The Anthropology of Propaganda: Threats, Priorities, and Limits

ABSTRACTThis article offers a discussion of teaching about real people and places. Examples of not-real people and places in the influential publication Thinking Through Geography (Leat, 2001) are critically discussed, and an argument is made against the teaching of geography through not-real people and places. The examples from Thinking Through Geography are suggested to: be necessarily limited in a way that sources about real people and places are not; include a problematic hidden curriculum; and offer a type of representation that positions imaginary places as if they were real. What ‘the real’ means is explored, and it is argued that, while teaching about not-real people and places is potentially highly problematic, simply teaching about ‘the real’ is impossible. A notion of ‘useful fictions’ is offered, and suggestions are made for further engagement with representation and abstraction in school geography.

Hyper-sensitive moments in ethnographic fieldwork, such as family conferences whereby continuing or discontinuing treatment is discussed, or when sitting by a dying person’s bedside with family members, call into question the positionality of the researcher and research ethics. Participant observation at the end of life can evoke the sense of intruding in people’s most intimate moments. On the other hand, being present at a defining moment in life can strengthen the relationship with interlocutors precisely because this moment is shared. In my ethnographic research on the end of life of people with dementia in nursing homes in the Netherlands, the doorstep came to symbolize the emotional and methodological negotiations of proximity and distance, involvement, and detachment. How close are you allowed, how close do you dare, and how close is close enough to be empathetic? And what distance is enough to be respectful and modest? Thinking through these affective encounters, in this chapter I reflect on the ethnographic navigation of moments that require a particularly sensitive approach. I do not propagate an answer to the question of how to do research on death and dying, but aim at illustrating the affective states that come with ethnographic research.

Acknowledgements Preface - Richard Suinn Introduction: Our Shared Journey: Lessons from the Past to Protect the Future - Joseph E. Trimble and Celia B. Fisher PART I. FOUNDATIONS OF ETHNOCULTURAL RESEARCH AND RESEARCH ETHICS 1. A Goodness-of-Fit Ethic for Multicultural Research - Celia B. Fisher and Kathleen Ragsdale 2. Scientist-Community Collaborations: A Dynamic Tension Between Rights and Responsibilities - John Fantuzzo, Christine McWayne, and Stephanie Childs 3. First, Do No Harm: Culturally Centered Measurement for Early Intervention - Nancy Busch-Rossnagel PART II. RESEARCH ETHICS CHALLENGES INVOLVING DIVERSE ETHNOCULTURAL GROUPS 4. Addressing Health Disparities Through Relational Ethics: An Approach to Increasing African American Participation in Biomedical and Health Research - Scyatta A. Wallace 5. In Their Own Voices: American Indian Decisions to Participate in Health Research - Tim D. Noe, Spero M. Manson, Calvin Croy, Helen McGough, Jeffrey A. Henderson, and Dedra S. Buchwald 6. I Wonder, Why Would You Do It That Way? Ethical Dilemmas in Doing Participatory Research With Alaska Native Communities - Gerald V. Mohatt and Lisa Thomas 7. Ethical Conduct of Research With Asian and Pacific Islander American Populations - Jean Lau Chin, Jeffery Scott Mio, and Gayle Y. Iwamasa 8. Ethical Community-Based Research With Hispanic or Latina(o) Populations: Balancing Research Rigor and Cultural Responsiveness - Felipe Gonzalez Castro, Rebeca Rios, and Harry Montoya 9. Ethical Issues in Research With Immigrants and Refugees - Dina Birman PART III. SOCIALLY SENSITIVE RESEARCH INVOLVING ETHNOCULTURAL FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES 10. Ethical Research With Ethnic Minorities in the Child Welfare System - Katherine Ann Gilda Elliott and Anthony Urquiza 11. With All Due Respect: Ethical Issues in the Study of Vulnerable Adolescents - Ana Marie Cauce and Richard H. Nobles 12. Ethical Research Dilemmas With Minority Elders - Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Joshua R. Bringle, Barbara W. K. Yee, David Chiriboga, and Keith Whitfield 13. Changing Models of Research Ethics in Prevention Research Within Ethnic Communities - Fred Beauvais 14. Ethnographic Research on Drugs and HIV/AIDS in Ethnocultural Communities - Merrill Singer and Delia Easton PART IV. THE RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF INDIVIDUALS, COMMUNITIES, AND INSTITUTIONS 15. Safeguarding Sacred Lives: The Ethical Use of Archival Data for the Study of Diverse Lives - Copeland H. Young and Monica Brooker 16. Ethical Issues When White Researchers Study ALANA and Immigrant People and Communities - Janet E. Helms, Kevin T. Henze, Jackquelyn Mascher, and Anmol Satiani 17. Coda: The Virtuous and Responsible Researcher in Another Culture - Joseph E. Trimble and Gerald V. Mohatt Name Index Subject Index About the Editors About the Contributors

Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places and Things in the Digital Age

ABSTRACTThis article builds on most recent scholarship, increasingly critical of the uncritical, or non-critical in critical security studies. Through the empirical context of migration and the theoretical structure of the Copenhagen School, this inquiry draws attention to the hegemonic dominance of securitisation’s negative logic. With Germany as its case study, this article unpacks why and how the securitisation of migration is already always of a distinctly linear, segregating, violent, hence, negative and undesirable security determinism. More simply put: for decades, security and securitisation in critical security studies scholarship remain conflated into the same conditions and practices, reiterating the same meanings, namely: insecurity. By exploring a more inclusive, progressive type of securitisation framing through the subject rather than the referent object locus, this inquiry directs attention to a different kind of what Jef Huysmans initially termed in 2011 “little security nothings.” These other security “nothings,” also so profoundly infused with power, are found embedded in everyday meso-level practices performed and exercised by pro-migration, non-elite, fringe grassroots securitisation actors and audiences such as Germany’s Green Party and many non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This everyday advocacy on-the-ground in Germany animates and sustains inclusive registers of meanings, which make “real people in real places” feel safe and secure.

The objective of emancipatory security theory is to examine the insecurities of individuals and social groups that stem from oppressive power processes, relations, and structures. However, the image of power in emancipatory security studies does not correspond to such a normative and analytical motivation. This renders the theory susceptible to substantial criticism on the grounds of inadequate analysis of resisting individuals as agents of security in their own localities. To address this issue, the present article conceptualizes ‘emancipatory power’. In this exercise, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power, enriched by Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and feminist insights, will be used as the theoretical foundation to tailor collective power based on trust in a ‘moment’ of emancipation. Collective power will be illustrated by references to the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011.

Reply to Herrera

Introduction - Real Life Research: The Inside Story - Ivan Waddington and Andy Smith Chapter 1. Researching the World of Professional Football - Ivan Waddington Commentary - Sports Medicine Goes Under the Knife - Dominic Malcolm Chapter 2. Darwin's Athletes: A Retrospective After Fifteen Years - John Hoberman Commentary - Racism, Sports Research and Political Failure - Grant Jarvie Chapter 3. Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter - Loic Wacquant Commentary - 'Three Funerals, Two Weddings, Four Births and a Baptism': On the Importance of Embodying Sociology - Chris Shilling Chapter 4. Mischief Managed: Ticket Scalping, Research Ethics and Involved Detachment - Michael Atkinson Commentary - The Ups and Downs of Hanging Out with Ticket Scalpers: Reflections on Doing Ethnographic Research - Kath Woodward Chapter 5. Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study - Lee F. Monaghan Commentary - Raising the Bar in Bodybuilding Research: A Commentary on Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk By Lee F. Monaghan - Martin Roderick Chapter 6. Home and Away Revisited - Warts and All - Scott Fleming Commentary - A Reflection on the Impact of Home and Away - Karl Spracklen Chapter 7. Methodological Issues in Researching Physical Activity in Later Life - Elizabeth C. J. Pike Commentary - Ageing, Embodiment and Physical Activity: Some Key Methodological Issues - Sharon Wray Chapter 8. Researching Inner-City Sport: Who Plays, And What Are The Benefits? - Ken Roberts Commentary - Roberts' and Brodie's Inner-City Sport: An Undiscovered Gem? - Ken Green Chapter 9. Researching Sport-for-Development: The Need for Scepticism - Fred Coalter Commentary - Sport-for-Development: The Work of Fred Coalter - Cora Burnett Chapter 10. Researching Policy Change in School Sport and Physical Education - Barrie Houlihan Commentary - Yes, Minister: Insights from Research on the Politics of Policy Change in Physical Education and School Sport - Andy Smith

