Abstract As the number of children exposed to war and political violence grows worldwide, the question of how such exposure will shape the life course is increasingly urgent. Drawing on in-depth life history interviews with 79 men and women who experienced the Bosnian war and genocide (1992–1995) as children, we examine how they narrate, interpret, and ascribe meaning to their experiences in adulthood. We highlight how these processes are shaped by gendered family dynamics and cultural discourses that render some wartime experiences speakable and others unspeakable. Our analysis reveals that more than 20 years after the war, gender and trauma remain deeply entwined through culturally patterned norms and communicative practices within families. Gendered narratives and discourses, including the essentialization of war as a masculine domain, continue to frame how individuals understand and express trauma. For women, these discourses help rationalize their exclusion from discussions of the past and prompt the minimization of their own trauma. For men, narratives of heroic masculinity centering on archetypical “brave soldiers” exacerbate feelings of stigma and shame, creating a formidable barrier to help-seeking behavior. These findings underscore the long-term impact of gendered silence and storytelling in shaping both personal and intergenerational understandings of trauma.

Abstract How do nature and community formation intersect in quintessentially urban New York City? In this ethnographic case study of Central Park, I show that park-based communities act as a rich source of affective social capital in the lives of their members. This sort of social capital is oriented around emotional ties and psychological support between group members, and often crosses demographic lines, distinguishing it from more traditional economic/rational choice and hierarchy reproducing models of social capital. Further, affective social capital and park communities themselves are not purely human creations, but rather the result of a process of cocreation, where humans and beyond human entities (lakes, rocks, landscapes, etc.) together facilitate experiences and interactions that nurture the parks’ social groups, groups that go beyond humanness as a boundary to the social world. To explain these phenomena, I offer a theory of transcendence based on the park’s social context as a “third place,” physical context as a greenspace, and normative/emotional context as a product of communal place-making to explain how park communities bridge demographic gaps and cocreate this affective social capital in collaboration with the natural entities they are enmeshed with.

Abstract This study examines how a Jewish coming-of-age ritual—the bar/bat mitzvah—serves as a point of intersection between sacred practices and secular aspirations. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of seven families from non-Orthodox congregations in Silicon Valley, the research highlights how the bar/bat mitzvah serves both as a religious milestone and as a structured rehearsal for adulthood. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and innovative video diaries, the study reveals the multidimensional role of the bar/bat mitzvah. Families and religious institutions collaborate to transmit class-specific cultural capital—interpersonal and performative fluency, resilience and discipline, and leadership and social management competencies—through the preparation and execution of the ritual. Aside from transmitting Jewish values, the bar/bat mitzvah equips adolescents with competencies that extend beyond religious settings, preparing them to navigate broader social, academic, and professional domains. The communal nature of bar/bat mitzvah celebrations, marked by shared rituals and public recognition, also serves as a vehicle for transmitting the values and competencies associated with upper-middle-class life in American Jewish communities. By demonstrating how sacred rituals align with secular aspirations, this study contributes to qualitative sociology by reframing religion as a dynamic site of cultural reproduction and social adaptation.

Abstract Rapport is an orienting principle in qualitative research. It is a capacious concept which, in practice, is deployed by researchers in a wide variety of ways. Despite its definitional ambiguity, in interview-based studies, researchers often link rapport to obtaining more open and honest – and thus high-quality – data. While rapport has been critiqued in the ethnographic tradition, these critiques have not extended to the particularities of interview-based studies. I offer two critiques of rapport as an orienting principle in interview-based studies. First, I question the assumption that rapport is an unmitigated methodological positive and consider instances when it may not be particularly useful or may even be detrimental to data collection. Second, I argue that the privileged position rapport occupies as an ideal-type of researcher-participant relationship risks foreclosing other types of researcher-participant relationships. The overemphasis on rapport may serve to harm data transparency and epistemic accountability. I argue for de-centering rapport as an orienting principle for interview-based studies.

Abstract How do political activists who live and work in high-risk contexts experience adversity? How do they make sense of the diverse institutional obstacles, strategic risks, and situational deprivations surrounding their work and lives? This article introduces the notion of relational adversity to capture how different adversarial factors in the diverse arenas activists inhabit intersect with and co-constitute each other. To validate and develop our framework, we analyze 160 narrative accounts of human rights activists in Colombia, Egypt, Kenya, and Mexico and examine concrete configurations and patterns of adversity found among different types of activists. By considering how structural constraints, institutional deficits, and opponent repression connect with the social location of individual activists, routine practices and personal concerns, and with their bodily and cognitive state, the article advances a relational and experiential treatment of political activism that complements structural and strategic approaches and does better justice to the lived reality of contentious mobilization.

