Fieldwork Sites Research Articles

Understanding Persistent Non-compliance in a Remote, Large-Scale Marine Protected Area

Area coverage of large-scale marine protected areas (MPAs) (LSMPAs, > 100,000 km2) is rapidly increasing globally. Their effectiveness largely depends on successful detection and management of non-compliance. However, for LSMPAs this can be difficult due to their large size, often remote locations and a lack of understanding of the social drivers of non-compliance. Taking a case-study approach, we review current knowledge of illegal fishing within the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) LSMPA. Data stemming from enforcement reports (2010–20), and from fieldwork in fishing communities (2018–19) were combined to explore and characterise drivers of non-compliance. Enforcement data included vessel investigation reports (n = 188), transcripts of arrests (20) and catch seizures (58). Fieldwork data included fisher interviews (95) and focus groups (12), conducted in two communities in Sri Lanka previously associated with non-compliance in BIOT LSMPA. From 2010 to 2020, there were 126 vessels suspected of non-compliance, 76% of which were Sri Lankan. The majority of non-compliant vessels targeted sharks (97%), catching an estimated 14,340 individuals during the study period. Sri Lankan vessels were primarily registered to one district (77%) and 85% operated from just two ports within the fieldwork sites. Social Network Analysis (SNA) showed that 66% of non-compliant vessels were linked by social ties, including sharing crew members, compared with only 34% of compliant vessels. Thematic analysis of qualitative data suggested that perceptions of higher populations of sharks and social ties between vessels may both be important drivers. We discuss our findings within a global context to identify potential solutions for LSMPA management.

STUDYING THE COST AND BENIFIT TO INCREASE THE ADDED VALUE OF THE ILEMENIT MINERAL EXTRACTED FROM THE EGYPTIAN BLACK SAND USING A SHREDDER

The researchers aim to shed light on the economic importance of the Egyptian black sands and the economic minerals extracted from them, and to determine the global and Egyptian reserves from them. The study also deals with raising the added value of ilmenite extracted from Egyptian black sand in order to produce ferotitanium alloy, and prepare an integrated vision to determine the possibility of establishing industrial projects to raise the economic value of ilmenite through the application of methods used in rationalizing costs, using the descriptive analytical method in order to increase the national product accordingly. This study was applied to the black sands of the Rosetta site in the North Delta, which is one of the field work sites of the Nuclear Materials Authority. Ferrotitanium alloy is one of the most widely used alloys in the steel and stainless steel industries, the paint industry, and the missile and aircraft industry. The study concluded that it is possible to increase the revenue generated from the production of ferotitanium alloy and raise the economic added value of ilmenite by using raw materials in different mixing methods that lead to rationalization of costs, achieving sustainable development goals and increasing national income. The researchers recommend expanding the application of the proposal to use the shredder machine in extracting the aluminite metal due to the rationalization of costs, an increase in the revenue, and raising the added value of the aluminite mineral, the need to maintain the quality of production and the introduction of continuous improvements to rationalize the indirect costs, as well as the necessity to supply the Nuclear Materials Authority with supplies, tools and devices used in the exploration of black sand areas throughout Egypt, and the use of fuel derived from solid waste plastic (RDF) instead of natural gas to save energy costs.

Doping-less tunnel field-effect transistors by compact Si drain frame/Si0.6Ge0.4-channel/Ge source

Tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) have attracted immense interest as a promising alternative to complementary metal–oxide semiconductors for low-power-consumption applications. However, conventional TFETs introduce both random dopant fluctuations and ambipolar current issues at negative gate voltages for sub-6-nm technology nodes. In this study, we address the performance of charge plasma-driven doping-less TFETs, including sub-3-nm thick compact drain (CD) geometry/SiGe-channel/Ge source layers for suitable bandgap engineering. An ultrathin CD frame and heteromaterials are adopted for use as channels/sources to improve the ambipolarity and ON-state features, respectively. Simulation demonstrates a clear reduction in the ambipolar current from 3.3 × 10−14 to 3.0 × 10−17 A at gate (VG)/drain (VD) voltages of −1.5/1.0 V and an enhancement in the ON-current from 2.0 × 10−5 to 8.6 × 10−5 A at VG = 1.5 and VD = 1.0 V, compared with conventional TFETs. In addition, diverse fabrication-friendly metals applicable to industry fieldwork sites are tested to determine how the metal work functions influence the outputs. The use of Ti/W/Ni as the drain/channel/source materials, respectively, yields an enhanced ambipolar current of 1.2 × 10−20 A and an ON-current of 3.9 × 10−5 A.

