In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
... A este aspecto se le suma el hecho de abordar en forma directa los relatos sobre el ejercicio de violencia. Tal como plantean Bourgois (2003) y Noel (2011, existe una tensión entre los requisitos legales de informar sobre delitos no reportados y los acuerdos sobre confidencialidad. ...
... En primer lugar, un aspecto a destacar es que los dilemas éticos identificados escapan a una lógica formalista sobre la investigación social. Tal como se ha discutido desde una visión crítica de la ética (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004;Santi, 2016) y de la antropología (Bourgois, 2003;Noel, 2016), abordar los potenciales conflictos en una investigación social implica desconocer su carácter inductivo, relacional y situado. Los requerimientos éticos deben adaptarse a la investigación social y, en particular, a la investigación en violencia. ...
La investigación social y criminológica sobre violencia hacia mujeres en relaciones de pareja ha despertado diversos debates académicos. Sin embargo, dada la escasez de estudios cualitativos focalizados en varones agresores, la reflexión sobre las dificultades y los procesos de trabajo de campo implicados en estas investigaciones ha recibido exigua atención. A partir de cuatro estudios cualitativos sobre perpetradores de violencia hacia sus parejas mujeres en América Latina, este artículo reconstruye los principales problemas éticos y metodológicos encontrados en experiencias de trabajo de campo en instituciones para varones con conductas violentas. Se identificaron cuatro ejes problemáticos: comités de ética, pedidos institucionales, coacción de participantes, y protección de los entrevistados. Las particularidades de las instituciones y de las racionalidades de los actores sociales imprimen tensiones y obligan a repensar los modos de realizar entrevistas. Discutimos la necesidad de explicitar los desafíos institucionales y éticos en los estudios sobre violencia en publicaciones académicas.
... Det å skulle endre på motivasjon, normer, moral, og ikke minst som forsker sannsynliggjøre at slike endringer finner sted, er vanskelig -saerlig på arenaer med mer fri aktivitet som det ofte er på fritidsklubber (Wikström, 2023). Internasjonalt, inkludert i vårt naboland Sverige, der man har solid forskning på feltet, er det ikke fri aktivitet, men familie, skole og organiserte aktiviteter med gode voksne som synes å ha god innvirkning på unges utvikling (Bourgois, 2003;Wikström, 2023). I tillegg viser ulike former for kognitiv og psykologisk behandling, hvor hensikten er å fremme empati, endre kultur eller en persons moralske grunnsyn, å ha gunstige virkninger. ...
... Forskning indikerer en sammenheng mellom ustrukturerte aktiviteter blant unge og kriminalitet, noe som antyder at fritidsklubber ikke nødvendigvis har de intenderte forebyggende effektene (Gerstner & Oberwittler, 2018;Vazsonyi et al., 2018). I utsatte områder i USA, der såkalt gatekultur er fremtredende, er for eksempel skolen snarere en arena for å laere mer, heller enn å forebygge, kriminalitet (Bourgois, 2003). Å utsette unge for miljøer preget av mobbing, ekskludering eller andre former for uønsket oppførsel kan føre til redusert trivsel, sosial isolasjon og psykiske helseproblemer (Mahoney et al., 2004). ...
Effekter av ungdomsklubber på lokalmiljøet? En forskjell-i-forskjeller-analyse av etableringen av en ny ungdomsklubb i Oslo Sammendrag Denne artikkelen undersøker om fritidsklubber endrer ungdommers syn på lokalmiljøet. Fritidsklubben Fubiak ble opprettet på Furuset i Alna bydel i 2016. Vi undersøker ungdommers opplevelse av lokalmiljøet i 2015 og 2018 og ser på om utviklingen var bedre i Alna bydel enn i andre deler av Oslo. Vi bruker tverrsnittene fra «Ung i Oslo» i 2015 og 2018 og benytter teknikken «forskjeller-i-forskjeller». Analysene viser ingen signifikante forskjeller mellom utviklingen i Alna bydel og resten av Oslo, verken blant ungdom generelt eller i spesifikke sosioøkonomiske subgrupper. Funnene støtter derfor ikke hypotesen om at fritidsklubber gjør ungdom mer tilfreds med sitt lokalmiljø. Studien gir grunnlag for diskusjon av teoriene om fritidsklubbers forebyggende effekt i lokalmiljøet. Effektstudier av fritidsklubber er imidlertid mangelvare. Det er derfor begrenset kunnskap om effektene av fritidsklubber og tilsvarende tilbud til ungdom i Norge og Norden. Det er derfor et stort behov for tilsvarende studier av ungdomsklubber og tilsvarende fritidsaktiviteter, herunder undersøkelser av effekter på andre relevante utfall som kriminalitet og vold. Abstract This article examines whether leisure clubs influence young people's perception of the local community. The Fubiak leisure club was established at Furuset in Alna district in 2016. We investigate young people's experience of the local community in 2015 and 2018, comparing the developments in Alna with other parts of Oslo. We utilize cross-sectional data from the "Ung i Oslo" surveys conducted in 2015 and 2018 and employ the "difference-in-differences" technique. The analyses reveal no significant differences in the development between Alna and the rest of Oslo, either among youth in general or within specific socioeconomic subgroups. Consequently, the findings do not support the hypothesis that leisure clubs enhance youth satisfaction with their local environment. The study
... Bobea and Veeser show how the nature of drug market competition, and the resources associated with it, buoy up poor communities through the recent crisis in Puerto Rico. Elsewhere, Philippe Bourgois demonstrates how the resources obtained through the trade not only provide for survival needs but also for unattached young men to develop a sense of attachment and at times even re spect (Bourgois 1995). At a global level, Roberto Saviano has argued that capital controlled by illicit actors has played a critical role in providing liquidity to global capital markets (Saviano 2015). ...
