ABSTRACT This paper presents a study of what it means to belong, for young people from South Asian backgrounds in Hong Kong. The work draws from a collaborative visual and linguistic ethnographic arts-based research project called Navigating Belonging, which responded to ongoing and historical oppression of minoritised ethnic groups in Hong Kong. Through narrative generated in interaction and through participatory photography, participants explored their understandings of belonging. In this paper we pay close attention to the narratives of belonging that emerged during the project’s creative practice workshops, alongside the writing, photography, and digital storytelling that were the creative outputs of the project. We focus on the talk of two participants, Rani and Amir, undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. In our analysis we invoke the concept of transculturality. We describe and explain how – through their narratives – our participants deploy their transcultural capital as they address questions of the authenticity of their belonging. In our conclusions we highlight the transformative power of arts-based ethnographic research to engender critical reflection that challenges essentialist notions of identity and belonging, for minoritised youth of South Asian descent in Hong Kong. Finally, we suggest implications of our findings for policy development for this population.

This article argues that centering dignity in analyses of mathematics classroom activity serves as a necessary rejoinder to histories of oppression, domination, and subjectification baked into US-based schooling and rife in school-based mathematics education. Defining dignity using Lloyd’s definition of dignity as struggle against domination, I add a literature-based Framework for Axiomatic Dignity in Mathematics Learning as a heuristic for considering the practices, positions, and micro-enactments of dignity evidenced in one classroom. Situated in a year of ethnographic research in one mathematics classroom at a predominantly Latine-serving high school in California, this article examines how conditions of possibility for dignity might be organized into classroom life and how minoritized youth participate in micro-enactments of dignity in school mathematics spaces. Findings revealed that even in a classroom where instructional practices and local positions strongly aligned with storylines of students as community members, learners, and mathematical thinkers, students at times resisted or renegotiated classroom expectations, particularly if the mathematical thinker storyline might compromise one of the other two. This article contributes to the learning sciences and mathematics education to articulate dignity as a productive analytic lens and better understand what, where, and how dignity may exist in the school-based mathematics classroom.

ABSTRACT How can a cultural item remain authentic when its form, users, and meanings change? This paper contributes to debates on authenticity in tourism by conceptualizing authenticity co-creation as an outcome of host–tourist interaction. Drawing on ethnographic research and two phases of semi-structured interviews on Qeshm Island, Iran, the study examines how the burqa, a local women’s face covering, has gradually changed in design, meaning and function, while its new forms continue to be embraced as authentic by both tourists and locals. The findings show how tourists’ interest in exotic, portable, visually legible, and aesthetically appealing cultural elements intersected with local women’s economic motivations and their efforts to adapt cultural items to contemporary needs. Through these interactions, the burqa shifted from a declining cultural garment into a redesigned craft object that many locals and visitors now recognize as authentic.

This article examines Brazil's free psychoanalytic clinics as radical experiments in what I callsanitary emancipation-a mode of mental health care production that links wellbeing to liberation from colonial oppression. Based on ethnographic research with clinical collectives in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond, I argue that these grassroots initiatives mobilise a "corruptive" form of emancipation: an imperfect, materially entangled refusal of purity that emerges from a discipline (psychoanalysis) marked by elitist and patriarchal histories. Through practices ofterritorial listening-offering sessions in breadlines, public squares and sites of racist police violence-these clinics reimagine care in ways that directly challenge the coloniality of power, knowledge and being embedded in Global Mental Health paradigms. Situated within Brazil's post-Psychiatric Reform landscape, clinics like Coletivo Pontes da Psicanálise (with its Afro-Brazilianescuta de giraapproach) and Margens Clínicas (working in territories scarred by state violence) and several others confront DSM-driven diagnostic logic as a neo-colonising discourse under financial capitalism. Their work critically fulfils the promise of the medical humanities by, first, politicising care as acommonsrather than a commodified service; second, fostering situated knowledges grounded in relational and territorial forms of alienation; and third, resisting the de-politicised metrics of global health epidemiology. These unfinished, situated experiments in street psychoanalysis and anti-racist care ethics reveal both radical potential and inevitable capitalist contamination. Ultimately, they offer a compelling model for rethinking mental health through insurgent, place-based and decolonial frameworks.

ABSTRACT This article situates the growing importance of cities in migrant and refugee emplacement within the mutations and contestations of neoliberal urbanism and shifting forms of state power under the changing conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic research on temporary protection regime for displaced Ukrainians in Vienna and extractive reconstruction following urban warfare in Nusaybin it examines how governing the displaced through top-down emergency laws and regulations has become a key arena for reshaping urban and state power. It explores the tensions between municipal and central authorities to scrutinize the ambiguous role of urban governments and the ways in which the governance of displacement is mobilized to establish new urban orders with particular attention to the increasing involvement and control of state authority. The article highlights how racialized hierarchies and ethnicity are entangled with the expansion of authoritarian rule in governing the cities and the displaced of populations.

