Ethnographic Account Research Articles

Feminist Ethnography in South Korea: Documenting Conversion to Islam in “Multicultural” Korea and the Gendered Struggle for Belonging

This paper presents a feminist ethnographic account of the gendered struggle for belonging in “multicultural” Korea through an in-depth case study of a Korean Muslim woman convert and her family. Centering the informant and her family’s narratives, I explore the gendered implications linked to her conversion to Islam, her sense of belonging and how her inter-ethnic marriage challenges existing notions of labelled “multicultural families” in Korean society. This paper sheds light on the penalties associated with the case study’s religious conversion and marriage choice, demonstrating how she experiences exclusion from mainstream society and her own ethnic community. Far from being an isolated case, I will further convey how it is linked to several others in the literature, highlighting the urgent need for further field research.

Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Affective Encounters: An Ethnographic Account of Medical Detection Dog–Trainer Relationships

ABSTRACT A relatively novel application of dogs’ olfactory capabilities involves training them to detect and alert to the odor of human diseases. Drawing on research using ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews at two medical detection dog training and research facilities, this paper examines interspecies relationships and knowledge production during the medical detection dog training process. This study aimed to understand how trainers experience this work. However, the analysis moves beyond a wholly anthropocentric focus by considering the agency of both human and nonhuman animal. Within the medical detection dog domain, ambivalent human perceptions towards the dogs are identified. On the one hand, the dogs are perceived as machine-like, extra-sensory tools that can be employed to identify odors imperceptible to the human nose. Simultaneously, however, the trainers understand the dogs as agentic individuals: a perception associated with the potential for unpredictability or ambiguity in a dog’s search behavior. To overcome such ambiguity, trainers learn to “listen” to the dogs and rely on interpretive flexibility in order to successfully interpret a dog’s behavior. The analysis finds medical detection dog training encounters to be mutually affective as both parties are changed in the process. In this context, knowledge is produced collaboratively, though not equally as attention to the power relations that underpin this interspecies work reveals asymmetries reflected in the training system. This study builds on previous literature that shows ambivalence to be central to the relationships between humans and other species, and extends our understanding of interspecies work practices.

Worker centres and coming out politics in migrant struggles

ABSTRACT Through an ethnographic account of an immigrant worker centre in San Francisco, this paper examines their role in brokering the practice of citizenship among undocumented workers through strategies of visibility and recognition. Positioned as critical brokers in migrant struggles, worker centres aim to build the collective ‘political muscle’ of those denied formal rights. Unlike previous research that documents the evolution and scope of worker centre activities, and their contribution to a worker-centred moral economy, this article focuses on how these representational brokers contribute to migration governance, particularly of precaritized workers who rely on them for their livelihoods. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration perspectives, it considers migrant activisms that are neither entirely voluntaristic nor particularly emancipatory. Instead, these mediated enactments are situated alongside a broader, increasingly normative (and assimilationist) process of ‘coming out of the shadows’ – a process that is widely celebrated and encouraged as it is assumed to mark an ontological shift from anonymity, nonbeing, and shame to defiant resistance. Here, the concept of ‘coming out’ emphasizes the highly laborious, selective, and normalizing nature of coming out politics. In the context of the worker centre movement, ‘coming out of the shadows’ entails heightened exposure and risk-taking among those with precarious immigration statuses and labour prospects, thereby contributing to an institutional culture of compulsive (and compulsory) self-disclosure.