... However, this was not the case, the condition of Munya was still alive. This short-lived acceptance of the health improvement of Munya by his mother can be best explained by anthropologist Bourgois (1995) who argues that the social suffering alienates and naturalises substance use and ultimately pushes people to view illness as their architect. Munya's mother explained When he "relapsed", the psychiatrist told him he had been smoking mbanje. ...
The metanarrative of biomedicine and “psy” discipline (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry etc.) asserts that cannabis use is one of the fundamental causes of mental illness among different men in the Rushinga district of Zimbabwe. These metanarratives, however, appear to have universalised, medicalised and marginalised the conception and representation of mental illness as enmeshed in local epistemologies and ontologies of mental illness. Based on local epistemologies, elders in Diwa largely trace mental illness to discursive sociocultural explanations rarely linked to cannabis use. This paper answers the central question: How is the use of cannabis by different persons related to mental illness in the Rushinga district? I argue that community members, health providers and police officers want to think of persons, especially men, with mental illness as “mad” and immoral cannabis users who brought illnesses upon themselves and lack personal responsibility based on Western neoliberal and biomedical metanarratives. However, this framing is not helpful, it is detrimental to treatment and social reputation, as it bypasses local cultural explanations that may be protective and that offer clearer guidelines for treatment.
... Several of these cultural-bound discussions were both meaning-centered and critiques of social structure, combining psychoanalysis and political economy. They identified harmful actors and societal forces perpetuating patient pain and distress (Guarnaccia et al., 2010;Gherovici, 2018;Bourgois, 2003). This mutual imbrication of anthropological and psychoanalytic traditions was an important throughline in the development of clinical ethnography. ...
... The movement in these spaces connects to 'hustling' or "a form of labor performed to acquire material goods and the ability to 'hustle' functions as a marker of an approved masculinity (Caputo-Levine 2022: p. 180)." Seminal works depict hustling as a means of masculine performativity and as an economic motivation (e.g., Anderson, 2000;Bourgois, 2003;Venkatesh, 2002) Caputo-Levine (2022) investigated the term hustling through her ethnographic work with formerly incarcerated, predominantly Black participants attending a re-entry program, emphasizing that it is hard to discern "the importance of the hustle" without relating it to the experience of being a product-an object used or "worked to achieve the ends of others" (p. 280)." ...
The geography of sex work has received attention from scholars exploring its ebb and flow based on how police, neighbors, and gentrification influence sex work zones; however, there are few studies about how sex market facilitators move within and feel about working in these zones. Researchers, artists, and activists have used psychogeography maps or maps that elucidate how individuals conceptualize place and their personal, emotional relationship to the city’s geography. We, a criminologist and a visual artist, used this psychogeography technique adapted from Debord and Lynch’s work. Sixty sex market facilitators working in NYC from the 1970s–2012 drew maps of their everyday operations. This participatory method enabled participants to feel and recall the emotions of this high-risk activity. This paper analyzes participants’ maps and corresponding narratives by exploring Lyng’s idea of edgework, the synergy of risk-taking activity, and feelings of mastery, authenticity, excitement, control, and a search for respect. This study addresses how participants map urban space from positions of ‘advanced marginalization,’ showing the impacts of spatial and mental boundaries of possibility. Through this psychogeography method, participants engaged in ‘countermapping’ as a form of resistance. The sensations and emotions derived from facilitation and its evolution moved us closer to understanding sex market facilitation from the inside.
