Collaborative Ethnographic Research Research Articles

Copresent jurisdictions: Spirits, theopolitics, and the rise of Akan spirituality in the United States

AbstractAkan spirituality, originally from Ghana, has risen in popularity in the United States since the 1960s and recently has expanded, as shrine houses grow. Akan spiritualists promote reconnecting to ancestors and spiritualists in Ghana, and they offer spiritual avenues for pursuing healing and justice, particularly for African Americans and other diasporic Africans. This article draws on extensive collaborative ethnographic research with a prominent shrine house in Maryland and its ties to a key shrine in Larteh, Ghana. It foregrounds two elder priestesses, focusing on their spiritual governance and work in the realms of healing, adjudication, policing, and protection. They serve in these ways within their spiritual communities and sometimes alongside or with state institutions, or as an antidote to them. This article advances a new concept called copresent jurisdictions—here, defined as Akan spiritual assemblages of Abosom (exalted spirits), ancestors, priestesses, priests, and spiritualists who operate with their own spiritual laws and authorities within their sacred communities and in relation to state institutions. It argues that these copresent jurisdictions offer alternative pathways of law, politics, spirituality, and justice within the contexts of imperiled democratic orders. Copresent jurisdictions expand current theoretical debates over theopolitics, postjuristocratic transitions, cosmopolitical assemblages, and transnational copresences.

Ethical guidelines for collaborative research in European ethnography

Ethical behaviour in sociological research is a basic principle of obtaining high ̶quality results from such activities; this issue is especially relevant for ethnographic research, where the problems of observance of human rights, in particular, freedom of speech and protection of personal data, are key factors in the fight against the continuous “technologization” of modern society and the devaluation of integrity. The study aims to develop recommendations for the correct behaviour of all participants involved in collaborative ethnographic research in Europe by considering the basic principles and aspects of interaction in this field of sociological research. The main methods used include comparative and historical, which helped to identify the key features and trends in the development of ethnographic research in the time dimension; systematic and analytical, which helped to identify the basic principles of ethical behaviour in the process of scientific research. The concepts of research in the field of ethnography and the ethical component in the process of such research are explained, and the ambiguity of generally accepted definitions is emphasised. The essence, content and characteristic features of ethnographic research and the principles of ethical behaviour in it are defined; the key problems and controversial issues of this field of research are emphasised. The historical development of this field of scientific activity in the context of fieldwork in the European region is considered, and several important examples of ethnographic research in the past are described. Based on the studied positive and negative international experience and on the analysis of the results of scientific research of several expeditions, general recommendations for the ethical component of ethnographic research are presented. The results and conclusions of the work can be used for further activities on this topic, in particular, in the context of providing practical recommendations for organising and conducting sociological research in the fields of ethnography, anthropology, etc. in different regions of the world

Ecologies of quantification in waste management: Landfilling, e-waste recycling, and car breaking

Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.

Performing political stories of the self: Subverting identities in the city of Goma, DR Congo

Since the ‘performative turn’ in social sciences, ethnographers have extensively studied how performances both constitute the subject and method of social theory but rarely understood the political potential that lies in it for research participants. This article looks at how young urban activists in the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo) politically appropriated performances that were initially meant as a research tool. Using audiovisual methods, this article analyzes three musical performances that were part of collaborative ethnographic research with a political youth group in Goma’s urban periphery. The members of this group used songs produced during the research process to create new identities and subvert political labels applied to them by outsiders. While this political storytelling of the self is an imperfect process, it signifies how ethnographic knowledge is not simply representational but always (co-)produced and performative.

Tuning ourselves into place: Enhancing multivocality with video

This article addresses the methodological aspects of a multi-voiced, collaborative ethnographic research process, in particular how video can enhance and amplify this research endeavour. The authors illustrate and discuss how experimental filmic methodologies can help to capture processes of becoming in a collaborative research endeavour, both enabling the development and production of diverse empirical materials and enhancing the multivocality of research practices. Using explorations of the National Tourist Route towards Havøysund in northern Norway as our empirical context, we reflect on diverse engagements along the process, such as becoming aware how the camcorder becomes a member in the research team. The filmed material forms an entanglement where our explorations along the route, our cultural practices related to the northern landscape and diverse disciplinary practices come together. We address three main ways video contributed to our research process and the creation of research materials. First, we highlight how video enables the creation of empirical traces that can be used as research materials. Second, we explore how video can work for mobilisation of multivocal dialogues. Finally, we point out that video opens the way for integration of the sensual into the research process.