Exploring the masculinization of innovation practice within a municipality

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to generate an empirically informed theoretical framework which can be used to analyze the relationship between gender and innovation in the context of a municipality. The authors present and analyze three illustrative tales from a feminist perspective. The authors thus offer a more balanced approach to the conceptualization of gendered ascriptions with respect to the possible outcomes of innovation work in a public context.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnographic account which employed “shadowing” as a method of observation.FindingsThe article presents a debate on how the social construction of gender and innovation can be placed in the context of a municipal reality. Our analysis reveals how the complexities of a gendered work life within a municipality can create paradoxes. A constructionism approach was used in the identification of hidden and unspoken paradoxes that exist in public spheres.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors used empirical tales from a very specific context, namely a Swedish municipality. The central implication of this study is the recognition of innovation as being masculine-gendered within the feminine context. This implication thereby deepens our understanding of gender paradoxes in the public sector.Practical implicationsThis study provides insights to practitioners who intend to work with innovation in a public organization.Social implicationsThe social implications of this study is that when a male-gendered concept like innovation is implemented in a female-gendered context, like a municipality, it is of importance to contextualize the concept.Originality/valueThe empirical value of examples of a gendered work landscape at a Swedish municipality.

THE STREAMYARD CYPHERS: ONLINE PLACE-MAKING WITHIN AN INDIAN HIP HOP COMMUNITY

This paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of Bengali-speaking rappers called the Cypher Projekt, based in the Indian state of West Bengal, attempted to create an online place for conducting cyphers during India’s harsh lockdowns in 2020. As an integral practice in Hip Hop culture, a rap cypher is akin to a poetry slam and typically held in physical locations where proximity between rappers is key to lyrical improvisation and competitive engagement. The Covid-19 lockdowns imposed throughout India in 2020 forced this community of Indian rappers to explore online environments for conducting the cyphers. However, due to infrastructural constraints related to latency in Internet connections, the cyphers were replaced with informal discussion sessions. These sessions were referred to as the Streamyard cyphers, owing to use of the free version of a web-enabled video-conferencing application called Streamyard. The ethnographic study revealed how the online sessions served as lively informal hangouts for members of the community, in line with several characteristics of Ray Oldenberg’s third place. However, there were other crucial aspects that did not meet the characteristics of a third place, which necessitated the explanatory power offered by the Indian social practice of the adda. The Streamyard cyphers clearly offered a vibrant third place for the undertaking of addas amid the Covid-induced Indian lockdowns of 2020. While Oldenburg’s notion of the third place still holds relevance for the examination of informal sociality, in the Global South, its application requires augmentation with scholarly analyses of social practices in specific sociocultural contexts.

Arrested (game) development: labour and lifestyles of independent video game creators in Cape Town

ABSTRACT The global video games industry is one of the largest entertainment sectors. Independent, or “indie” video game producers make games using small production budgets, outside of larger corporate game companies. In South Africa, video game production is a new industry. Because of the absence of large game companies, formalised production and distribution infrastructure, all producers are independent. This essay is primarily an ethnographic account of the work and lifestyles of a community of video game creators in Cape Town. I approach the category of “youth” to address the sociological facts of those who work in independent game development and as a metaphor for the emerging game development industry in Cape Town. I show how indie game developers attempt to “evangelise” their craft, hoping to grow the industry by attracting more creators and consumers. They negotiate the tensions of the haphazard work rhythms and uncertainty of financial security and their desire to express themselves by making a career out of creating meaningful cultural artefacts, eschewing mainstream expectations and definitions of success. The essay concludes with a discussion on how the industry could grow in the future, and the possible impact of this growth on the current culture of work and community.

‘She’s a real expat’: be(com)ing a woman expatriate in Luxembourg through everyday performances of heteronormativity

This paper provides an ethnographical account of everyday practices of how expatriate women in the Global North adjust and negotiate their gender position to become part of a transnational elite. Drawing on feminist scholarship, it makes the case for a comprehensive understanding of the production of expatriate wives’ gendered subjectivities in relation to the neoliberal doxa of success associated with transnational mobility. Through an intersectional analysis that places the body as the main scale of analysis, this paper sheds light on the role of hegemonic sexual norms in the context of family migration in Luxembourg. The results reveal the spatial dimension of heteronormativity in the shaping of expatriate subjectivities. They also give insights into how these women access the world of global privileges while supporting the social reproduction of their expatriate family and contributing to the reconfiguration and reproduction of exclusionary power relations. In so doing, this paper argues for the use of heteronormativity as a useful – although underused – analytical framework to understand further the power dynamics that shape transnational experiences, spaces and subjectivities in the context of neoliberal globalisation.