... John thus took the view, not unlike Bourgois (1995), that condemnations of Blackness and Brownness notwithstanding, social scientists were obliged to do this research. Their job should be to deepen our own and the public's understanding of these phenomena and that it is imperative not to stay silent about the prevailing conditions in such communities so long waiting for their American Dream and pyramid of needs to be even partially met. ...
... Oscar Lewis famously (and controversially) argued that a culture of poverty contributed to ongoing social and economic distress in Mexico [7]. Closer to the present, Phillippe Bourgois and Paul Farmer demonstrated how structural inequalities and racism promote ongoing disease and suffering throughout the world [8,9]. ...
In their classic accounts, anthropological ethnographers developed causal arguments for how specific sociocultural structures and processes shaped human thought, behavior, and experience in particular settings. Despite this history, many contemporary ethnographers avoid establishing in their work direct causal relationships between key variables in the way that, for example, quantitative research relying on experimental or longitudinal data might. As a result, ethnographers in anthropology and other fields have not advanced understandings of how to derive causal explanations from their data, which contrasts with a vibrant “causal revolution” unfolding in the broader social and behavioral sciences. Given this gap in understanding, we aim in the current article to clarify the potential ethnography has for illuminating causal processes related to the cultural influence on human knowledge and practice. We do so by drawing on our ongoing mixed methods ethnographic study of games, play, and avatar identities. In our ethnographic illustrations, we clarify points often left unsaid in both classic anthropological ethnographies and in more contemporary interdisciplinary theorizing on qualitative research methodologies. More specifically, we argue that for ethnographic studies to illuminate causal processes, it is helpful, first, to state the implicit strengths and logic of ethnography and, second, to connect ethnographic practice more fully to now well-developed interdisciplinary approaches to causal inference. In relation to the first point, we highlight the abductive inferential logic of ethnography. Regarding the second point, we connect the ethnographic logic of abduction to what Judea Pearl has called the ladder of causality, where moving from association to intervention to what he calls counterfactual reasoning produces stronger evidence for causal processes. Further, we show how graphical modeling approaches to causal explanation can help ethnographers clarify their thinking. Overall, we offer an alternative vision of ethnography, which contrasts, but nevertheless remains consistent with, currently more dominant interpretive approaches.
... What the study amounts to is a series of interconnected ethnographies that provides a broader picture of the drug trade that is attuned to the geographical, contextual, and cultural differences in each location. In doing so, Gundur's work differs from traditional ethnographies in this field that often concentrate on one geographical area (i.e., Bourgois, 2003;Venkatesh, 2008). There is always a trade-off here between depth and breadth, but Gundur manages to embed himself in each locale and firmly draw out the lived experiences of the men and women of the trade. ...
... Between 2013 and 2017, the steepest increases in opioid-related overdoses were highest among younger urban Black individuals (178%) followed by younger rural Black individuals (98%) [3]. Community disinvestment, driven by White flight and depopulation, contributes to more space for the marketing, distribution and usage of drugs [153][154][155]. To this end, Black individuals, relative to non-Black races, buy and use drugs in locations twice as close to where they live and may be farther away from syringe services programs, particularly in rural areas where drug use/harm reduction stigma may be comparatively higher, thus amplifying the likelihood of injection equipment sharing [156]. ...
Issues
To date, there has been no synthesis of research addressing the scale and nuances of the opioid epidemic in racial/ethnic minority populations in the United States that considers the independent and joint impacts of dynamics such as structural disadvantage, provider bias, health literacy, cultural norms and various other risk factors.
Approach
Using the “risk environment” framework, we conducted a scoping review on PubMed, Embase and Google Scholar of peer‐reviewed literature and governmental reports published between January 2000 and February 2024 on the nature and scale of opioid use, opioid prescribing patterns, and fatal overdoses among racial/ethnic minorities in the United States, while also examining macro, meso and individual‐level risk factors.
Key Findings
Results from this review illuminate a growing, but fragmented, literature lacking standardisation in racial/ethnic classification and case reporting, specifically in regards to Indigenous and Asian subpopulations. This literature broadly illustrates racial/ethnic minorities' increasing nonmedical use of opioids, heightened burdens of fatal overdoses, specifically in relation to polydrug use and synthetic opioids, with notable elevations among Black/Latino subgroups, in addition uneven opioid prescribing patterns. Moreover, the literature implicates a variety of unique risk environments corresponding to dynamics such as residential segregation, provider bias, overpolicing, acculturative stress, patient distrust, and limited access to mental health care services and drug treatment resources, including medications for opioid use disorder.
