training had on the way justice-involved veterans “do time” in prison. In sharp contrast to the misconduct literature, which utilizes quantitative data and links variables statistically to some measurement of prison misconduct, the current study is one of the first to qualitatively explore how incarcerated veterans connect their military experiences to their adjustment to prison life by giving voice to the veterans themselves. Forty-three currently incarcerated veterans in a Midwestern state were interviewed. They described how they acclimatized to the correctional environment utilizing the discipline and adherence to structure learned during their military service. If justice-involved veterans adapt to the prison environment by relying on their military training, then it may be possible to help them further utilize that training to succeed in rehabilitation and reentry.
Complex health care interventions often consist of specific and non-specific effects and can present a methodological and intellectual challenge to researchers. This is especially the case in Complementary and Integrative Medicines (CIM), where research may inadequately capture the holistic nature of therapies, affecting the quality of outcomes and evidence reported. This article introduces a novel approach that advances methodology and helps researchers to “step inside” the therapeutic drama, to improve the quality of evidence produced. The method, termed Theatricality, was trialed in five complementary health centers across four European countries and provides a fresh view of therapy, where the interventions, practitioners, and researchers appear bound by their context and space, creating, or limiting the potential for these acts. Delivered as an adjunct to Ethnography, this approach offers a new way of conceiving, capturing, and communicating whole health care performances that may help to improve the quality of evidence in complex health care interventions.
This paper has two main goals: to make an exploratory study of the use of notes and note-taking in social science, with a special emphasis on sociology, and to suggest a few ways in which this practice can be improved. By note-taking is here meant the writing of notes to observe, to remember, and to work and think with. It is suggested that most forms of note-taking represent a kind of private writing, in the sense that the notes are written exclusively for the writer and not for other people to read as in public writing. The quality of being private changes the structure as well as the content of the note which is often hard to understand for others. The approach in the paper is historical as well as material. Early forms of note-taking by social scientists are discussed, and also its use today in such areas as fieldwork, participant observation and qualitative sociology. The paper concludes with a discussion of a few ways in which the note-taking practices in social science can be improved.
This article aims to broaden joint performances of talk-story, a form of Indigenous Research Methodology, to give voice to non-indigenous participants who presuppose misrepresentation in qualitative research. Indigenous Research Methodologies emerged to challenge axiological concerns with Western Research Methodologies, which participants perceive to disregard, oppress, and exploit those they claim to represent. Founded on the principle of relational accountability, Indigenous Research Methodologies place learning co-created knowledges and social epistemologies at the center of the study, promoting the publication of authentic explanations and representations that empower participants. In response to grounded theories emerging from talk-story with non-indigenous members of the global surfing tribe, describing their anger and powerlessness against cultural studies researchers who deceive and misrepresent them in a perceived culture war, I explain how non-indigenous researchers and disempowered populations can jointly perform talk-story to co-create depictions that survive participant scrutiny. However, I caution that influential gatekeepers will execute Western a priori assertions and cultural imperialism to silence opposing voices and epistemologies empowered by talk-story. Nonetheless, my article aims to contribute towards promoting performances of talk-story methodology by explaining how an indigenous paradigm enables analytical processes to be shared, thus exposing insights participants perceive to be silenced by Western Research Methodologies.
Marshaling ethnographic data from a county jail, this study introduces “autonomy”—a novel concept and measurement of the degree to which an actor's exchange initiations are regulated by other exchange relations. This study rearticulates mutual dependence arguments about the social order of penological living in terms of social exchange theory and offers several innovations: 1) the structural forms of exchange relations in a penal housing unit stratify “carceral autonomy” across members of a social order; 2) diminished carceral autonomy contributes to the buildup of “exchange frustration”—the mixture of discontent and sadness experienced when goals cannot be achieved due the structure of an exchange network; 3) deprivations, inefficacies, and imported cultural standards contribute to what is exchanged and with whom in a penological setting; 4) caretaking in penological housing units is as much about maintaining social order through a form of generalized exchange as it is about network members helping each other; and 5) the emotional landscape of penological living can be mapped, in part, by examining the distribution of carceral autonomy and exchange frustration.
This paper considers the personal commitment to ‘boxe popolare’ (people’s boxing), focusing on my scholar-practitioner status as a tool to contribute to the boxe popolare agenda by means of what I term ‘shared sociological imagination’. Through a reflexive tale on becoming a boxe popolare member, the article sheds light on the importance of overcoming the theory/practice divide. The first section of the paper draws on ‘habitus as topic and tool’—namely, the methodology I have adopted in a four-year ethnography of boxe popolare—and illustrates sociological imagination as a capacity that can be cultivated even in extremely carnal worlds by social agents who do not belong to academia. The second section broadens the reasoning, arguing that one characterising trait of being a scholar-practitioner in sport and physical culture may consist in working out agency both on an individual and a collective level. Echoing Burawoy’s perspective of ‘public sociology’, such an attempt can be seen as a potentially emancipatory strategy: it allows people with whom we research and practice to live with and through theory, embodying shared understandings in novel mundane activities.