Arts-led, youth-driven methodology and social impact: “making what we need” in times of crisis

This paper considers the social role of collaborative ethnographic research amid our current intersecting social, political and ecological crises. It investigates how the multi-sited, arts-based, ethnographic study, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019–2024), adopts drama as a tool to at once respond compassionately and imaginatively to crisis, and envision alternative social, political and ecological futures in its wake. A “metho-pedagogical” paradigm is mobilized as a framework to consider how drama is put to work, methodologically and pedagogically, at a time of climate emergency and pandemic. This framework is illustrated across two vignettes, which attend to the social challenges and impacts of emergent drama-based ethnographic research across two years of the study, in varying geographic locations with different cultural orientations, in live classrooms and in virtual theatre spaces. Attention, risk, desire, trust and reciprocity emerge as important proposals for engaging in arts-led research with youth in these times.

Virtual innocence. On the status of the children of European departees in northeast Syria

ABSTRACT About 700 European children are stranded with their mothers in the detention camps in northeast Syria. They are children of European departees who travelled to the Levant after 2012 to join one of the fighting forces against the Syrian regime. Most European countries refuse to repatriate these children because of their parents, who are considered terrorists. This paper investigates the status of these children through the analysis of the political and media-debates and ongoing collaborative ethnographic research in Belgium. We argue that these children reside in a condition of virtual innocence, which is characterized by a continuous interrogation of their social, political, and ontological status as well as their right to life. This condition of virtual innocence also sheds a different light on the state of exception: rather than being expressed through a permanent ban, it becomes manifested through an undecided and pending inclusion into the bios.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes”: Reciprocal Ethnography and Academic Leadership

The influence of the discipline of folklore on academic leadership has not been widely examined. This essay explores the connections between collaborative ethnographic research—one form of which Elaine Lawless labels reciprocal ethnography—and collaborative approaches to academic leadership through an examination of the author's leadership experience preceding and during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Economías inflamables en tiempos de COVID-19: La reventa de gasolina en la frontera de Venezuela-Brasil.

The resale of Brazilian fuel on the Venezuela–Brazil border is an emerging event that facilitates a renewed sociopolitical understanding of local survival strategies beyond notions of societal resilience and informality in times of crisis. This economic activity rather belongs to a mercurial way of life that occurs in these cross‐border spaces where gold is the locus of a commercial chain that links various underground economies. Based on collaborative ethnographic research, in this article we show that the resale of fuel occurs with even greater virulence in times of multiple crises and closed borders, which has exacerbated by the current Covid‐19 pandemic turning prevailing underground economies into “flammable economies.” By this, we refer to an informal economy in times of crisis that is extremely volatile and contagious, whose effects proliferate fueled by the legal ambivalence that is becoming more extensive everyday.

Decolonising the university from the Antipodes: Geographical thought and praxis

How does geographical thought and praxis challenge intellectual frameworks and everyday practices to seed pluriversal imaginaries? What role can Antipodean geographers play in decolonising knowledge production and the university? This special section centres, invigorates, and refreshes scholarship that embodies fearlessness, interdependence, commitment to epistemic justice, and generosity nourished by collaborative ethnographic research with, not about, vulnerable, marginalised, and racialised bodies.

The intimacies of drug dealing: narcotics, kinship and embeddedness in Nicaragua and South Africa

In this article, we explore how and to what extent it is useful to think about drug dealing through the conceptual lens of intimacy. Such an approach both complements and challenges mainstream views on drug dealing, which see the phenomenon as based on ‘formal-rational’ organisation and practices. We explore the intimacies of drug dealing along three axes: the involvement of kin and family, ‘governing intimacy’ and as embedded in culturally intimate models and ideas. Drawing on our collaborative ethnographic research in Nicaragua and South Africa, we illustrate first how family and kin are implicated in drug dealing, both voluntarily and against their will. Secondly, we explore how drug dealing institutes or produces particular forms of order, often entangled with state and policing governance, folding itself into communal and family relations. Finally, we consider the extent to which drug dealing enters into local notions and rationalities, from models of how to be a ‘good’ drug dealer to how one’s daughter should conduct her love life. These analyses allow us to suggest new avenues for research on drug dealing that foreground social embeddedness and gender relations.