Implications
There has been a lack of rigorous, targeted study on racial/ethnic minorities who use opioids, but evidence highlights burgeoning increases in usage, especially polydrug/synthetic opioid use, and disparities in prescriptions and fatal overdose risk‐phenomena tied to multi‐level forms of entrenched disenfranchisement.
Conclusion
There is a need for further research on the complex, overlapping risk environments of racial/ethnic minorities who use opioids, including deeper inclusion of Indigenous and Asian individuals, and efforts to generate greater methodological synergies in population classification and reporting guidelines.
... The sociological literature on street culture abounds with descriptions of this type of violence. From the classical studies (Anderson 1999) to more contemporary ones (Kalkan 2021), respect-based violence is widely portrayed as a way to build identity, settle disputes, contest dominance, achieve symbolic capital, defend masculinist ideals, and obtain a sense of self-worth in a context of marginalization (Bourgois 2003;Lalander 2009;Millie 2009). Stewart and Simons (2010:574) write that, "at the heart of the street culture is an emphasis on respect, toughness, retribution, and ultimately, violence." ...
... The combination of poverty and discrimination is a well-known driver of street culture and associated crime (Anderson, 1999;Bourgois, 2003). The criminal environment is also prevalent in the explanations for crime embedded in the life-stories of the men in this study who were convicted of violent offenses. ...
Life-stories emerge from a wide variety of facts and events in individual lives and weave a selected few of these together to make meaning in the present. They are crucial for constructing identity and influence action by establishing worldviews and a persona that narrators will seek to confirm. In this study we describe three main themes in the life-stories of six incarcerated men in Argentina: a) Protecting family, especially parents; b) reconstructing an ideal past, and contrasting it with a more cynical present; and c) blaming criminal neighborhoods, friends, and girlfriends for their crimes. We discuss how these themes are intertwined, what function they fulfill, and the identities and masculinities they produce. Combining research on life-stories with narrative and psychosocial criminology the analysis reveals how life-stories of incarcerated men can be seen as attempts at countering stigma and defending a self that is under attack. The life-stories portray a believable, 'good', and multifaceted image of the self, but most importantly, create coherence and unity in otherwise chaotic lives.
Is it possible to conduct rigorous, reflexive social science research without revealing something of oneself? This is the question I propose to address in this article, analysing the influence that my personal identities as a researcher, my gender identity, and my experiences in the drug scene had on my access to this field, the nature of the data gathered and the process of analysing that data. As a woman who uses drugs writing a research thesis on female drug users in Bordeaux and Montreal, I was very well integrated into the Bordeaux field context and much less so in Montreal, resulting in an asymmetrical comparison. This asymmetry cannot be explained without taking into account my own personal experience among drug users. My gender identity also shaped the data-gathering process: during my field research I had to contend with sexual harassment, as well as being on the receiving end of stereotypes undermining my credibility, all the while dealing with my own emotional trauma linked to past experiences of sexual violence. The resulting research is a form of “delinquent ethnography”, whose participatory dimension has clear scientific and methodological advantages, but which also raises important ethical questions. This article concludes with some proposals for protecting women researchers from gender violence and inequality in their fieldwork.
Neste artigo exploramos as reações e comentários de três moradoras de uma favela carioca diante da publicização e repercussão das circunstâncias da morte do morador de uma favela vizinha. Sustentamos que as referidas reações e falas são pautadas por moralidades que expressam sensos de justiça e concepções de direitos que articulam atribuições diferenciadas de status a partir de critérios identitários com expectativas e demandas por distribuição desigual de formas de tratamento. Uma formulação que revela o entendimento sobre direitos como um privilégio de tipos morais e que se articulam com experiências de insulto moral e processos de exclusão discursiva.
In this article, we explore the reactions and comments of three residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela in response to the publicity and repercussions of the circumstances surrounding the death of a resident of a neighbouring favela. We argue that these reactions and discourses are guided by moralities that express senses of justice and conceptions of rights that articulate attributions of differentiated status, based on identity criteria, with expectations and demands for an unequal distribution of forms of treatment. This formulation reveals an understanding of rights as a privilege of specific moral types that are articulated with experiences of moral insult and processes of discursive exclusion.
