ABSTRACT When the Spanish conquistador Pizarro and his troops landed in the village of Coaque in 1531, the pillage began. Considered by treasure hunters to be the city of gold, Coaque's population grew accustomed to assist them to obtain their loot. During successive economic crises, looting became an economic alternative, converting locals into expert looters. Recently, community leaders also looters stopped looting and selling artifacts, and sought ways to exhibit materials they accumulated, including the possibility of building a museum. In that context, they approached university, resulting in an integrated partnership in which the local community, academia, and even local government participate. This paper focuses on the question of why these former looters changed and now champion the defense of archaeological heritage. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with community leaders and heritage officials, we argue that access to information, institutional relationships, and a reconceptualization of archaeological context were decisive factors in this conversion.

Background Adolescent vaping has increased rapidly in recent years, shaped not only by product appeal but also by communication practices that frame vaping as socially meaningful and culturally desirable. This study explored how adolescents make sense of vaping within their everyday social and communicative environments. Methods A qualitative ethnographic study was conducted with three adolescents aged 12–18 in southern Spain (Andalusia). Data was generated through participant-led observational diaries, fieldnotes, voice-recorded reflections, and in-depth ethnographic interviews. Materials were analyzed thematically. Results Findings from the three adolescent participants revealed three interrelated themes. First, vaping functioned as a symbolic resource for identity work linked to maturity, belonging, and style. Second, vaping operated as a normalized social practice embedded in leisure settings and peer interaction. Third, participants described frequent exposure to vaping-related communication through influencers, aesthetic branding, and digital platforms, contributing to normalization and perceptions of reduced harm. Conclusion Vaping is embedded within adolescents’ social and communication environments. Prevention and drug education strategies should address the broader social and digital contexts through which vaping becomes normalized.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how digital disconnection is negotiated, encountered and experienced in the context of the mega platform WeChat. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with WeChat users in China, I argue that WeChat users inhabit and negotiate a complex continuum of (dis)connection, in which reluctant engagement constitutes a modality of living with and within a WeChat-saturated environment. This paper makes three important contributions. First, it advances understandings of disconnection as a pathway to digital balance in which individuals responsibly engage for their wellbeing. Second, it contributes to our understanding of the ways in which people make sense of online practices as well as some of the complex dynamics inherent in contemporary digital disconnection work. Third, it identifies the need for platform specificity in and the de-Westernization of discussions on social media disconnection.

ABSTRACT This article examines citizen science as situated urban politics in Siena, Italy, through two initiatives engaging students, residents, migrants, volunteers, and researchers in documenting everyday urban life and river ecosystems. Drawing on ethnographic engagement, data walks, and interviews, we argue that citizen science produces more than data: it becomes a relational practice through which participants negotiate belonging, enact presence, and challenge epistemic hierarchies in urban governance. The article shows how digital platforms both enable participation and act as epistemic gatekeepers, making friction a diagnostic and transformative force for more responsive urban knowledge practices.

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘urgent waiting’ to describe a condition central to temporal bordering in contemporary asylum regimes. We argue that for refugees, delay and urgency are not alternating phases but a single, co-produced governing condition in which stasis and compulsory readiness are simultaneously imposed. To build this theory, we conduct a diachronic analysis of Estonia’s bordering regime, contrasting the attritional ‘slow time’ of its pre-2022 asylum system with the accelerated ‘crisis time’ following 2022. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data, we analyse the vernacular practices through which refugees navigate this condition.

ABSTRACT This study challenges conventional understandings of diaspora remittances as mere economic lifelines, arguing instead for their profound role in shaping and reconfiguring development paradigms within transnational social fields. Focusing on the Igbo community in New York, USA, between 1985 and 2023, this research employs a qualitative case study approach to explore how remittances transcend financial transactions, becoming conduits for social capital, cultural norms, and political influence. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival analysis, we demonstrate that Igbo migrants actively engage in the co-production of development in southeastern Nigeria, not solely through financial transfers, but by fostering intricate networks that facilitate knowledge transfer, institution-building, and the redefinition of local priorities. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay where diasporic aspirations intersect with homeland realities, leading to both transformative progress and complex challenges in governance, social stratification, and identity formation. This article contributes to diaspora studies by offering a nuanced framework for understanding the remittance-development nexus, emphasizing the agency of migrants, and highlighting the enduring significance of transnational ties in shaping contemporary African identities and futures.