Interesting numbers: An ethnographic account of quantification, marketing analytics and facial coding data

This article asks why facial coding, a method for understanding emotions that was rejected by mainstream psychology for over century, has emerged as a popular method in contemporary marketing. Reading ethnographic, historic and technical data sets, the article argues that facial coding works because it shifts the task of quantification from humans to computers. This grants facial coding an appearance of objectivity that allows marketing practitioners to open up new ways of understanding, talking about and acting in markets that go beyond the data itself. Informed by science and technology studies, the article offers the concept of interesting numbers to illuminate these contradictory tendencies in the quantification of consumer behaviours. It alerts us to the importance of the agents and forms of quantification in selling a measure to marketers. In short, the article shows that, when it comes to marketing measures, the numbers count.

Amplifying Street Knowledge through Practice-as-Research

Based on a first-hand account of the SSO#5 event, the authors discuss the challenges of grounding the organization of an international academic event in the local environment of Naples, a Southern Italy city with a strong sound system tradition. An ethnographic account of the Italian and Naples scene, including interviews with local sound system pioneers, will provide the context. The overarching intention animating the planning of the event was to acknowledge the way academic research can interact with local and global grassroots music movements in a transformative way, establishing connections, nurturing skills and promoting mutual recognition. More specifically, the event was aimed at amplifying the value of the already-existing scene, turning up the self-confidence of its practitioners and boosting the acknowledgement of sound system practice as an academic research field. This was achieved through the active involvement of local practitioners and activists in the conception of the event, to achieve the mutual trust and respect between participants from different backgrounds, which made the event itself a form of practice-as-research in terms of adding to an ongoing learning process.

Decently transgressing: expressions of female heterosexuality and the discourses of (hetero)sexual pleasure in South Africa

This article explores sexual agency and pleasure among heterosexual women in South Africa. By focussing on Tupperware-style sex-toy parties, this article offers a glimpse into a ‘hidden’ world of white, middle-class women living in Johannesburg. What is revealed in this ethnographic account is that these gatherings promise women new ways of enjoying sex, while remaining within the boundaries of heteronormative notions of (hetero)sex. I use the term ‘decently transgressing’ to capture the ways in which the women in this study make sense of their (hetero)sexual selves and how they negotiate their (hetero)sexual agencies, particularly in relation to past and present heteronormative discourses within the South African context. The findings show that there are tensions between women wanting to embrace their own sexual agency and desires, yet at the same time being limited by certain heteronormative norms.

Queering potentials: Negotiations of gender, parenthood, and family in polyamorous relationships in the Netherlands

Using a critical feminist perspective, this article provides an ethnographic account of negotiations of gender relations, parenthood, and family in polyamorous relationships in the Netherlands. A conceptual framework is developed and employed to analyze the queering potentials of polyamory by looking at (1) a difference-oriented self, (2) expansion of political community, (3) deconstructions of gender, (4) enduring and unexpected care, and (5) an awareness of existence with people we do not know. Based on a thick description of everyday negotiations, it is argued that the categories of “gender,” “parent,” and “family” are mainly stretched and diffused rather than fundamentally disrupted.

Encoding Collective Knowledge, Instructing Data Reusers: The Collaborative Fixation of a Digital Scientific Data Set

This article provides a novel perspective on the use and reuse of scientific data by providing a chronological ethnographic account and analysis of how a team of researchers prepared an astronomical catalogue (a table of measured properties of galaxies) for public release. Whereas much existing work on data reuse has focused on information about data (such as metadata), whose form or lack has been described as a hurdle for reusing data successfully, I describe how data makers tried to instruct users through the processed data themselves. The fixation of this catalogue was a negotiation, resulting in what was acceptable to team members and coherent with the diverse data uses pertinent to their completed work. It was through preparing their catalogue as an ‘instructing data object’ that this team seeked to encode its members’ knowledge of how the data were processed and to make it consequential for users by devising methodical ways to structure anticipated uses. These methods included introducing redundancies that would help users to self-correct mistaken uses, selectively deleting data, and deflecting accountability through making notational choices. They dwell on an understanding of knowledge not as exclusively propositional (such as the belief in propositions), but as embedded in witnessable activities and the products of these activities. I discuss the implications of this account for philosophical notions of collective knowledge and for theorizing coordinative artifacts in CSCW. Eventually, I identify a tension between ‘using algorithms’ and ‘doing science’ in preparing data sets and show how it was resolved in this case.