A menudo se ha dicho que Foucault era crítico con el marxismo o incluso antimarxista. Tal ha sido ciertamente el caso en relación con la actitud de Foucault hacia el «marxismo oficial» de su época, es decir, el marxismo del PCF o, en menor medida, de los grupos «extraparlamentarios». Sin embargo, especialmente sus análisis en Vigilar y castigar, y el curso de conferencias que permitió su preparación, La sociedad punitiva, pueden revelar una lectura muy diferente de la relación entre Foucault y Marx, una lectura que, al mismo tiempo, desafía algunas de las interpretaciones más tradicionales de Marx. Contrariamente a la vulgata leninista al uso, que centraliza el poder en la dudosa entidad llamada «el Estado», creo que es posible anclar la idea de poder en la dimensión de «la fábrica», subrayando la continuidad entre las premisas violentas de la acumulación en su fase «primitiva» u «originaria», y el poder enquistado en lo que Marx llama la «morada oculta del poder» en la «esfera de la producción», figuradamente en «la fábrica». De ahí la centralidad de la idea de «disciplina», que es crucial tanto para la noción fundamental de El Capital, la noción de extracción de plusvalía, como al mismo tiempo generadora de la obra «sociológica» clave de Foucault, Vigilar y castigar (especialmente si se lee junto con La sociedad punitiva). La afinidad electiva entre una determinada lectura de Marx y la obra más importante de Foucault aparecerá con especial claridad en el redescubrimiento de un marxismo centrado en la fábrica entre los años sesenta y setenta, los años de la victoria pírrica de la clase obrera sobre la fábrica fordista.
This chapter presents a contextualized analysis of the evolution of concepts, theoretical models, and diagnostic criteria associated with substance use and dependence throughout history. From the earliest medical classifications to contemporary systems like the DSM-5 and ICD-11, it examines not only the terminological changes but also the gradual improvement in understanding drug-related disorders from a multidisciplinary perspective. Influenced by scientific evidence, clinical practices, and theoretical reflections, the diagnostic criteria have evolved, resulting in more comprehensive and precise approaches. In addition to reflecting social, cultural, and scientific dynamics, this progression is also essential for more effective intervention in the context of substance use and dependence.
We begin this book with the not-so-provocative statement that the last few years have posed great challenges for contemporary societies. Climate change and other socio-environmental (and technological) risks; global health hazards and the intrinsic vulnerabilities they have exposed; (inter)national warfare and the concomitant rise in migration and refugee flows; the rise of ethno-nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment that have ensued such migratory flows; soaring housing prices and the depletion of social welfare systems and social services. These are but a few examples of social problems that contemporary societies have had to grapple with in the last few years. And, although these are surely global issues, it might be argued that it is in the world’s urban areas that the effects of such challenges (crises), the struggles they stimulate (conflicts), and also their resolution (celebrations) take shape (Sassen, 2018). This edited volume aims to focus on the expressions of these contemporary global challenges in European urban areas. It revolves, and is structured around, these three central and interrelated dimensions of contemporary urban life: crisis, conflict, and celebration.
Scholars have long debated what is the role of inequalities in organised violence, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. I argue that mainstream approaches (e.g. deviance, subcultures, grievances, rational choice and Marxism) fall short because they overlook that organised violence is an intensive form of work. These perspectives often exoticise individuals involved in violence for profit or political purposes. Violence is not a deviant feature of social life but an integral part of collective action. By applying occupational lenses, I position those engaged in violence as a specialised class of manual workers recruited in the protection labour market. Scholars can acknowledge the occupational stratification observed before in research about organised violence by understanding violence specialists as workers. This essay explores how the sociology of work can enhance our understanding of inequality reproduction within criminal organisations, guerrillas, armies, police forces, mercenaries and private military companies.
The Programa ‘De Braços Abertos’ (PBA) [Open Arms Programme] was planned and implemented by authorities of the city of São Paulo, between 2014 and 2016, and provided for the accommodation of its beneficiaries in hotels. We perceived a lack of specific research on the ways this programme was operated. Through an ethnography and the construction of close relationships with the teams of professionals working in these hotels, we were able to verify: (1) the constant attempts by the programme’s agents to develop bonds with the beneficiaries, (2) the skilful, attentive listening to the demands and daily stories lived by the beneficiaries, and (3) the problem-solving efforts in a consensual and participatory environment. In contrast to life on the streets, along with the professional intervention, the new context provided by PBA hotels has, in many cases, paved the way for changes in the drug users’ relationship with crack consumption to a more controlled pattern.