ABSTRACT This article examines the planetary boundaries framework for environmental governance in port cities, highlighting tensions between planetary metrics and situated socio-ecological limits. Based on ethnographic research in Colombo, Valencia, Genoa and Rotterdam, it shows that environmental issues are experienced as socio-ecological problems affecting livelihoods, public health and territorial identities. While planetary boundaries are useful for diagnosing ecological risk, they hold limited capacity for environmental governance in port cities. Meanwhile, grassroots articulations of socio-ecological limits integrate justice concerns and reveal transformative potential. Ultimately, the operationalisation of planetary boundaries depends on socio-political negotiation, only effective for governance when grounded in local struggles.

ABSTRACT A growing body of research has revealed a trend towards the securitisation of conservation in the past several decades worldwide and explored the forms of accumulation enabled by such securitisation. This article builds on the idea of accumulation by securitisation in conservation to explore specifically how tourism enables and even drives this process. We examine more than 25 years of world heritage and global biodiversity conservation in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala to identify four types of accumulation by securitisation through tourism in a globally prized conservation area. These include: (1) accumulation by securitisation of territory, (2) touristic securitisation of heritage, patrimony and culture, (3) accumulation by securitisation through ‘sustainable development’, and (4) practices of touristic securitisation that ‘fix’ identities and produce commodifiable, vulnerable and/or threatening subjects. Each of these forms of securitisation provide an additional frontier for accumulation related to tourism, with clear implications for spatial relations, mobility, resource management, heritage claims, and relations of governance. Drawn from more than ten years of combined ethnographic and collaborative research in northern Guatemala and building from literatures across tourism studies, security studies, and political ecology, this article ultimately suggests that tourism in many cases may depend on accumulation by securitisation, which then plays a key role in further processes of tourism expansion. We contend that this analytic may be useful to explain observed dispossession, violence, and exclusion related to touristic development.

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic research conducted in neurology clinics across three sites in Kenya and Canada, we examine cross-cultural differences in how people describe their everyday sensory experiences in relation to their health conditions. We focus on sensations of heat, cold, burning, and freezing experienced by patients living with neurological symptoms. We examine how these sensory experiences influence patients’ communication of neurological conditions – such as tremors, paralysis, seizures, sensory sensitivities, and pain – to their neurologists. We analyze cultural and linguistic differences in patients’ accounts of somatic experiences linked to brain injuries and in medical providers’ responses. By paying close attention to clinical encounters and conversations between patients and clinicians, we observe socio-cultural variations that reflect local beliefs about the body, mind, and biomedicine in Canada and Kenya. Specific sensory experiences associated with neurological conditions are described, along with their context. Finally, we explore the historical and social forces shaping these perceptions of illness and disability in anthropological discussions of sensory ethnography and localized spaces of action, considering the differences and similarities between two former British colonies.

ABSTRACT The distinction between the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’ is sometimes presented as a simple and static dichotomy. However, ethnographic research provides an opportunity to move from being an outsider to an insider. The experience of volunteer ethnography at two foodbanks in the North East of England involved the researcher achieving insider status, aided by their similar values and beliefs to the volunteer team. The insider status came at a personal emotional cost, arising from combining the roles of volunteer and ethnographer. Constant self-reflection was required to maintain an appropriate balance between the two roles. However, the costs were outweighed by the quality of the data and the depth of insight that arose from the researcher’s insider status.

ABSTRACT Feral cat management in Australia highlights tensions between traditional conservation and compassionate conservation. Drawing on 19 interviews and ethnographic research with practitioners involved in feral cat management, we examine how ethical complexities are navigated in practice and explore the potential to bridge the gap between these approaches. The article demonstrates that protecting biodiversity is reinforced as the default goal through institutional norms and appeals to scientific objectivity, while ethical disagreements are shifted into technical debates. Although practitioners share concerns about limited evidence and support less harmful measures, sustainable collaboration requires explicit normative deliberation about objectives, trade-offs, and acceptable harms.