Tricks of the Light

While there is a growing literature focusing on clients in sexual economies, much of this relies on heteronormative and/or unproven assumptions about masculinity and men’s motivations for purchasing sex. This collaborative ethnographic research takes a comparative approach by studying performances of masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual commercial sex venues in Rio de Janeiro. The authors argue that masculine performances not only are about homosocial male bonding between clients but also are aspirational performances in which actors must work within and across particular class- and race-based structures to jockey for position within the local hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity. They conclude that the connection between masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual venues is fractal, refractive, and coconstituitive. That is, even though the performances of masculinity look different in outward appearance, they actually operate within a shared ideology of gender and are coconstructed through actors’ own pretensions toward class distinction.

The cruel optimism of co-production

PurposeIn this paper, the author reflects on her researcher experiences of attempting to construct co-productive epistemic relations in her ethnographic doctoral research about a gallery youth collective. The paper engages with debates about the nature of co-productive relations, advocating for a more affective approach which attends to multiple, temporary moments within the research, rather than seeking a grand or unified process of collaboration.Design/methodology/approachThis methodological paper draws on the records and reflections the author generated in the process of undertaking collaborative ethnographic research, considered with a specific theoretical resource (Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)) to construct a reflexive narrative from her doctoral research experiences.FindingsThe paper discusses the multiple, shifting ways in which research relationships unfolded in the author's doctoral research and the impasse this generated in the author’s understanding of desirable co-productive relations. Reflecting with Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011) allowed the author to understand the Covid-19 crisis as the rupture of the author’s attachment to this relational fantasy. Beyond this rupture, the author was able to more fully attend to fleeting, affective moments as a form of co-production within the research.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the growing anthology of critical and reflexive narratives about co-production; these collectively provide a resource for researcher reflection and for teaching about collaborative practices.

Fieldwork through the Zoomiverse

We have been conducting collaborative ethnographic research together for over 20 years. Over the past 12 months, this collaboration has included face-to-face encounters, both in Kampala, Uganda, and in Perth, Australia. However, since the advent of COVID-19-related ‘lockdowns’ in our respective countries, our engagements have been conducted exclusively over online platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook and – increasingly – Zoom. In this article, we reflect upon our shared experience of conducting ethnography through this platform as a tool for understanding the effects of the pandemic in Uganda. We argue that, despite all kinds of material constraints (at both ends), Zoom has much to off er the ethnographer particularly because it can generate an intimate understanding of experience and time. However, against this advantage, some aspects of social life remain beyond the range of its channels, for which an assemblage of additional methods are required. We finish by reflecting upon what these methods have contributed to our long-term study of emergent cultures of mobility in Uganda – a study which is now being conducted in an ostensible context of immobility.

Epistemic prejudice and geographies of innovation

This article seeks to understand how and why certain locations are excluded from or seen as foreclosed as places of innovation and knowledge production in health research and practice. Rooted in several years of collaborative ethnographic research in Mississippi, we develop this conceptual framework to understand the persistence of – and often ineffective response to – racialized and classed health disparities. We define our concept of epistemic prejudice as a structural inability or resistance to seeing certain places, bodies, and locations as capable of knowledge production and innovation. The history of the community health center movement, paired with the portrayal of Mississippi in contemporary media representations, helps us develop our concept. We use an interface ethnography method as Mississippi scholars to demonstrate the importance of this model of research in understanding persistent inequality in places of ‘lack’, noting that the challenges of addressing health problems in Mississippi stem in part from epistemic prejudice of scholars, health care practitioners, and policy-makers. Epistemic prejudice has broader implications for how global health initiatives are implemented, how postcolonial frameworks still shape knowledge production, and how knowledge is generated and taken as authoritative.