This essay explores the relationships between illicit drug flows (my current area of historical research) and state borders. The larger theme, for objects-in-motion, is how statist languages of “control” underlie their construction and maintenance as illicit and criminalized flows. Students of drug trafficking can make public discourses about drugs a usefully explicit object of study. But in doing so they should also beware of the possible intellectual and political pitfalls of “talking like a state” – that is, of adopting the categories or characterizations of the illicit deployed by policing and regulatory agencies―for thinking well about such flows. Among other problems, it is hard for territorial states to supersede their stationary view of shifting, furtive, border-less activities, a dilemma of note in the recent “war on terrorism” as well. The essay winds its way to these ideas by addressing three topics: first, the relation of drugs to commodity studies writ large (how drugs were differentiated from other goods during the historic rise of commercial and industrial capitalism); second, the relation of drugs to the building of borders and states; and third, the role of bureaucratic-control language in marking and naturalizing the thin line between “controlled substances” and freer commodities.
Education fundamentally focuses on 'individuals', whose human value is rooted in the expression of 'self-identity'. This process is influenced by their social rank and linguistic culture, and within varied discourses and ideological communities, different 'self-identity values' emerge. This applies to all individuals, whether they are citizens or women, and encompasses complex social metaphysical questions. For instance, how do we define social identities such as poverty, disability, privilege, or femininity? 'Intuition' and 'common sense' often fail in such definitions, especially in recognizing exceptions like gender identification, which challenges the distinctions between biological sex and gender identity. The paper analyzes 'Social Historical Structuralism' and ' Performative Theory' to see if they address the challenges of 'Essentialism'. It assesses both pluralism and monism and the autonomy of the 'true self' in educational philosophy's core concepts, grounded in the philosophy of self-identity. This study starts from female community perspectives, addressing women's disadvantaged status in social and linguistic structures and the impact of individualism on gender mainstreaming. This paper concludes by re-evaluating monistic approaches and considering the equitable recognition of community members' autonomy, underscoring the importance of self-identity in educational philosophy amidst the growing influence of identity politics in Western education.
A publicação é resultado de uma série de textos que dão conta de processos sociais que têm efeitos sobre os modos como as pessoas vivem na cidade. Seus organizadores propõem o fomento de discussões em torno de temas como as perspectivas históricas sobre o processo urbano no Brasil, o acesso ao espaço público e a securitização do espaço urbano e o acesso de diferentes atores sociais aos espaços da cidade. A importância dessas discussões partem do pressuposto de que diálogos interdisciplinares são essenciais para compreender e amadurecer os debates sobre o que ocorre hoje nas cidades, especialmente latino-americanas.
Entre lo ordinario y lo extraordinario: Estrategias metodológicas para la investigación social cualitativa es una obra colectiva que presenta una amplia diversidad de aproximaciones y experiencias metodológicas atravesadas por una misma pregunta: ¿cómo investigar en situaciones adversas? Estas situaciones pueden ir desde la imposibilidad de salir de casa por una pandemia hasta encontrarse en contextos socialmente peligrosos, desconocidos o signados por distintas injusticias sociales.
El objetivo del libro es proporcionar una caja de herramientas que incluye desde la etnografía virtual hasta la minería de datos, pasando por los diarios de campo, la fotografía, el trabajo de archivo y la receptividad afectiva, para así promover entre sus lectoras y lectores la apropiación y adaptación de estas estrategias al momento de hacer investigación en situaciones extraordinarias. La obra invita a preguntarnos ¿cómo influyen los contextos sociales en la investigación que realizamos? y ¿cómo impacta nuestra presencia en esos contextos? De manera incluyente y didáctica, las autoras y los autores del libro comparten sus experiencias en dos grandes vertientes: 1) cómo han encarado sus procesos de investigación en situaciones críticas o contingentes, y 2) qué retos enfrentaron al irrumpir en espacios violentos,
inseguros o peligrosos.
Sin pretensiones de convertirse en un manual, este libro busca promover la reflexión propia y colectiva sobre las posibilidades de afrontar la investigación con metodologías cualitativas variadas y complementarias, con enfoques interdisciplinarios y en constante transformación.
This article presents ethnographic explorations of crime and punishment, aiming to bridge the disciplines of law and anthropology. Through qualitative methods, including literature review and library research, this study delves into the complex interplay between legal frameworks and cultural practices surrounding crime and punishment. Drawing on ethnographic data and theoretical insights, the research offers a nuanced understanding of how legal norms and cultural values intersect in shaping perceptions of crime and approaches to punishment. By examining real-life contexts and narratives, the study sheds light on the socio-cultural dynamics that influence legal processes and outcomes, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary perspectives in addressing issues of crime and punishment. The findings underscore the importance of integrating anthropological insights into legal frameworks to foster more contextually grounded and culturally sensitive approaches to justice.
