Multi-sited Ethnographic Research Research Articles

The curious case of tweeting an Aadhaar number: trust/mistrust in security practices of public data infrastructures

ABSTRACT This paper explores data security practices of Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identification number, and the co-constitution of trust and mistrust that underlies its operation as a public data infrastructure. Based on 18-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, I document tensions around whether Aadhaar numbers were designed to be disclosed publicly or kept confidential. I further map identification practices around how residents share their Aadhaar numbers with other government and private organizations to access services. These practices to promote sharing of Aadhaar numbers broke down with growing anxieties over their public disclosure on government websites, lack of audits, and emerging forms of Aadhaar-based frauds. In response to this rising mistrust, an ex-member of Aadhaar's design team publicly disclosed his number in a tweet that went viral. The paper uses this tweet as a point of departure to: (1) provide an account of infrastructural concerns (grounded in design choices and events) that transformed Aadhaar from a public to a confidential number; and (2) illustrate that this transformation reflects how trust and mistrust co-constitute Aadhaar's data security practices. I conclude by illustrating how these infrastructural concerns imbricate to produce a spectrum of possibilities where identity numbers are simultaneously public and confidential, trusted and mistrusted.

Dynamics of convivial affective atmospheres

This article examines the dynamics of affective atmospheres in explaining compelling touristic service experiences. Extending affect-theoretical research, we theorize and examine the role of affective bodily encounters through which convivial atmospheres are (re)produced. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in iconic Club Med resorts, our findings emphasize the spontaneity and fragility of convivial affective atmospheres, meaning they are difficult to control, but also how their ongoing “bubbling” is shaped by materiality, ritual activities, and temporality. We contribute by (1) developing the concept of convivial affective atmosphere, and by (2) offering a theoretical framework that helps advance research into the affective entanglement and dynamics of atmospheres in tourism. Finally, we critically discuss what service providers can do to facilitate and re-produce convivial atmospheres.

Framing the pandemic: Multiplying “crises” in Dutch healthcare governance during the emerging COVID-19 pandemic

In this paper we explore the impact of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic on the governance of healthcare in the Netherlands. In doing so, we re-examine the idea that a crisis necessarily leads to processes of transition and change by focusing on crisis as a specific language of organizing collective action instead. Framing a situation as a crisis of a particular kind allows for specific problem definitions, concurrent solutions and the inclusion and exclusion of stakeholders. Using this perspective, we examine the dynamics and institutional tensions involved in governing healthcare during the pandemic.We make use of multi-sited ethnographic research into the Dutch healthcare crisis organization as it responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on decision-making at the regional level. We tracked our participants through successive waves of the pandemic between March 2020 and August 2021 and identified three dominant framings of the pandemic-as-crisis: a crisis of scarcity, a crisis of postponed care and a crisis of acute care coordination. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these framings in terms of the institutional tensions that arose in governing healthcare during the pandemic: between centralized, top-down crisis management and local, bottom-up work; between informal and formal work; and between existing institutional logics.

White-adjacent Muslim development: racializing British Muslim aid in Mali

AbstractMuslim aid organizations are relatively new actors in the Western aid industry. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with the UK-based NGO Islamic Relief, I explore the organization’s engagement with a school in need of repair in southern rural Mali that is also the site of a sacred shrine of importance to locals. I examine the contextual global logics of racialization that undergird different interpretations and practices of what it means to ‘do good’. Situating an understanding of ‘development’ in an analysis of global racial capitalism, I argue that, as an Islamically inspired aid organization based in the UK, Islamic Relief is both subject to anti-Muslim racism and complicit in a white-adjacent racialized project of ‘development’ in Africa. I foreground the whiteness of development to show how modernist development practice makes it impossible to see other ways of conceptualizing ‘doing good’ that are also deeply grounded in Islam.

Everyday Politics of Mobility: Translocal Livelihoods and Illegalisation in the Global South

AbstractThis article contributes to migration and livelihood scholarship by reflecting on global and political dimensions of livelihoods and experiences of illegalisation in Central America. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families and their migrant family members in Costa Rica, the article adopts a translocal livelihood perspective and uses the notion of everyday politics to explore migrants’ mobility practices and nuance the role and reach of illegalisation in relatively accessible South–South migration. In conclusion, the article reinvigorates the notion of ‘everyday politics of mobility’ to incorporate the multi-sitedness, multi-dimensionality and multi-directionality of translocalising livelihoods, offering a lens for future comparison of illegalisation within and beyond the so-called Global South.