ABSTRACT This article explores how café spaces in post-pandemic Kolkata were reconfigured as affective infrastructures and contested third places in response to COVID-19 disruptions. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with café owners, staff, and managers, it traces the sensory, spatial, and emotional adaptations that reshaped everyday café life. The analysis moves across global chains and hyperlocal establishments to examine how pandemic protocols transformed labour practices, customer interactions, and spatial design. The article foregrounds the role of emotional labour, embodied affect, sensory ecologies, and rhythms of care in navigating hygiene mandates and socio-spatial anxieties. It also reflects on the mediated dislocation of third places through digital platforms and the reconstitution of public intimacy via informal spatial improvisations. By situating these transformations within broader frameworks of affective labour, mediatization, and infrastructural reordering, the article contributes to urban ethnographies of everyday life and the sociology of post-pandemic space. It argues that cafés became key sites where governance, emotion, and sociability intersected, offering insight into the affective labour and sensory politics that underwrite urban recovery in the Global South.

2614-P: Understanding the Lived Experiences of Dosing Practices among People Living with Obesity (PwO) Using Glucagon-Like Peptide 1 Receptor Agonists (GLP-1RAs) for Weight Loss (WL): A U.S. Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT In contemporary digital news environments, photography plays a central role in attracting audience attention and shaping editorial storytelling. Image selection is increasingly embedded in convergent newsroom workflows involving multiple actors, platforms and constraints. This article examines how visual gatekeeping operates in such contexts through ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in five French-speaking daily newspapers in Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Our findings show that visual gatekeeping is a distributed and negotiated process involving multiple actors whose roles are variably defined within newsroom organizations. Beyond individual preferences or traditional news values, image selection is shaped by contextual influences linked to the temporality of news production, the publication medium (print or web), and anticipated audience engagement. We argue that visual gatekeeping is best understood as a context-driven and situated process, in which selection criteria vary depending on temporal, technological, and platform-specific conditions. This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of visual gatekeeping as a situational and organizational mediated process in contemporary journalism.

ABSTRACT Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Edirne and surrounding areas along the Greek – Turkish land borders, including ethnographic observations and interviews with migrants, civil society actors and local officials, this article conceptualises pushback as a form of ex post gatekeeping: a reactive and violent mechanism intended to symbolically restore the illusion of border control. Ten years after the 2016 EU – Turkey Statement, it critically revisits Turkey’s role as gatekeeper of the EU’s external borders and a refugee rentier state by examining the bidirectional hyper-circulation and the recurrent cycle of irregularised crossings and pushbacks. The article argues that pushback practices challenge the logic of gatekeeping aimed at preventing entry ex ante and instead operate as a performative technique of migration governance that perpetuates the fiction of border control. The analysis is organised into two sections. The first documents how the persistence of a cycle of irregularised border crossings and expulsions at the Greek – Turkish border has ensured a continuous flow of funds for migration management and border control directed towards both host and potential destination countries. The second examines how hyper-circulation challenges the EU’s narrative of sealed borders and migration management, revealing a border regime characterised by contradiction, permeability and systemic human rights violations.

ABSTRACT This article examines Qale Qasi’ra, a traditional children’s game of the Sidama people in southern Ethiopia, as an indigenous pedagogical tool that nurtures holistic child development. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with children aged 6–12, the study demonstrates how the game cultivates cognitive precision, patience, emotional resilience, fairness, and social cooperation. By situating Qale Qasi’ra within decolonial and cultural-historical psychology frameworks, particularly the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) tradition developed from Vygotsky’s work, the article highlights its value as a form of play-based learning and peer pedagogy. Findings show that traditional games are not merely recreational but function as culturally embedded systems of education, identity formation, and moral reasoning. This article underscores the enduring relevance of indigenous knowledge in contemporary early childhood discourse and argues for recognizing indigenous games as culturally responsive pedagogical resources that can enrich formal education while respecting Ethiopia’s cultural diversity.