ABSTRACT This article introduces the Selective Multiple Acculturation (SMA) framework to explain how ethnic institutions—the shared rules, practices, and meanings through which ethnic communities structure collective life and reproduce cultural identity—transform when exposed to multiple, overlapping cultural influences. The framework reconceptualises ethnic institutions as dynamic cultural filters operating at the intersection of three fields: the ethnic community, the host society, and the diaspora. Four filtering mechanisms—moral framing, aesthetic judgment, organisational capacity, and legitimacy structures—specify how actors affiliated with institutions selectively incorporate or deflect external influences. Drawing on multi-method ethnographic research among three Surinamese-Hindustani dance traditions in the Netherlands, the article demonstrates that divergent institutional trajectories — adaptive stability, ritual resilience, and attrition — are produced by different configurations of the same filtering mechanisms, which can work for or against an institution. These findings contribute to acculturation scholarship by shifting the focus of analysis from individuals to institutions, by specifying how informal ethnic institutions change through selective filtering, and by demonstrating that cultural change in diaspora communities cannot be understood without attending to the multiple cultural fields these communities simultaneously navigate.

This article interrogates the production of 'fraud' at the interface between welfare and migration regimes. Taking the welfare micropublic of children's social care in the UK as a case study, we focus on encounters between migrant families subject to the 'no recourse to public funds' immigration condition and London local authorities. Through analysis of policy documents and ethnographic data, we trace the counter-fraud turn within the local state in the 2010s. We argue that a shift away from 'the child in need' and towards destitution as the threshold for support saw children's rights legislation reinterpreted through the lens of 'fraud', implicitly racialising impoverished migrant children as undeserving of essential support. Paying close attention to questions of undeservingness, defined in part through attributions of fraud, we highlight the ways in which migrant parents are subject to suspicion by social services. We suggest that existing literature on the 'problem' of welfare fraud helps us to contextualise this shift but does not yet sufficiently address the production of fraud at the welfare-migration nexus. Drawing on more contemporary ethnographic material, we show how the counter-fraud turn has been deepened and expanded. We argue that extensive counter-fraud practices have been developed through processes of discretion at the local level, producing and normalising major shifts in the enactment of policy that remain relatively hidden in the absence of more contextualised ethnographic research. Migrant families have thus been rendered ever-suspicious, either gatekept from essential support due to their 'fraudulence' or subject to ongoing monitoring if they receive support, caught up in the impossible labour of disproving their own 'fraudulence'. Finally, we show that counter-fraud approaches arise from the interface between welfare and migration regimes in ways that bolster the logics of both immigration controls and welfare retrenchment, whilst amplifying the reach of the counter-fraud turn.

ABSTRACT Based on a year-long ethnographic research into everyday life in Santiago’s dense high-rises, this paper analyses the emergence of everyday digital economies among building occupants through messaging applications. In this context, novel neighbor-based commercial interactions have, to some extent, overturned the impersonal character of Chilean verticality. Infused with a communitarian ethos, these transactional encounters reshape residents’ perceptions of neighborliness in dense, heterogeneous vertical settings, fostering a sense of togetherness reminiscent of traditional neighborhood imaginaries, while enabling residents from diverse backgrounds to generate unexpected relationships. I therefore argue that consumption practices within these buildings add complexity and nuance to the experience of living in verticalizing South American cities. Specifically, they reveal alternative ways in which seemingly rigid residential structures are transformed through ordinary inhabitation as neighbor relations become more digitalized. In doing so, this paper contributes to the expanding interest in understanding vertical ordinariness in the region.

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and 2024 among first- and second-generation Palestinians in Germany, this article examines how anti-Palestinian racism is reproduced through discursive, institutional, and security regimes. It shows how dominant narratives surrounding Israel and Palestine, embedded in German memory politics and state practices, render Palestinian experiences of violence unintelligible or illegitimate, while recoding them through the idioms of terrorism and antisemitism. The article conceptualises anti-Palestinian racism as operating in part through symbolic violence, a process in which Palestinian suffering is systematically misrecognised, delegitimised, and recoded as threat. By analysing media discourse, political interventions, and everyday interactions, the article traces how these regimes shape the conditions of Palestinian life in Germany. It demonstrates how Palestinians are positioned outside the bounds of moral and political legitimacy, producing forms of non-grievability, self-erasure, and internalised stigma. Drawing on narrative-biographical interviews and long-term ethnographic engagement, the article further examines how these dynamics are negotiated across generations. The article argues that anti-Palestinian racism in Germany must be situated within broader histories of European racialisation, coloniality, and post-Holocaust formations of national identity within German memory politics, in which anti-Palestinian racism is constitutive.