Race, emotionalized bodies and migration research: doing fieldwork in the West as a Black African Male

ABSTRACT The optimism that accompanies the voyage into social science-related fieldwork is sometimes confronted by the ‘unanticipated’ of the field, which surges out of a perceived (in)congruence between the researcher and the settings of the site of fieldwork. Using theoretical framings from Pierre Bourdieu, I show how my habitus as a ‘Black African Male’ was perceived in a field of research that is both racialized and gendered, accounting for the several surprising and awkward moments that marked my fieldwork in Denmark and New Zealand. I begin by showing how the origins of migration studies effected the racialized composition of this field of scholarship, as well as its subsequent gendered turn. I then present my sites of fieldwork and the several encounters of the ‘unanticipated’ that engendered fieldwork reflexivity, especially as regards the unequal power relations existing in various sites of research engagements. I suggest a few fieldwork navigation strategies for researchers with comparable identities and lastly recommend that fieldwork’s awkward moments engendered by stereotypes of race and gender be made productive by way of ‘creative confrontations’.

Exploring the Program-Site Alliance: Building Partnerships Between Counseling Programs and Fieldwork Sites

Practicum and internship experiences are critical in students’ professional development in counselor education programs, and the dynamics that occur between programs and field sites can impact these experiences. A program-site alliance is a measure of how well these entities work together. Using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, the authors interviewed five site supervisors and found five themes (Site Supervisor Role, Communication Within the Program-Site Alliance, Independent Mutualism, Regulated Support, and Inconsistency Between Program-Site Alliance) capturing the essence of the program-site relationship. The authors explore implications for practice and future research.

Reflections on ethnographic fieldwork across a lifetime

In this ‘Tale from the Field’, I reflect on the practice of ethnographic fieldwork with folk puppeteers over time, using my own experiences in a single fieldwork site at two points, 38 years apart. I describe my fieldwork as a graduate student in 1982 and as a professor towards the end of my career in 2020. I reflect on differences based on digital communication equipment and on my own changing positionality. My 2020 fieldwork was interrupted by the covid-19 confinement which adds a new wrinkle to contemporary participant observation.

From an ethnography of the everyday to writing echoes of suffering

Veena Das has introduced a major shift in our contemporary conception of ethnography. While she brings forward a new way of looking at everyday life, which is already a major achievement, she also offers a conceptual resolution to a classical unresolved opposition between the individual and the collective, and between idiosyncratic psychology (subjectivity) and collective modes of thinking, through a challenging debate on what makes one a member of a group and yet radically distinct from all others. The ethnography in her book Affliction stands on three major pillars: The first is the ethnographer’s subjective position in the field regarding the issues of lives, testimony, and research. The second is the neighborhood as the site of fieldwork, with all of its heterogeneity, rather than the group, such as an ethnic or racial group or one cohering around another criterion of belonging. The third and final pillar is the focus on the ordinary through ethnography of the everyday. I then illustrate Veena Das’s perspective on subjectivity with my own fieldwork with survivors of the Cambodian genocide.

Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China by Liang Yongjia

Reviewed by: Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China by Liang Yongjia Megan Bryson Liang Yongjia, Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. x, 176 pp. US$124 (hb). ISBN 978-0-415-52850-4 One of the best-known works on the Dali 大理 region of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province remains Francis L.K. Hsu’s 1948 Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, which treats the residents of the pseudonymous West Town as paradigmatically Han, though today most officially belong to the Bai 白 minzu 民族 (ethnic group or “nationality”). Both before and after Hsu conducted fieldwork in West Town (now openly recognized as Xizhou 喜洲, a town on the northwest side of Er Lake 洱海), scholars visiting Dali have developed widely divergent views of Bai ethnicity vis-à-vis majority Han culture. Some argue that the Bai are essentially no different from the Han, and the minzu label preserves ethnic difference where no cultural difference survives; others argue that, while some Bai people might represent themselves as Chinese or Han under certain conditions, specific cultural differences—especially language, but also including religion—distinguish them as a separate ethnic group.1 Liang Yongjia’s Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China returns to Hsu’s fieldwork site, Xizhou, to revisit many of the issues that Hsu raised in the 1940s. As its title indicates, Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority focuses on the connections between the reform-era (1978–present) celebration of ethnic culture and revival of religious practices in Xizhou, the Dali region, and the PRC more broadly. Liang argues that the two phenomena of ethnic and religious revival are, in fact, joined in their common goal of attaining what Liang refers to as transcendence and alterity. The introduction lays out the terms of this argument, which centers around these two concepts of transcendence and alterity. Liang does not explain what he means by transcendence, but his use of the term suggests that it refers to a utopian or idealized state. For example, he describes the Chinese state, in its imperial and communist forms, as offering a kind of universal transcendence that encompasses all religions. Liang explains his use of alterity a bit more, quoting Marshall Sahlins (who in turn was quoting Viveiros de Castro): “Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked with something that is outside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior” (p. 10). Alterity is this exteriority, or “something” outside society. Liang chooses this concept to get around more limiting terms such as “the supernatural” or “power.” He argues that establishing contact with alterity is the goal of both ethnic and religious revival. Liang’s approach is admirable for resisting reductionist readings of religion as a political or economic epiphenomenon, or as an exercise of social power played out through a postcolonial framework of oppression and resistance. However, his own framework needs further clarification. The concept of transcendence and the relationship between transcendence and alterity are particularly unclear. Liang observes that, through the PRC’s minzu identification project, “[e]thnic identity thus gained transcendence that oriented towards the communist alterity” (p. 11). Even if we understand “communist alterity” [End Page 300] as the utopian socialist future, the concepts of “ethnic identity gaining transcendence,” “religious transcendence,” and “communist transcendence” remain obscure both on their own and in connection with alterity. Given the long histories and complex uses of the terms transcendence and alterity in Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Literary Criticism, they need significantly more attention to underpin the book’s overall argument. Chapter 1 introduces the backgrounds of Xizhou and Dali history, with a focus on kingship in the Nanzhao 南詔 and Dali kingdoms (the dates of which Liang gives as 652–899 and 937–1254, respectively) that ruled modern-day Yunnan Province and surrounding areas until the Mongol conquest. Liang follows Marshall Sahlins’s notion of the “stranger-king” to argue that Nanzhao and Dali rulers were outsiders who married into powerful indigenous families and then claimed kingship. Kings thus embodied alterity, and...

The Revised American Occupational Therapy Association Fieldwork Performance Evaluations: Evaluation of Content Validity-Part 1.

Occupational therapy education and practice has changed over time; however, items on the American Occupational Therapy Association's (AOTA's) Fieldwork Performance Evaluations (FWPEs) for the Occupational Therapy Student (OTS) and Occupational Therapy Assistant Student (OTAS) have not been updated in more than two decades. To explore evidence of validity in relation to test content of the revised FWPEs for the OTS and OTAS. A qualitative study using cognitive interviews was conducted to gather perspectives on the revised FWPEs, including updated items and a proposed rating scale. A content analysis approach was used to link patterns in responses to stable, meaningful constructs to further align and refine content of the tool before further validation. Fieldwork sites and academic settings. Eighteen fieldwork educators (FWEs) and academic fieldwork coordinators. Seven areas for refinement were identified: (1) relevance to a variety of practice settings, (2) overlapping and redundant items, (3) long item statements, (4) double- and triple-barreled item statements, (5) alignment between OTS and OTAS items, (6) further alignment with AOTA and Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education documents and contemporary practice, and (7) wording and features of the proposed rating scale. The findings guided revisions of FWPE content. Cognitive interviewing was a critical step in refining the FWPE items to support content validity. The issues identified may not have been detected using traditional approaches to survey development and therefore were critical in maximizing the validity and usefulness of the final items, which will ultimately benefit fieldwork educators and students. This study resulted in refinements to FWPE items before the next step in the validation process, ultimately improving the final FWPE items. In addition, this article outlines a process that other researchers can use to validate similar tools.