ABSTRACT Traditional family-based care for older people in Ghana is declining as globalization and social change weaken historical support systems. This analysis is informed by a review of scholarly literature concerning the implications of globalization for the provision of caregiving for older people managing chronic life-limiting illnesses. We aimed to explore ways of strengthening social structures to enhancing the quality of lives of older people with chronic life-limiting illnesses in rural Ghana amongst 15 older people; 15 family caregivers; 10 healthcare professionals. Critical Social Theory (CST) functions as the primary theoretical framework for conducting an interrogation of the systemic structures that perpetuate social, economic, and political inequities. The average age of participants was 75 years. Ethnographic interviews were conducted after participatory observations during 6 months of fieldwork supported with daily fieldnote notes utilized to gather the needed data and purposively sampled across the study location. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematic analysis procedure used as the major data analysis approach to present the results. Our paper finds that the significant physical, financial, and emotional burden on family caregivers threatens the sustainability of informal care and proposes addressing these vulnerabilities by restructuring national policies to foster inclusivity and social justice for older people and their caregivers.

To explore newly-graduated registered nurses' professional needs and how these needs are supported by mentors in clinical practice, at two Swedish hospital care units. Previous studies show that newly-graduated registered nurses face challenges on initially starting to provide hospital care, thus needing organisational support. Experienced nurses and mentors are commonly described in the literature as facilitating this support and need to be investigated further; however, where this appears in a hospital setting. A qualitative study using focused ethnography was conducted between May 2024 and March 2025. Data was generated from 9 different fieldwork sessions (68 h) for mentoring that included newly-graduated registered nurses and mentors from two different care units at hospitals within one regional healthcare authority in Sweden. Data was collected by means of participant observations, shadowing, ethnographic interviews, and the use of ethnographic analysis. One main theme was identified: I'm in freefall and in need of practical, social and emotional support when navigating my new role, as well as two subthemes: (1) I am a new nurse and in need of help in comprehending and performing nursing, and (2) I am undergoing a learning process in need of a trust-based relationship. Each theme includes three subthemes. Newly-graduated registered nurses need consistent practical, social, and emotional support in their day-to-day work through trust-based relationships with mentors. This is a relationship crucial for their learning process, and which helps them bridge the gap between understanding and practicing nursing. Structured mentorship can improve the learning environment of newly-graduated registered nurses and constitute a sustainable working environment for them. Decision-makers and managers can use this knowledge to implement mentoring programmes that are of interest when it comes to retaining both new and experienced nurses and providing qualitative and safe care. This study conforms to the reporting of the COREQ guidelines and checklist. No patient or public contributions.

Recent urban studies have increasingly recognized public transport and transit spaces as important public spaces, yet the specific nature of their publicness remains underexplored. This paper examines bus stops in Malmö, Sweden, focusing on how their function as waiting spaces intersects with their role in urban public life. Through ethnographic observations, travel diaries, and interviews, the study investigates waiting as a social activity and the dynamics it generates. Findings show that waiting at bus stops involves a subtle negotiation between privacy and collectivity, especially in diverse and spatially constrained settings. Individuals employ tacit strategies, such as strategic placement, temporary withdrawal, and selective interaction, to manage their presence among others. The sociality of bus stops is marked not by overt interaction but by a shared experience, an ‘indifferent togetherness’ that reflects the nuanced relationality of public space. Encounters with non-transit users, including marginalized individuals, further contribute to the publicness of bus stops by fostering awareness of urban diversity. These fleeting interactions expand the social scope of transit spaces, highlighting their role in everyday enactments of publicness. The study contributes to ongoing debates about the social life of transit environments and their significance in contemporary urban settings.

ABSTRACT This article shows that the progressive online transposition of yoga teaching has exacerbated tensions and ambivalences inherent in the processes of inclusion, dissemination and consumption of contemporary yoga with regard to three pivotal and interwoven aspects where practitioners’ bodies are crucial: the verbal instructions used by teachers, which in online pedagogies become the primary means of transmission of specific ‘body techniques’ and forms of ‘body work’; their authority and legitimacy, simultaneously hindered and reinforced by the online format of classes; and yoga communities, articulated around the co-construction of virtual communities, recasting processes of exclusion and forms of privilege around new communitarian aspirations. Relying on ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers, the article interrogates these dimensions introducing the concept of the body at a distance, as the locus of implementation and experience of the practice of online yoga. This body, the article shows, becomes the sociocultural arena where pressing biopolitical instances of self-care, processes of knowledge transmission and communitarian ideals are ineluctably privatized within the confines of one’s own home.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the everyday racialization of Iranian immigrants in Canadian Atlantic cities to indicate their position on the Canadian racial hierarchy. Using postcolonial and critical race theories through a symbolic interactionist lens and drawing on data from 42 ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I demonstrate how Iranian participants tend to deflect their racialized encounters onto other markers of difference, such as immigration status or language. The article reveals how the mismatch between the Iranian's self-racial perception and the recognized-racial perception contributes to their silence about their racially motivated experiences, limiting them from addressing systemic racism. I introduce the concept of the racialized spiral of silence to show how racism embedded in everyday social interactions, combined with the belief in the Aryan myth, shapes Iranian experiences of racialization. This study highlights how colonial legacies of white gaze persist, shaping the shifting ambiguities of racialization in the context of migration.