This paper builds on Latin American Marxist feminist and decolonial feminist thought to rethink the study of urban cycling mobilities through the lens of video mobile ethnography. It examines how territorialities are constructed through daily bicycle commutes and the development of social practices and care strategies. We draw on two case studies, one in Quito and the other in Bogotá, where we conducted separate ethnographic research between 2020 and 2021 among cyclists. We focus on the case of women cycling activists. Our study employs an accompaniment method that provides access to participants’ travel conditions and daily route choices. The collaborative ride is complemented by qualitative interviews conducted before and after the ride. The concept of ‘cuerpo-territorio’ is applied to our cases to show how relationships between the body and territory are constructed through cycling. We detail four major aspects of this relationship: cuerpo-territorio, familiarity, signs and signalling, and accompaniment. The article contributes to debates on cycling mobilities by highlighting the need to situate academic knowledge within the Global South from a perspective that views the body as an object of feminist reclaiming and cycling as an appropriation of lived space.

This article, which is methodological in nature, draws on a materialistic approach to the development of family relations in society, assuming that these relations depend on the socio-economic conditions of people's lives. The article examines the main social aspects of people's lives, conditioned by the division of society into separate families. Based on ethnographic data and research, a general description of the evolution of family relations is provided, beginning with the tribal period of human development. The changing social role of women both within families and in public life is analyzed, with the emergence of patriarchy and the evolution of human civilization. The social essence of the process of women's emancipation in the modern historical era and the role of feminist ideology in this process are demonstrated. The modern nuclear family is considered both in terms of its inherent social relations and the contradictions generated by these relations, and in terms of the influence of family relations on the development of society. The issue of homosexuality is addressed in terms of its impact on public life and family relations. Finally, the prospects for the further evolution of the monogamous family. All aspects of this article's topic are examined primarily in relation to the populations of democratic countries undergoing the transition from industrial to post-industrial societies.

Drawing on ethnographic research with Yemeni refugees in Greece, this article proposes to think about the airport, not just as a site of securitization and racialized surveillance, but also as a site of possibility and struggle. To do so, it foregrounds refugee flight- attempts by asylum seekers to reach European destinations by air using fraudulent documents. Using the lens of opacity, I sketch how migrants navigate the airport’s regime of visibility, by working with and against its expectations. As they pass through security cracks and fly, I argue, they do not only seize movement, but refuse the otherwise deadly terms of refugee journeys, and take advantage of infrastructure of privileged mobility that is not meant to be theirs.

ABSTRACT Migrant cultures have played a significant role in Australian society, yet meaningful representation of culturally diverse groups remains a challenge for many Australian heritage and memory institutions. This article details informal heritage practices being carried out by Ukrainian, Iranian, and Sri Lankan migrant communities in Queensland, in light of comparatively limited holdings of culturally diverse heritage materials held in official repositories. Ethnographic research revealed these case study communities regularly engage in cultural heritage via three main activities: cultural maintenance, public representation, and informal archival practices, which are aligned through the activation of intangible creative practice and knowledges. These activities are positioned as ‘living’ methods of heritage preservation which are enacted through the ‘performance’ of heritage in the everyday life of diaspora communities. This article explores the implications of maintaining migrant heritage both in community and industry settings, foregrounding the significance of considering the future of Australian heritage collections.

ABSTRACT In contemporary China’s restrictive policy environment, specifically under the principle of separating religion from education, Catholic lay religious education faces significant institutional challenges. Based on extensive ethnographic research and archival analysis of a rural Catholic community in central China, this article examines how shanghui (上会) – a revived traditional practice – successfully achieves its educational function without triggering political sensitivity. The research reveals that shanghui‘s efficacy stems from ‘strategic integration’: skilfully embedding educational functions within the temporal framework of Spring Festival customs, the sacred space of Catholic liturgy, and the practical field of pastoral care. This multi-dimensional positioning generates a ‘triple legitimacy’, effectively transforming shanghui from potentially controversial ‘religious education’ into culturally acceptable ‘festival gatherings’, liturgically necessary ‘Mass preparation’, and pastorally legitimate ‘faith guidance’. By creating such ‘strategic ambiguity’, the community secures a sustainable space for faith transmission. This study illuminates the remarkable agency, adaptability and creativity of grassroots religious communities within specific socio-political contexts. Ultimately, it challenges the prevailing binary ‘oppression-resistance’ framework, offering new theoretical perspectives on understanding the operational logic of non-formal religious education under restrictive policy constraints.

ABSTRACT Globally, the care sector faces precarious working conditions and workforce shortages, prompting the emergence of numerous empowerment projects. To explore the power-related tensions and politics of empowerment, this study draws on ethnographic research investigating a nurse empowerment movement in the Netherlands. We build on a framework distinguishing ‘power-over, to and with’, and extend this debate by incorporating views of power that see it as both three-dimensional as well as a matter of processes and flows through circuits of power. This integrated framework enables analysis of the daily, multidimensional and recursive operation of coercive and facilitative power during power transitions.