This study explores the social organisation of risk among injecting drug users in Norway. Based on qualitative interviews with 80 people who regularly injected drugs, recruited from harm reduction services in five Norwegian cities, the analysis illustrates how users embody various forms of capital in order to mitigate harm. These forms of capital work along three axes that we conceptualise as sociocultural, injecting and structural capital. First, the sociocultural capital highlights how users accounted for a field-specific competence that enabled them to evaluate the trust-worthiness of drug dealers, and the quality and purity of the drugs they bought. Second, the injecting capital illustrates the drug-related competence among users, and how they managed their drug use in certain ways to minimise harm. Third, structural capital emphasises how users learned to benefit from various low-threshold agencies and the welfare state. Together, these forms of risk capital illustrate the subtle, and often neglected, forms of capital embedded within marginalised populations and how they 'do' harm reduction in their everyday interactions and drug use. If interventions within this population are to succeed, there is need for a greater awareness of such forms of capital and how these are employed within the social environments in which drug-related risks are organised.
Over the years, the field of forensic anthropology has become more diverse, bringing unique perspectives to a previously homogeneous field. This diversification has been accompanied by recognizing the need for advocacy and activism in an effort to support the communities we serve: marginalized communities that are often overrepresented in the forensic population. As such, forensic anthropologists see the downstream effects of colonialism, white supremacy, inequitable policies , racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia, gun violence, and misogyny. Some argue that ad-vocacy and activism have no place in forensic anthropological praxis. The counterarguments for engaging in advocacy and activism uphold white, heterosexual, cisgender, and ableist privilege by arguing that perceived objectivity and unbiased perspectives are more important than personally biasing experiences and positionality that supposedly jeopardize the science and expert testimony. Advocacy and activism, however, are not new to the practice of anthropology. Whether through sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, or other areas of biological anthropology, activism and advocacy play an important role, using both the scientific method and community engagement. Using a North American approach, we detail the scope of the issues, address how advocacy and activism are perceived in the wider discipline of anthropology, and define ways in which advocacy and activism can be utilized more broadly in the areas of casework, research, and education.
The chapter considers the involvement of street children in criminological research by drawing on a 3-year case study in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The chapter reflects on the need to develop and utilise emotional labour as a key methodological tool for conducting research into crime and violence. The chapter discusses the emotional labour utilised at 3 stages of the research process: before, during and after the completion of the study. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of emotional labour to engage participants, facilitate the research process and develop reflexivity. These reflections relate specifically to developing a more nuanced understanding of the victim–offender dichotomy, rooted within wider notions of constructions of childhood, and coloniality and my own positionality as a British scholar conducting research in Bangladesh.
This article* discusses the tolerance of violence. Specifically, it explores the way violence is enacted and perpetuated in residential education in Latvia. The article explores the perception and experience of violence in these schools by combining ethnographic fieldwork and autoethnographic data. Violence within the institution coalesces around three main aspects of experience: violence as necessary for regulating relationships, the embodiment of violence, and the expression of institutional violence. I illustrate how the application of violence is often justified as developing independence in students and by offering opportunities that mask the role of the school system in the reproduction of inequality in society. I conclude with an exploration of how the tolerance of violence arises from reproduction of an unequal social order that is maintained through the duplicitous position of the residential school as simultaneously necessary and unnecessary, closed and open, violent and nurturing.
Studies in Brazil and other Latin American countries have demonstrated how the expansion of illegal drug markets and firearms trafficking over borders has increased the risks for young people, especially those who live in socially vulnerable neighborhoods, of becoming victims of lethal violence. In addressing this scenario, we review some of the most relevant research approaches that seek to understand the involvement of young men in organized crime, the rise of criminal factions or groups and their internationalization process, and the social and institutional mechanisms that contribute to the production and reproduction of lethal violence. Delving both into sociological and anthropological studies in Brazil, as well as other Latin American contributions, we elaborate on the most promising contributions that combine an intersectional approach to the sociological and criminological theories most often employed to understand the involvement of youth with lethal violence in Brazil and the Latin American context.
In this chapter you will be offered a ‘post-psychology’ that traces concepts of motivation and motives through various theories relevant to my project. The most important problem, around which this ‘immanent critique’ is centered, is that of scientific objectivity: How to make of subjectivity a scientific object? Or, how to move beyond this contradictory ambition? As already mentioned, the concept of ‘boundary objectivity’ around objects such as ‘energy’ are suggested as central. We shall discuss prevalent strands of positivist psychology (behavior design, cognitive theories, self-determination theory), and then off-mainstream traditions. Of the latter, I focus mostly on the Vygotskian (socio-cultural-historical) tradition, including its version of critical psychology, but I also venture to find parallels to (critical) psychoanalysis. When off-mainstream traditions seek a scientific objectivity for their concepts of motives, the idea of (biological and social) ‘function’ becomes important, as it configures the necessity of needs, defines pathologies and cures, and translates those into activities. This has spurred attempts to overcome such functionalism, and the dualisms it entails; attempts, which then run into troubles with how to think of objectivity. That contradiction is the germ cell from which the position of this book has emerged.