Getting Cozy, or How the European Commission Produces Legitimacy in the EU

Abstract International organizations increasingly resort to strategies of legitimation in order to justify their authority and policies. This article explores one such strategy of the European Commission that targets organized interest groups with the aim to build a legitimating constituency. The members of this constituency not only contribute expertise to a policy, but also benefit from that policy and, therefore, participate in the development and confirmation of a claim to the policy's legitimacy that is put forward by EU officials. As a consequence, the agents seeking legitimacy and the addressees granting it become closely associated and “get cozy” with each other. EU officials address their claim to legitimacy to a community of co-opted elites who are likely to confirm this claim and in whose own interests it is to do so. The result is legitimation as a collaborative activity with preordained outcomes. Taking the case of the European Commission's research and innovation policy, and building in part on an ethnographic practitioner's account, the article provides an original insight into how this legitimation strategy works in everyday EU policymaking.

Receiving the Eucharist, Writing the Gift: Anglo-Catholic Epistemology and the Obligation of Transformative Knowledge

In this article I address anthropology’s secular underpinnings by presenting the discipline’s epistemology as antithetical to that of Catholic Christianity. I consider this opposition through the lens of an Anglo-Catholic student chaplaincy in Oxford, England. Anglo-Catholics are members of the Church of England who desire to restore Catholic sacramentality to Protestantism, particularly through a theology of the Eucharist in which Christ inhabits and transforms material elements. Anglo-Catholic Eucharistic theology exemplifies an epistemology based on attachment and obligation between the human recipient and God as the giver of revelation. In offering an ethnographic account of Anglo-Catholic Eucharistic theology, I consider how a theory of knowledge based on gift exchange may remedy anthropology’s struggle to comprehend and convey a level of difference in religious lives beyond the social register.

Speeding up, slowing down. Language, temporality and the constitution of migrant workers as labour force

ABSTRACT This article offers an original ethnographic documentation of employability schemes targeting migrants in contemporary Italy. It argues that analysts’ current theorisations of time and space compression do not help us understand the multiple temporalities that migrants are subjected to when crossing borders, including those of labour market regimes. This ethnographic account is informed by a scholarship of migration that has extensively documented how the acceleration of movement and access to language, citizenship or work co-exist with experiences of waiting, elongation, withdrawal and delay – processes that complicate our understanding of the temporal regimes migrants are subjected to. Through a thick documentation of the experiences of unemployed migrants, job counsellors and other social actors in employability programmes in Rome, this article argues that both speeding up and slowing down are technologies of temporal management, including time–space compression, elongation and partitioning. These technologies regulate the time and speed of migrants’ incorporation into the labour market and allow the performance of processes of differential inclusion.

Ready for Business: An Anthropology Graduate as Change Management Consultant

This paper is a historical, confessional and ethnographic account of a former change management consultant in a global consulting firm who later went on to complete a PhD in social anthropology. Locating herself as both the researcher and informant, the writer gives her ‘native’ account of one model of management consulting that was based on a proprietary ‘method’. She notes how her undergraduate training in anthropology made her a more effective consultant as she tried to make sense of the culture of various client organizations for the specific purpose of designing and developing training materials. By mapping the ways in which anthropological theory and methodology could be aligned to meet the business goals of her clients, the paper aims to persuade both prospective employers and students alike to see how anthropology can be applied effectively in the business world.