Legitimacy is an overlooked precondition for a tactic’s availability within social movement repertoires. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 37 Movement for Black Lives activists in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, this article identifies a three-step process through which activists legitimize riots. First, activists reclassify riots as protest by lumping them with revered tactics, thereby splitting them from criminality. Second, activists engage in moral legitimation: they acknowledge the harm riots can cause to Black communities but frame them as justified counterviolence to state repression. Third, activists use instrumental legitimation. Despite potential reputational risks, they argue that riots impose costs on capitalism, delegitimize the state and lend credibility to subsequent nonviolent protests. By tracing how activists legitimate a controversial movement tactic, this article argues that legitimation work shapes tactical availability. This challenges views of the repertoire of contention as a fixed toolkit from which activists choose tactics they regard as strategically effective or aligned with their collective identities.

Abstract Political street art is a critical medium through which protestors attempt to mobilize others to their causes. Scholars have argued that they often do so through iconographic, textual, and compositional choices that situate a movement’s adherents and opponents in dyadic, morally charged conflicts. By shifting focus from representations of dyadic to triadic relations, I introduce a distinct set of strategies through which the makers of political street art frame conflicts to align the goals of their social movements with the interests of spectators. I argue that character triads, or representations of three actors in a single work of art, are useful cultural tools for implicating bystanders in bilateral conflicts because of two tropes with broad resonance – those of the “common enemy ” and “mutual friend.” Based on a qualitative analysis of triadic networks observed in political street art in newly independent Lithuania, I demonstrate how protestors used these triadic tropes to communicate the global significance of a Soviet crackdown on Vilnius. By embedding third-party spectators directly into narratives of conflict between a “hero” (pro-sovereignty Lithuanians) and “villain” (Soviets, under Gorbachev’s command), they constructed relational motives for these bystanders to build, break, or solidify alliances with Lithuania and the USSR; expanded the scope and scale of their political struggle; amplified the moral imperative of Lithuania’s success; and rendered victory by the underdog a realistic outcome.

Abstract Post-conflict memorialization efforts exacerbate disputes over who is authorized to speak about the past. Through the case of museum and memorial sites in Colombia, this article examines how expertise on the past is enacted and perceived in a post-conflict context. Bringing together qualitative data from observations of school trips and other daily activities to two memory sites, as well as focus groups with students and interviews with teachers, site staff, and key informants working on issues of memory, this study examines how multiple stakeholders embody, perform, and perceive expertise. I extend literature on the question of experience-based expertise to the case of post-conflict memorialization to analyze the tensions that arise when creating exhibits and presenting them to youth audiences. Findings suggest that there is a constant push-and-pull between “scholar-experts” who can claim authority based on educational credentials, professional experience, and research skills, and “victim-experts” whose lay expertise is decidedly grounded on experiential knowledge and emotions. Interactions among distinct experts bring up complex negotiations, becoming materialized in objects and spaces that are then communicated to lay audiences. Young visitors perceive and assess performances of expertise from their place as non-experts, expecting communicative and novel translations that can convey experiential knowledge. Engaging with the production, materialization, and communication of expertise in the context of post-conflict memorialization, this article adds new layers of analysis to binary distinctions between experts and non-experts.

Abstract Drawing on Goffman’s frame analysis, we utilize the encounter between two relatively foreign cultural worlds, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish (haredi) perspective and Western popular psychology, to examine how actors manage cultural discrepancies in situ. Based on an ethnographic study of an NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) training course for haredi men in Israel, we highlight the interactive dimension of framing processes in cultural diffusion, showing how participants actively and collectively reject, negotiate, and adapt new cultural elements. We exemplify this process through three framing strategies: confrontation, negotiation, and make-believe. Confrontation involves rejecting new ideas by positioning participants as cultural gatekeepers. Negotiation enables the creation of hybrid solutions through Yeshiva-style discussions. Make-believe entails accepting the new worldview “as if” and playing along with its logic while stating that it is “not real.” These frames demonstrate that cultural adaptation is not always a neat process of “fitting” into local culture but can involve rejection, partial absorption, and even relegation to an imaginary realm. The study illuminates how groups can maintain cultural boundaries while engaging with new ideas and how cultural adaptation is an ongoing process that is frequently local, partial, and incomplete.