Training Indigenous Community Researchers for Community-Based Participatory Ethnographic Dementia Research: A Second-Generation Model.

Conducting community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a complex endeavor, particularly when training non-academic community members. Though examples of CBPR training programs and protocols have been published, they often address a limited set of concepts and are tailored for university or medical school students. Here, we describe the process of developing an online CBPR training program for American Indian (United States) and Indigenous (Canada) community members to conduct multi-sited ethnographic dementia research. This program is unique in its breadth and depth, as our program covers CBPR theory, methods, practical research, and administrative skills. Significantly, this program centers Indigenous methodology, pedagogy, and processes such as two-eyed seeing, storywork, and decolonization approaches. Key to this training program is a "second-generation" approach which incorporates experiential knowledge from prior community-based researchers and academic partners and is designed to develop CBPR capacity among community-based researchers and partnering communities. In this paper, we detail the experience of the first cohort of learners and subsequent improvement of the training materials. Unique challenges related to the specific research focus (dementia care pathway), population/setting (American Indian and Indigenous communities), and technology (rural digital infrastructure) are also discussed.

Leveraging Foreign Higher Education Institutional Affiliation to Support Preservation of Local Knowledge and Fight Displacement in Thailand

Study abroad host families and communities in the Global South frequently provide learning experiences to study abroad programs in search of ‘intercultural experiences’ and ‘global competency’ to students from the Global North. This paper shares findings from a multi-sited ethnographic research project exploring cultural and economic impacts on host communities in Thailand who hosted U.S. study abroad programs and students. The study found that rather than participating solely for economic gain, host families participated in the global study abroad economy to preserve local knowledge, learn about cultural others, and leverage this knowledge and affiliations in negotiations with local government over land use and the right of communities remain in place. It also found that creation of systems of distributive benefit (systems that ensured transparency and equal sharing of economic benefits received from hosting students) by local government helped to mitigate unwanted impacts from outside visitors while allowing host communities opportunities to engage with the global study abroad economy.

Informing for the sake of it: legal intricacies, acceleration and suspicion in the German and Swiss migration regimes

ABSTRACT In migration law, being informed about legal and administrative procedures constitutes an essential procedural safeguard. Yet, in practice, the transparency of legal practices is often structurally undermined, resulting in the curtailment of procedural safeguards and potentially affecting perceptions of procedural justice. Building on our multi-sited ethnographic research in Germany and Switzerland, we first argue that migrants find it often difficult to anticipate how laws work, contradicting the key procedural law principle of legal certainty. Second, a general trend towards acceleration in migration administration allows limited time for information to reach migrants on the ground, leaving them uninformed about legal procedures. Third, migration law is implemented in an atmosphere of suspicion, which has a negative impact on trust between migrants and state officials – and on transparency. We thus demonstrate how procedural safeguards become empty and routinised, aggravating the structural violence at the heart of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in interactions with the state.

Making Do as a Migrant in Morocco: Between Formal Recognition and True Integration

The New Migration Policy developed from September 2013 onwards initiated a new approach to the presence of migrants in Morocco. It began a process that rendered it possible for migrants to attempt to access and maintain a regular migration status and transformed urban landscape in many cities across the country. However, a concrete policy on integration has not advanced. Drawing on long-term multi-sited ethnographic research, this article examines strategies migrants deploy to “make do” in Morocco: how they seek to integrate in the society despite the partiality, even absence of a formal framework that would regulate how to do so. It examines a context where immigration policy is a relatively recent development, integration strategies by the state are either in flux or absent altogether, yet which has for long been a region of concern for its neighbors in the North. This provides a setting where migrants strive to understand what is expected of them to become recognized as full participants in the society, and how they navigate at times conflicting demands.

“We have to separate so we can be together again”: Eritrean mothers’ gendered racialisation and family separation within the Israeli and UK asylum regimes

ABSTRACT This article explores how two asylum-seeking women from Eritrea attempt to secure safety and legal status for their children – born and unborn – and themselves by leaving them behind in the settler colonial state of Israel and taking on forged Ethiopian Israeli identities to travel to the UK to facilitate a process of family reunification. Situating the Israeli asylum regime in the settler colonial state and drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research collected between 2016–2018 in Israel and the UK, the article argues that by engaging in acts of refusing militarised border regimes, migration enforcement, and their racialised orderings, the women shape a future for themselves and their children. The article then sheds light on the women’s experience of waiting while faced with protracted uncertainty and separation from their children. It also analyses how gendered and racialised legal precarity and motherhood are experienced.

Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma

Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma is an important contribution to Romani studies and research in anthropology, ethnography, and folklore, especially material culture. Based on long-term fieldwork, Péter Berta conducted multi-sited ethnographic research in Romanian Transylvania, primarily among the Gabor Roma. He tells a fascinating tale of traditional Roma and their intricate relationships with antique prestige items—silver beakers and roofed tankards (the most valuable of which are sold, among Romani brokers, for over a million US dollars, yet worth, among European antique marketeers, only fractions of these amounts). Berta views the multi-layered workings of Romani life through the lens of material culture as he examines how beakers and tankards inform Romani ethnic, social, cultural, political, and economic identity. He challenges the dominant narrative on Roma in Western academic discourse and media that focuses on marginalization, deprivation, and powerlessness. “Being Gabor,” Berta argues, is not centered on resisting “the negatively defined majority society” (p. 14), but rather constructed within a Romani arena empowered by an ethnicized, translocal, informal, and male-gendered prestige economy. In Berta's story, many Roma have money (some of them untold amounts), and thus rank and power. Through elegant ethnographic accounts and readings of how beakers and tankards generate wealth and status, Berta deconstructs and reconceptualizes Gabor Romani identity.The book contains an introduction, 13 chapters, and a conclusion. “Translocal Communities of Practice and Multi-Sited Ethnographies,” the introduction, begins with “How do objects mediate human relationships?” (p. 3)—a question that drives the entire volume and is convincingly (and painstakingly) answered in the hundreds of pages that follow. Part 1, “Negotiating and Materializing Difference and Belonging,” provides a discussion of the social and political underpinnings of Gabor society. It explores how the prestige economy, rooted in beakers and tankards, embraces a complex Romani-centered consumer subculture. Overall, these vessels have the symbolic power to determine individual and family standing, affecting social hierarchies and belonging within the community. Part 2, “Contesting Consumer Subcultures: Interethnic Trade, Fake Authenticity, and Classification Struggles,” introduces the Cărhar Roma, who likewise inhabit Transylvania and trade prestige items with the Gabors, bringing into relief rivalries and fraudulent transactions as intra-ethnic Romani tensions are played out. Berta also explores how the status of previous owners of antique vessels informs their value when sold. These objects are vested with phenomenal subjective power based, as he maintains, on appreciations of their symbolic and material worth. “Multi-Sited Commodity Ethnographies,” Part 3, furnishes “biographies” of a beaker and a tankard, vivid examples of the anthropology of things-in-motion. Berta's Conclusion, “The Post-Socialist Consumer Revolution and the Shifting Meanings of Prestige Goods,” is an intriguing account of the post-socialist decline of the prestige economy. He contrasts the older generation of Gabor Roma—with their deeply embedded, almost religious, regard for prestige vessels (that formerly functioned as “invisible” possessions of extraordinary value within the highly monitored socialist economy)—with Roma who came of age after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Younger Roma now question the validity of sacrificing enormous sums of money for antique objects for which there is little practical use, instead of investing in contemporary cachet (especially houses and cars) that far more tangibly benefits their families. This has generated “a new, post-socialist symbolic repertoire of wealth accumulation and representation” (pp. 306–7) and calls into question long-held Gabor assumptions and the very meaning of the traditional beaker-and-tankard-centered prestige economy.As a monograph that documents the role of material culture in a traditional Romani community, Materializing Difference is clearly relevant to the field of folklore. Moreover, beakers and tankards as “institutions” among the Gabors animate other genres of interest to students of both Romani culture and folklore: the norms and customs embedded in life-cycle events and the repertoire of songs that symbolically express the power of prestige goods. Betrothals and marriages are highly ritualistic events among many Transylvanian Roma. They entail early-age nuptials, marriage alliances and payments, and tests of bridal virginity, among other things. Prestige items are closely linked to the folklore of weddings and especially the elaborate marital agreements that are negotiated among the Gabors. Funerals are also important community events, and a man's postmortem standing is directly related to his stash of antique vessels, which his sons inherit. Thus, prestige objects also form part of the discourse of death rites. Particularly telling are the traditional songs that are performed at these life-cycle commemorations. Metaphorical formulaic language, or what Berta calls “linguistic indirectness” (p. 17), forms the core of the songs, where not only horses and carts represent precious beakers and tankards, but an entire lexicon of well-known tropes depicts individuals and families and their status as informed by the prestige goods in their possession.Despite the breadth and depth of Berta's ethnographic and theoretical findings, they really concern only the role of prestige items in the post-socialist and—by virtue of the older Roma in the community—socialist years. A historical perspective that pre-dates the Communist regime (1944–1989) is not offered. Were prestige vessels part of the networks of Gabor (and Cǎrhar) identity and a representation of the pre-Communist past? A fuller treatment of the historical context would provide a useful frame and surely enhance Berta's more contemporary readings. Moreover, while the volume is admittedly about both Gabor prestige goods and, accordingly, Gabor men and their world, the lack of any real female perspective is conspicuous. The profoundly patriarchal world of the Gabors paired with Berta's own role as a male ethnographer may have precluded, at least in part, any significant coverage on the position of women in this “system.” But the question still remains: Do women have any role at all in the prestige economy, or are they truly entirely tacit? Finally, a comment: Berta weaves in the research of many different scholars yet inexplicably ignores two relevant works: Cătălina Tesăr's dissertation (“‘Women Married Off to Chalices’: Gender, Kinship, and Wealth among Romanian Cortorari Gypsies,” University College London, 2013) on the role of comparable vessels as prestige items in marriage alliances of analogous Transylvanian Roma, and Martin Olivera's substantial monograph, La tradition de l'intégration: Une ethnologie des Roms Gabori dans les années 2000 (Pétra 2012).Materializing Difference will (and already does) appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. It is innovative, accessible, meticulously organized, and brimming with theoretical rigor, nuanced interpretation, and constant references to rich ethnographic fieldwork. Berta does a superb job of demonstrating how objects not only mediate human relationships but also possess potent and influential social and political agency. His opus is a compelling, informative, and moving account and a significant contribution to the study of Romani society and material culture.