“Fairness” in an unequal society: Welfare workers, labor inspectors and the embedded moralities of street‐level bureaucracy in Argentina

AbstractThis article advances a new argument on street‐level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) moral dilemmas in developing countries. Developing countries feature deeper and more pervasive social and economic inequalities than their developed counterparts. They also feature what I call a fragmented stateness: states whose legal and bureaucratic reach is functional and territorially unequal and that also have an ambiguous relationship with their own legality. This macro‐level force shapes daily bureaucratic encounters and SLBs’ moral dilemmas and practices in ways that the literature has not fully grasped. I found that the awareness of this fragmented stateness implies a kind of structural experience of arbitrariness in bureaucratic encounters that makes the exercise of fair judgments in the implementation of policies elusive. I ground my argument in an ethnographic account of bureaucratic encounters in different arenas of the Argentinean social protection system: welfare provision and labor inspection. By reconstructing the connections between fragmented stateness and state workers’ moral dilemmas, this article presents a novel and empirically grounded theoretical argument on an often‐overlooked dimension of collective regulation of conflicts and judgments at the state frontlines.

Managing the Humanitarian Workplace: Capitalist Social Time and Iraqi Refugees in the United States

AbstractThis paper offers an ethnographic account of tensions around time that arose at a small nonprofit offering employment‐assistance programs for newly arrived Iraqi refugees in a large American city. Iraqi refugees have been subjected to multiple interventions, each of which put them on a strict timeline for results. Their experience gives rise to critical insights into the abstract, managerial representations of time that coordinate each of these successive programs. Staff responded to these concerns by attempting to correct clients’ expectations about the future, but this effort remained bound to the same temporal standard and therefore produced further frustrations on the part of clients. Meanwhile, the one employee who attempted to implement an alternative project ended up being disciplined by her employer for misusing time on the job. Tracing this dynamic of tension, conflict, and reconfiguration across multiple standpoints, the paper demonstrates how humanitarian work unfolds through the same contradictions between abstract and concrete forms of time that characterizes commodity‐directed labor under the capitalist mode of production as a whole. This finding complicates theoretical models of political subjectivity that have hitherto informed anthropological critiques of humanitarianism and points to abstract social time as a specifically capitalist mechanism of power at work.

Granting the future? The temporality of cash transfers in the South African Countryside

In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studies suggest that grants today go beyond the domain of traditional social policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with governments, non-governmental entities and the political left reaffirming the importance of a basic universal income. Considering these discussions, my article focuses on an income transfer program in South Africa after the Apartheid period, placing an ethnographic account in relation to the design of a 'progressive' policy of social grants. I present a longer history of salaried work in relation to rural African households and show how the emancipatory promises of cash transfer projects were read as a risk to local traditions and morals. In addition to this reduction in political hopes invested in transfers, I examine the temporal aspect of cash transfers, as well as the possible futures they evoke. By considering the futures that grants enable, I conclude by suggesting that it is premature to affirm that they have overcome wage work and its attendant sociality.

Listening Like a Computer: Attentional Tensions and Mechanized Care in Psychiatric Digital Phenotyping

This article explores negotiations over the humanistic versus mechanized components of care through an ethnographic account of digital phenotyping research. I focus on a US-based team of psychiatric and engineering professionals assembling a smartphone application that they hope will analyze minute changes in the sounds of speech during phone calls to predict when a user with bipolar disorder will have a manic or depressive episode. Contrary to conventional depictions of psychiatry as essentially humanistic, the discourse surrounding digital phenotyping positions the machine as a necessary addition to mental health care precisely because of its more-than-human sensory, attentional capacities. The bipolar research team likewise portrays their app as capable of pinpointing sonic signs of mental illness that humans, too distracted by semantic meaning, otherwise ignore. Nevertheless, the team members tasked with processing the team’s data (audio recordings of human research subject speech) must craft and perform a selectively attentive machinic subject position, which they call “listening like a computer”: a paradoxical mode of attention (to speech sound) and inattention (to speech meaning). By tracing the team’s discursive and on-the-ground enactments of care and attention as both humanistic and machinic, I tune a critical ear to the posthuman promises of digital phenotyping.