In this article we explore how artisanal gold miners in Western Kenya “look for life” in a landscape where precarity is not exceptional but part of everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with artisanal gold miners and participant observation, we examine how miners sustain both their livelihoods and lives whilst navigating precarity through relational, financial, practical, material and cosmological interventions in an agentive gold-mining landscape. We demonstrate how the phrase “looking for life,” which they use to describe their reasons for being artisanal miners, reflects more than the pursuit of livelihoods. It embodies an ongoing relational pursuit of crafting a viable life beyond mere survival. We argue that such viability is not a fixed economic metric but a fluid and relational state that is constantly recalibrated through the interplay of economic aspirations, social networks, skills, material conditions and cosmological forces that sustain livelihoods and life.

ABSTRACT This study explores whether and in what ways the socio-spatial dynamics of Verhalenhuis Belvédère contribute to community resilience and social connections in Katendrecht. Located in Rotterdam, the neighbourhood’s layered social history and evolving diversity make it a distinctive context for studying community places. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, the research identifies key socio-spatial qualities that position the place as an important form of community infrastructure, enabling network-building and reinforcing people – place ties. The findings highlight three ways the place supports community resilience: (1) fostering spatial agency through participatory co-creation of the physical environment; (2) promoting networked solidarity across diverse social groups in the neighbourhood; and (3) enabling identity grounding through cultural recognition and memory work connected to Katendrecht’s heritage. The study demonstrates how such community-driven places can help counteract the disruptive effects of urban renewal while maintaining neighbourhood identity. These insights underscore the importance of public space design that prioritises cultural recognition, grassroots participation, and flexible programming to support communities undergoing transformation. Operationalising socio-spatial frameworks through resident-collective management, participatory governance, and targeted design interventions can enable integrated design – planning – policy approaches, helping planners and policymakers foster more connected and resilient communities.

Water puppetry in Dong Ngu hamlet, Song Lieu ward, Bac Ninh province, is one of the few traditional water puppet guilds that still exist today. There have been quite a number of articles and studies on the art of water puppetry in this area; however, most of them mainly focus on the formation and development of the guild, without adequately addressing the imprint of Kinh Bac culture embedded in it. With the aim of clarifying the imprints of Kinh Bac culture in the water puppetry art of Dong Ngu hamlet, we employed ethnographic fieldwork methods and interview techniques. Through investigation and research, we identified 15 water puppet performances that are still preserved and performed. These performances are classified into the following groups: performances reflecting the festival life and belief system of the people; performances depicting agricultural production life; and performances portraying customs and everyday practices. Through this classification, the article helps readers gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the imprints of Kinh Bac culture as expressed through the water puppetry art of Dong Ngu hamlet, Bac Ninh, Viet Nam.

ABSTRACT This article discusses collective representation work in the context of territorial stigmatisation experienced by young Muslims in Furuset, a neighbourhood in Oslo, Norway. Collective representation work refers to a shared way of coping with stigma that becomes part of a moral ethos. In Furuset, young Muslim responses to polarised public debates on segregation, youth crime and marginalisation are mitigated by collective resistance in a local community where ethnic minorities, and predominantly Muslims, make up the majority. The discussion is based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and co-research with young Muslims participating in a local youth leader programme. In the context of this local youth environment, the idealised moral response to stigma is polite and gentle resistance, proving prejudiced categorisation wrong. This article contributes to the research literature on how Muslim youth experience and deal with anti-Muslim hostility by linking discussions on stigma management, social mobilisation and anthropological perspectives on morality.