What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological homologies between the two disciplines. Structurally, ethnography and historical sociology are similarly positioned in sociology more broadly, as enterprises with sometimes-tense relationships with dominant assumptions of the social sciences. Methodologically, both ethnographers and historical sociologists face the challenges of bounding the research process, navigating access to data, analyzing and retaining data while “in the field,” and overcoming cultural distance between themselves and the worlds they are studying. Taken together, these findings extend work in the sociology of science and knowledge and suggest some key conditions for intellectual efflorescence.
Les aspirations à l’émergence d’un modèle d’action publique post-New Public Management (NPM) sont nombreuses et plurielles. Le nouveau paradigme serait fondé sur la promotion d’une logique de réseau collaboratif, qui s’ajoute à la logique hiérarchique associée à l’administration publique traditionnelle et à la logique de marché associé au NPM. Le développement de collaborations entre associations et acteurs gouvernementaux est stratégique pour le dépassement du NPM, mais elles sont difficiles à mettre en œuvre. Les littératures sur la transformation des modèles d’action publique et la collaboration intersecteurs se sont peu intéressées aux acteurs dans la construction de la collaboration et à la mise en lien de ce niveau micro à l’émergence d’un paradigme post-NPM. Cet article propose de comprendre comment les acteurs publics et associatifs se représentent la logique de réseau collaboratif sous-jacente au dépassement du NPM et s’organisent pour la mettre en œuvre. La collaboration gouvernements-associations est envisagée comme un processus en cours conduit par des acteurs impliqués dans un changement institutionnel : la transformation de leurs relations et de l’organisation de l’action publique vers des modalités collaboratives. La méthodologie adoptée est une ethnographie (2018-2020) d’une collaboration en cours entre des acteurs gouvernementaux et des associations. La collaboration étudiée a pour objet la transformation de l’organisation des politiques publiques régionales d’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes vers un fonctionnement en réseau et une participation extensive des associations du territoire. Les résultats montrent que les représentations du réseau collaboratif, de son articulation aux autres logiques de régulation et de la distribution des responsabilités dans sa mise en œuvre diffèrent en fonction de l’appartenance sectorielle des acteurs. Alors que les acteurs gouvernementaux intègrent l’incompatibilité et l’illégitimité de l’exercice de leur autorité hiérarchique dans la collaboration, les associations sont en demande d’une collaboration mandatée hiérarchiquement s’opposant à la logique de marché. La non-reconnaissance dans la structure collaborative de ces visions différentes de la collaboration et l’absence de soutien hiérarchique aux règles de la collaboration empêchent la construction d’une vision commune. Les conflits restent larvés, mais la méfiance des associations envers les partenaires publics croît. La collaboration s’essouffle mais se poursuit grâce à un effet de cliquet collaboratif permis par la hiérarchie. L’article propose une contribution théorique à l’analyse du modèle émergent post-NPM en mettant en lumière les représentations différentes du réseau collaboratif et de sa mise en œuvre. Il souligne la nécessité de déplacer le débat de la légitimité de l’autorité hiérarchique des acteurs publics dans les réseaux collaboratifs aux modalités d’exercice légitimes et éthiques de la hiérarchie dans la collaboration. Il offre une étude empirique sur les transformations des paradigmes du management public via une méthodologie ethnographique originale. Il contribue à soutenir les praticiens souhaitant construire la collaboration en éclairant les représentations et attentes mutuelles des partenaires et en identifiant les conditions d’exercice légitimes de la hiérarchie à des fins collaboratives.
For good reasons, many micro-sociological approaches follow a ‘methodological situationism’. This raises the question of the before, after and beside of situations, which have been problematised in various discussions, including those on the mobilisation and mediatisation of modern societies. I take up this question by drawing on empirical data from an ethnographic study on air travel, with the aim of understanding the material link between situations, including the link created by mobile media practices.