Do Locals Need Our Help? On Participatory Research in Anthropology

AbstractHere I argue that anthropologists, whether we want it or not, affect the localities and the people at our fieldwork sites. These effects can be short, medium or long‐term, depending on the place and the circumstances. Short term help may mean helping to pick up fruit or vegetables for dinner or lend a hand during the harvest. Mid‐term engagement may mean to set up a school for local teachers wanting to learn anthropological methods or participate over the years in a single project helping with help, funds, or both. Long‐term projects may include setting up museums and helping support them through foreign donations or working with locals through the mediation of a foreign or world‐wide institution such as the World Health Organization or the United Nations. There are specialty areas, such as medical anthropology, which could seem to have the in‐built purpose of achieving long‐term effects, but most other anthropological work does not fall within these categories and anthropologists can choose when and how to commit to local welfare depending on their circumstances and those of their hosts. Here I discuss the ways in which different anthropologists have chosen to engage with locals during and after fieldwork.

The gendered politics of fieldwork and state medicine in the Altos of Chiapas, 1940–1960

ABSTRACT This article examines how an expanding Mexican state sought the insights of ethnographic theory and practice between the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the Instituto Nacional Indigenista Coordinating Center in los Altos de Chiapas and its relationship with national and foreign researchers active in the same area, I show how ideas about gender affected the organization of health services, the hiring of indigenous promotores, and the differential treatment of women and men traditional medicine healers as well as anthropology graduate students and researchers. The article is organized around two conceptually distinct though, in reality, overlapping spaces: (1) the anthropologist’s fieldwork site and relations between informants, professors, and students and (2) the Mexican state's provision of health services. Even if gender was not an automatic category of exclusion or inclusion of the researcher into a local community, ethnographic insights were formed through fieldwork practices that were determined in part by gender difference and relations among researchers and their subjects. Ultimately, both anthropologists and the Mexican state indigenous agency grew to rely informally on gender as a category of expertise for gaining access to indigenous women in particular, even if the "gender intermediaries" who helped achieve this access were frequently unpaid and received little formal recognition or reward.

Research with Refugees in Fragile Political Contexts: How Ethical Reflections Impact Methodological Choices

Abstract Research with refugees poses particular ethical challenges, especially if data is collected in places where most refugees today live: namely countries neighbouring conflict, ones that are sometimes at war with their country of origin and where refugees are exposed to different degrees of legal vulnerability, posing security risks to participants and researchers alike. These challenges are exacerbated when data is collected across countries and includes survey research. The article adds to the emergent literature on ethics in forced displacement by highlighting how security precautions and ethical considerations influence and shape methodological choices. Based on recent fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Turkey in 2018, the article discusses a mixed-methods approach combining in-depth interviews with an individual survey based on multistage cluster sampling, random walks and limited focused enumeration. Advocating for a refugee-centred approach, it elaborates on: (i) how to negotiate ‘ethics in practice’; (ii) how risks and violence influence the choice of fieldwork sites; and (iii) how ethical considerations impact in particular quantitative or mixed-methods studies. It describes the advantages of including members of refugee populations in research teams, as well as open challenges with regard to risks, informed consent, confidentiality, sensitive issues, positionality, advocacy and collaborative writing efforts.