INTRODUCTION: Exercises in re.exivity: situating theory in practice

This article examines the relationship between indigenous sovereignty and identification as instanced by the legal and political debates informing the Human Genome Diversity Project. The HGDP proposes to map the history of human origins and migrations by the identification and measurement of populations. I analyze the impact of the criticisms of this agenda and methodology by indigenous nations, organizations, and advocacy groups, focusing on the incommensurability of populations with indigenous identifications as peoples. My argument is that the work of identification is the mediation of the terms and conditions of indigenous sovereignty in the very real places where their intellectual property rights and the ethics of scientific research are negotiated.

Plato and Aristotle place opinion intermediate between knowledge and ignorance with all opinions under the suspicion of error. Kant summarized that opinion is a consciously insufficient judgement, subjectively and objectively. Belief is subjectively sufficient, but is recognized as being objectively insufficient. Only knowledge is subjectively and objectively sufficient. Despite this philosophically doubtful value of opinions, thinkers such as Milton, Locke, Montesquieu and Mill maintain that the freedom of opinion and speech are the basis of open societies but find limits when it represents a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public. Also the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights proclaims the right to hold opinions without interference provided that it respects the rights or reputations of others and does not interfere with the protection of public health. Hate speech and propaganda for war are expressively prohibited. Postwar US politicians formulated the position that every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts. The impact of this discussion on opinions about control measures of the COVID‐19 pandemic is explored in this editorial.

Article 20: Propaganda for War and Hate Speech

This review discusses three pieces of work, that is, a conference panel and two books, that deal with the role of research ethics committees (RECs) in regulating biomedical research and medical anthropological research. We summarise the papers and conversations of a panel we convened on this topic during the 2020 European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference. We review two relatively recent books which discuss the role of RECs in biomedical research: Adam Hedgecoe’s (2020) Trust in the System: Research Ethics Committees and the Regulation of Biomedical Research, and Salla Sariola and Bob Simpson’s (2019) Research as Development: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Collaboration in Sri Lanka. Finally, we consider how the review that RECs outside academic institutions perform is inadequate for ethnographic research, including that involving prospective participants who may lack capacity to consent. We conclude that undertaking the research ethics review internally (i.e., under university RECs) would be a first step forward in reclaiming ethnographic research ethical conversations.

Ethnographic research ethics involved in bridging offline and online modes of action research are the focal point of this chapter, written from an anthropological perspective. The specific form of action research in this case study is that of website development. The author argues that online action research, and Web development as a research tool and relationship in ethnographic research are still very much neglected areas of concern, with respect to both virtual ethnography and traditional forms of field work. In this chapter, the argument put forth is that while traditional offline research ethics are still applicable, especially in the offline dimension of research that precedes collaborative Web development, online modes of action research involve substantively different and more fluid conceptions of research ethics, rights and responsibilities for all parties concerned.

Using the case study of statements of denial issued by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) over an extended 35-year period, this article critically examines how non-state armed groups (NSAGs) use statements of denial when engaging with various audiences across time and space. It posits that these statements are an integral part of how NSAGs communicate with different audiences during their armed campaigns, and subsequently during the process of transitioning out of political violence. At the same time that these statements feed into the macro-level “propaganda war” between the NSAG and the state, this article maintains that they also reflect the complex intimate relationship between NSAGs and the communities from which they emerge. Arguing that statements of denial help NSAGs to favourably frame how the conduct of its campaign, the character of its members and its internal cohesion are understood by proximate and distant audiences, the article tracks the qualitative changes to IRA statements that would eventually become a key component in the performance of the peace process by the late 1990s.