Space is a highly complex network of perception. Even the recognition of a specific arrangement of people and social goods into a space is the product of subjective processes of consciousness and cultural contexts of order. With this constitutional-theoretical assumption, relational sociology of space has dynamized the notion of space. With this in mind, the perspectivity of the perceiving subject is no longer limited to the moving arrangement. Instead, it is supplemented by the knowledge of the shared meaning of space. At the same time, this knowledge is informed by a stream of sensory experience in the field. This leads us first to a proposal of a typology of different kinds of data, based less on the situation of creation than on an in-relation to the lifeworld. Secondly, we turn to methodological implications. This will be based on our assumption that the addition of relational spatial sociology to the notion of perspective reveals the strengths and limitations of a social science research. At least for those social scientists who aim to reconstruct perspectives and therefore attempts to approximate them. By means of spatial sociological aspects we discuss the problem of perspectivity on the basis of hermeneutic sociology of knowledge within lifeworld analytic ethnography.KeywordsLifeworld analytic ethnographyObservational participationData sortsBodiesRelational sociology of spacePerspectivityPositionality
This article addresses the everyday forms of urban precarity, which is under‐studied in the context of Finnish cities. We examine how urban precarity becomes lived, practiced, and resisted in the case of a suburban open‐air shopping center in Helsinki, Finland. Referring to precarity as a socio‐spatial condition that reveals the precariousness of urban people and places, this study discovered everyday forms of urban precarity in detailed materialities and tactics; in housing, food, and addiction struggles; and in movements and networks. These mundane manifestations revealed that precarity could be approached in more relative terms that are not linked with certain neighborhoods but that emerge as spaces with intersecting nodes of services, networks, mobilities, and sociality. We conclude that particular places across urban spaces, where these aspects intersect, can be central to the ways precarity is navigated in the city and to increasing understandings of the mechanisms through which spaces of precarity are constructed in the city. The methodological choices used in this article—volunteer ethnography and vignettes—present profound accounts of the microscale lived experience, and bring humanness to a context that often exhibits stereotypes and marginality.
There has been an increased focus on the factors that influence gang continuity given the short- and long-term consequences associated with gang membership. Despite this, Asian gangs—notably the Hmong—have rarely been at the center of these academic inquiries. This is especially troubling given that their cultural and historical profile provides a unique vantage point for assessing how culture, diaspora, and immigration affect social deviance and crime. Considering these empirical gaps, the current study examines the motivations associated with gang persistence by analyzing life history interviews and ethnographic observations among a sample of 34 current and former Hmong gang members in the United States. Emergent themes suggest that brother love, perceptions of power, and a sense of obligation ensnare individuals in gang life for extended periods of time, with notable geographic and cultural distinctions. These findings highlight important avenues for future research and practice.
After the play This is Us was performed (see fieldwork reflection), I went to Sjælsmark for a final session to interview the group about the process and to round up. We debriefed quickly and had time on our hands. Prior to this, some of them had received donations of instruments to start a band with. We decided to get the instruments and have a music session, not for anything but the sake of it. Armed with guitars, amps, a bass and other miscellaneous sound-makers, we walked down the main ‘street’ of Sjælsmark playing chords and singing. At one point Ghafour looked at me and said: ‘welcome to Hogwarts’ while gesturing to the grey sky, old, dilapidated buildings and iron fences. The irony was obvious; Sjælsmark is not a place for magic or music. Though not a moment of revolution nor research, it was at times like these—spent standing side by side in demonstrations, sharing meals, being taught about Kurdish dancing or Lebanese pop music—where the call for decreation to and participating in re-creation (from welcome to theatre) rooted. This is perhaps too porous to construct robust arguments around in a scholarly context, too close for critical distance and too far afield for taking a position on solid ground. But the poetic subtleties that destabilised frames of reference led to the understanding of dramaturgical ethics to address responsibility and practice solidarity beyond theatre and research. The solidarity produced by making theatre and by caring beyond the theatrical frame, as Thompson and Stuart Fishers also note, can re-orientate one’s work within the field, on stage and on the academic page (2020). In short, caring beyond the moments of theatre making or research shapes both knowledge and worldmaking. And so, I conclude this chapter on December day, walking through Sjælsmark, not a place for magic or music; in a moment that is neither research nor revolution, yet, is perhaps both poetry and theatre, strumming the chords of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song with people who wrote, acted and drew; whose lives are still filled with the precarities of living the limbos of citizenship, legal status, and belongingKeywordsDramaturgical ethicsCritical closenessArtistic responsibilityEmanuel LevinasSimone Weil
La technologie chaîne de blocs et ses applications, telles que les contrats intelligents (smart contracts), l’organisation décentralisée autonome (OAD) et les jetons non fongibles (NFTs) font partie des technologies de l’avenir pour le financement du cinéma indépendant. D’un côté, ces innovations favorisent la chaîne de valeur du secteur grâce à la transparence et à la traçabilité des financements octroyés aux films. De l’autre, les cinéastes indépendants rencontrent beaucoup de difficultés à boucler leurs budgets et ces plateformes représentent de nouvelles dépenses, ainsi qu’une courbe d’apprentissage longue et coûteuse.
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