Antagonistic landscapes

This article introduces and develops the concept of “antagonistic landscapes” on the basis of fieldwork conducted in the Israeli settlement Efrat in the occupied West Bank and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem campus on Mount Scopus. The concept refers to the ways in which powerful actors antagonize “unwanted” communities by means of the physicality of the landscape. Both fieldwork sites, built on hills, use higher ground to tower over, yet overlook, the presence of “unwanted” Palestinian communities in the valleys below, thereby constituting prototypically antagonistic landscapes. That said, as expressions of utopian dreams, antagonistic landscapes require the erasure of what already exists. But, Palestinians continue to lay claim to the landscape. As a consequence then, these dreams remain utopian since by simply persisting and refusing to be entirely effaced the antagonized inscribe themselves into the fabric of the landscape. Antagonistic landscapes thus display both the dreams that the antagonizers hoped to realize, and the narratives of those whom they failed to replace.

Overcoming Obstacles: Healthcare Students With Disabilities on Fieldwork

Abstract Date Presented 03/28/20 The Americans with Disabilities Act allowed for an increased number of individuals with disabilities seeking higher education in healthcare professions. Students may require accommodations to succeed. This research explores barriers fieldwork sites identified to working with students with disabilities. This research drives a conversation about inclusivity and reasonable accommodations on fieldwork, which aligns with the pillar of AOTA’s Vision 2025 addressing equity, inclusion, and diversity. Primary Author and Speaker: Koreena Thompson Additional Authors and Speakers: Danielle Clune, Lindsey Eckstein, Abigail Valenta Contributing Authors: Theresa Delbert

Feminist affect and children's embodied trauma

Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have putwords to the bodily feelings and attunements that we can’t describe. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect and offer this as a theoretical tool for thinking through the child body. Feminist affect is used here as a resource for understanding embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Through analysing data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we explore art as a way to affectively rework trauma in three case studies with refugee children from our Australian fieldwork sites. Our new materialist arts based approaches map embodied changes in children that speak to how bodies inherit and are affected by things that often can’tbe described. Specifically, in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories (Van der Kolk 2014, Menakem 2017), we offer the analysis in this paper as a routetowards understanding children’s bodily experience and expression, in ways that havebeen made possible by affective lines of inquiry pioneered by feminist scholarship.

Bottom-Up Perspectives on the Re-Greening of the Sahel: An Evaluation of the Spatial Relationship between Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) and Tree-Cover in Burkina Faso

The Re-Greening of the West African Sahel has attracted great interdisciplinary interest since it was originally detected in the mid-2000s. Studies have investigated vegetation patterns at regional scales using a time series of coarse resolution remote sensing analyses. Fewer have attempted to explain the processes behind these patterns at local scales. This research investigates bottom-up processes driving Sahelian greening in the northern Central Plateau of Burkina Faso—a region recognized as a greening hot spot. The objective was to understand the relationship between soil and water conservation (SWC) measures and the presence of trees through a comparative case study of three village terroirs, which have been the site of long-term human ecology fieldwork. Research specifically tests the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between SWC and tree cover. Methods include remote sensing of high-resolution satellite imagery and aerial photos; GIS procedures; and chi-square statistical tests. Results indicate that, across all sites, there is a significant association between SWC and trees (chi-square = 20.144, p ≤ 0.01). Decomposing this by site, however, points out that this is not uniform. Tree cover is strongly associated with SWC investments in only one village—the one with the most tree cover (chi-square = 39.098, p ≤ 0.01). This pilot study concludes that SWC promotes tree cover but this is heavily modified by local contexts.

The Lifespan of Ethnographic Reports: The Predicament of Returns to the Field

SummaryOnly a minority among our colleagues enjoy the opportunity to revisit their earlier fieldwork sites, reviewing their initial observations and research conclusions. This paper presents the researcher’s experience witnessing the dramatic social transformations that have taken place owing to internal and external processes, in three fieldwork sites over twenty to thirty years. The subjects of his ethnographic monographs: Moroccan Jewish immigrants in an Israeli farming community; Israeli emigrants in the Borough of Queens; the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York City. These evolutionary changes, unconceivable during the studied period but inevitable aftereffects of most ethnographic projects, present a reality that anthropologists rarely consider in their work and teaching. Expanding ethnographic perspective involves a more sensitive assessment of fieldwork records considering the mutability of ethnographic observations and conclusions.