A Pan-African Space in Cape Town? The Chimurenga Archive of Pan-African Festivals

ABSTRACT Created in 2002 in Cape Town by Ntone Edjabe, Chimurenga is a multidimensional project that combines a print magazine, a workspace, a platform for editorial and curatorial activities, an online library, and a radio station (the Pan-African Space Station). Based on collaborative ethnographic research with the Chimurenga team, this paper discusses the collection, production and creation of an archive about Pan-African festivals that this collective has developed through their cultural activities. After a brief overview of Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC) which took place in Lagos in 1977, and the history of Pan-African festivals, I describe the materials collected by Chimurenga and the projects in which they have participated. By following the travelling routes which have led to this informal and unstable collection of materials, I highlight how Chimurenga’s work contributes to challenging the idea of the archive, transformed through their practice into a dynamic and generative medium. I consider how the archive and memory of FESTAC is spread by Chimurenga in global and local spheres, and how it is used to produce new cultural and art forms in the present day, scrambling boundaries between past, present and future to perform a Pan-African transtemporal space in South Africa.

Guidelines for data management and scientific integrity in ethnography

New protocols for scientific integrity and data management issued by universities, journals, and transnational social science funding agencies are often modelled on medical or psychological research, and do not take account of the specific characteristics of the processes of ethnographic research. These guidelines provide ethnographers with some of the most basic principles of doing such research. They show that the primary response of ethnographers to requests to share research materials with third parties should be to remain aware of the fact that these research materials have been co-produced with their research participants; that the collaborative ethnographic research process resists turning these materials into commodified, impersonal ‘data’ that can be owned and shared publicly; and that therefore the primary response of ethnographers should be to retain custody of research materials.

Participatory Research Ethics - Aruskipt’asipxaňanakasakipunirakispawa

Collaborative ethnographic research with First Nations Peoples contributes to our understanding of humanity, its dynamic processes, and possibilities toward sustainable ways of living in harmony with Mother Earth. Cultural diversity is one of the greatest gifts bestowed on humanity (Spradley 1979:v). When conducting participative research with indigenous peoples, it is essential for the fieldworker to adopt a holistic perspective with the awareness that ethnographic interviewing is a cross-cultural opportunity of intimate communication, exchange and fellowship. The researcher must be conscious of her/his personal biases and assumptions that directly reflect their ethics and values, as well as the research process and outcomes.

Designing for Diverse User Groups: Case Study of a Language Archive

This article explores the challenges of designing large-scale computing systems for multiple, diverse user groups. Such computing systems house large, complex datasets, and often provide analytic tools to interpret the data. They are increasingly central to activities in industry, science, and government agencies, and are often associated with “big data,” data warehousing, and/or scientific “cyberinfrastructure”. A key characteristic of these systems is the diversity and multiplicity of their intended user groups, which may range from various scientific disciplines, to assorted business functions, to government officials and citizen groups. These user groups occupy structurally different positions in local and global political economies, and bring different forms of expertise to the data housed in the computing system. We argue that design anthropologists can contribute to the usefulness of such systems by engaging in collaborative ethnographic research with the targeted user groups, and communicating findings to the designers and developers creating these systems.

Minority-World Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of Contextually Appropriate Practice While Working in Majority-World Early Childhood Contexts

ABSTRACTInternational field experiences in Kenya and Nepal supplied data for two collaborative ethnographic research projects that analyze, using the concept of contextually appropriate practice (CAP), how minority-world early childhood preservice teachers define “quality” practices. The term minority-world is used for educators who come from wealthier regions of the globe, which constitutes a small percentage of the world population, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The term majority-world has replaced the term third world, as this term constructs a discourse about third-world countries being less developed. Fifteen preservice teachers from a predominantly White university in the United States served as the participants. Two Kenyan and Nepali teachers also participated to gain an emic perspective of quality practices from local community members. Data were collected through participation observation by the researchers, written ethnographic field notes, individual interviews, group discussions, and reflective journals. CAP was used to inform the data collection and analyze in two ways. First, it was used to guide the questions during the interviews and discussion groups. Second, the tenets of CAP were used to determine themes when coding the data. The findings reveal that U.S. preservice teachers are most likely to exert a “privileged position” by assuming that quality in Kenya and Nepal could be “fixed” by adopting Euro-Western policies and pedagogies, which perpetuates neo-colonialism in the education sector. The history of marginalization, coupled with Euro-Western influences and domination, silenced and oppressed local forms of educating young children in Kenya and Nepal. It is critical to provide preservice teachers with opportunities to expand their views of quality, especially in collaboration with adults from the local teaching community, so that they can provide feedback and mentoring about contextually appropriate practices for majority-world children.