The chapter outlines the ways in which restricted access to exclusive people and spaces impacts the way ethnographers relate to elites and ultimately how they grapple with questions of morality in their fieldwork. Given the challenges of gaining and maintaining open communication with elites, ethnographers generally avoid confrontation or debate and instead resolve to let elites speak freely and without interruption, even when they draw on self-serving tropes that assert moral superiority. Whereas ethnographers set aside judgments when elites expound on matters of class differences between them and others, they exhibit strong reactions to incidents of racism and gender oppression that appear in the field. The chapter explains this divergent response as a function of ethnographers’ personal experiences of marginalization in conducting research and in other aspects of their lives as well as reported findings from women and ethnic minorities who live, work, and study in spaces that historically favor ethnically or culturally dominant men. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how ethnographers of elites might incorporate complementary interviews and fieldwork with family, friends, and intimates as well as service workers who retain contact with existing and aspiring elites but who do not have access to the same spaces. When possible, sustained study of cross-class interactions developed alongside in-depth analysis of elites themselves can enhance understanding of what motivates elites.
Este artículo interroga las experiencias de violencia cotidiana, y las vulnerabilidades que estas conllevan, en un barrio popular de Manizales, Colombia. A partir de la descripción de situaciones etnográficas y haciendo énfasis en las vivencias de niñas, niños y jóvenes, analizo el lugar que ocupa, tanto para ellos como para sus familias, el espacio físico y social —aquí el barrio— en la reproducción de la violencia. ¿Qué implica crecer o criar los hijos en un espacio que “daña”, que destruye? ¿Qué otras vidas posibles se pueden imaginar frente al efecto destructor de las experiencias de violencia? Estas son algunas de las preguntas sobre las que busco reflexionar.
How do you support and nurture youth in the world’s largest refugee settlement? While the initial focus for aid organisations is to provide safety, shelter, sustenance, health care, and education, boredom among refugee youth is a persistent challenge in the years to resettlement and therefore providing creative outlets is vital. The Bidi Bidi Music and Arts Centre is intended to answer this challenge, alleviating pervasive boredom while providing necessary cultural infrastructure and programs, as well as supporting the building of community, easing tensions between rival groups, and helping overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, which is rife in many refugee communities. The centre will comprise a recording studio, spaces for music training, and a sheltered performance venue which doubles as a community meeting space. To.org and Hassell in collaboration with LocalWorks and Arup have created a sheltered, open-air amphitheatre, built from compressed earth blocks crafted from material excavated on the site. Currently under construction, the centre will also include community toilets, a tree nursery, vegetable garden, and freshwater facilities.
Forced disappearances have been a persistent issue in Mexico for over 50 years, contributing to a human rights crisis in the country. The complexity of the problem is exacerbated by contradictory filing systems and a lack of clarity regarding the number of individuals who have been forcibly disappeared. The Mexican legal framework defines a disappeared person as someone whose whereabouts are unknown and who is presumed to be a victim of a crime. Various crimes such as kidnapping, human trafficking, femicide, and homicide contribute to the difficulty in documenting forced disappearances. Despite the existence of laws and institutions aimed at addressing the issue, governmental authorities have demonstrated a lack of will to conduct effective investigations or locate the disappeared. Relatives of disappeared persons, along with human rights defenders, face challenges and resistance in their search for truth and justice. The growth of disappearances in the past two decades has highlighted the systemic inefficiencies and complicity with organized crime within government institutions. Institutional paradoxes and a lack of accountability perpetuate impunity and hinder the search for missing persons.
This review explains how and why the United States has systemically high poverty. Descriptive evidence shows that U.S. poverty is (i) a huge share of the population, (ii) a perennial outlier among rich democracies, (iii) staggeringly high for certain groups, (iv) unexpectedly high for those who "play by the rules," and (v) pervasive across various groups and places. This review then discusses and critiques three prevailing approaches focused on the individual poor rather than the systemically high poverty: (i) behavioral explanations "fixing the poor," (ii) emotive compassion "dramatizing the poor," and (iii) cultural explanations both dramatizing and fixing the poor. The essay then reviews political explanations that emphasize the essential role of social policy generosity, political choices to penalize risks, power resources of collective political actors, and institutions. This review demonstrates a long emerging but ascending and warranted shift away from individualistic explanations of the poor toward political explanations of poverty.
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