Engineering Representation in A Single-Party Regime: A Mobilizational Model of Political Representation in China’s Local Congresses

Can authoritarian regimes provide meaningful representation to their citizens? Political representation has been primarily considered and discussed in liberal-democratic settings. However, why do authoritarian rulers care about representation? How can authoritarian rulers engender representation in their relationship with the ruled? China presents an ideal case to examine these questions in light of the party regime’s strong claims to represent its people and the recent reforms in utilizing mobilizational means to generate representation. Drawing on first-hand data collected from thirteen fieldwork sites across eastern, middle and western regions of China, this article outlines a mobilizational model of political representation under non-liberal environments by unpacking the dynamics, process, and logic of congressional representation in China. The findings of this article suggest that the Chinese party regime is strongly motivated to employ mobilizational means to engineer congress representation in the context of declining use of electoral accountability. Although it still meets with shortcomings and challenges, the mass-line mobilizational pattern of representation is instrumentalized by the ruling party for regime-sustaining purposes, therefore creating the potential for a form of representative authoritarianism to emerge in China.

In search of a moneymaking machine: Discourses on policy towards fashion in Finland

Recently, fashion has become a target for political considerations and ‘strategic governmentalization’ in such countries as Denmark, Australia and New Zealand, among others. The Finnish government has also paid attention to fashion. This research uses the concept of ‘governmentality’ as a form of power with the purpose to understand how fashion is governed in a contemporary western society. Taking Finland as a site of fieldwork, this research shows how various governmental and non-governmental actors, aligned in fluid networks, produce policy for fashion, what rationalities lay behind their actions and what kind of dilemmas they have to address.

Dyke failures in the Province of Groningen (Netherlands) associated with the 1717 Christmas flood: a reconstruction based on geoscientific field data and numerical simulations

AbstractThe 1717 Christmas flood is one of the most catastrophic storm surges the Frisian coast (Netherlands and Germany) has ever experienced. With more than 13,700 casualties it is the last severe storm surge with a death toll of this order. At the same time, little is known about the hydrodynamic conditions and the morphological effects associated with this storm surge.In this study, 41 potential dyke failures in the Province of Groningen (Netherlands) associated with the 1717 Christmas flood were systematically reconstructed and mapped by using historical maps and literature and by analysing the recent topography in search of typical pothole structures and sediment fans. The dimensions of the sediment fans as derived from the topography show a good accordance with the dimensions documented by vibracore profiles, direct push tests and electrical resistivity tomography data taken at three fieldwork sites. Moreover, the fan dimensions closely agree with the dimensions as simulated using a process-based morphodynamic numerical model for one of the three sites, the village of Wierhuizen. Consequently, the recent topography is still indicative for the locations and dimensions of dyke failures and sediment fans associated with the 1717 Christmas flood. Considering the large number of detected dyke failures (41) and the large dimensions of the potholes and particularly of the sediment fans up to a few hundred metres wide and up to 0.7 m thick, this study proves significant morphological effects of the 1717 Christmas flood on the mainland of the Province of Groningen.Based on the numerical simulation approach and the comparison with field data and field observations, a maximum seaward water level of 5 m NAP for the dyke failure at Wierhuizen during the Christmas flood can be derived. A similar maximum water level is indicated for the two other fieldwork sites Vierhuizen and Kohol, which is in good agreement with the maximum storm surge level of 4.62 m NAP historically documented for the city of Emden located almost 50 km to the east of Wierhuizen.The results of the current study demonstrate that the reconstruction of historical dyke failures based on (i) historical sources, (ii) recent lidar/high-resolution topographical data, (iii) multi-proxy sedimentary field data and (iv) hydro- and morphodynamic numerical simulations is a highly promising approach to derive hydrodynamic conditions and the morphological onshore response of the 1717 Christmas flood in the Province of Groningen. This knowledge is essential to improve our understanding of extreme storm surge dynamics, their influence on the coastal landscape and the associated hazards for the coastal population.