Tiger atmospheres and co-belonging in mangrove worlds

This article adopts a place-based approach to explore tiger atmospheres in the Sundarbans, a transboundary environmental commons and major climatic hotspot in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta of India and Bangladesh. We argue that affective intensities of greed ( lobh), fear ( bhaya), respect ( srodhya), trust ( biswas) and empathy ( karuna) sensed by the tiger subject contribute to novel theoretical as well as empirical insights into co-belonging and intersectional multispecies justice. We explore these animal atmospheres through multi-sited ethnographic research that include embodied observations, photographs, 31 in-depth interviews and focus groups with impoverished as well as racialised low-caste Hindus (Dalits/Scheduled Castes), Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) and Muslim forest-dwellers in India and Bangladesh. This attention to more-than-human geographies, animal atmospheres and subaltern stories situated in the Bengal delta unsettles macro-narratives of forest conservation and wildlife management that reduce animals to passive subjects or alternatively make them killable.

Feeding the Trolling: Understanding and Mitigating Online Trolling Behavior as an Unintended Consequence

Trolling is a form of consumer misbehavior that involves deliberate, deceptive, and mischievous attempts to provoke reactions from other online users. This research draws on actor-network theory to explore the assemblages of human and non-human entities that allow and perpetuate online trolling behaviors. By taking a practice-focused multi-sited ethnographic research approach, the research shows that online trolling is often an unintended consequence of interactions between human and non-human entities that are joined in the performance of trolling behavior. These entities include: troll(s), target(s), a medium of exchange, audience(s), other trolls, trolling artifacts, regulators, revenue streams, and assistants. Some of these actors (i.e., troll, target, medium) are playing a role in initiating, and other actors are (un)intentionally sustaining trolling by celebrating it, boosting it, facilitating it, and normalizing it. The findings highlight the role of nontraditional actors in the performance of misbehaviors and suggest that effective management of online consumer misbehaviors such as trolling will include managing the socio-technical networks that allow and fuel these misbehaviors.

Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones

Book Review| April 01 2022 Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha LolaJones. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. viii, 346 pp. Birgitta J. Johnson Birgitta J. Johnson BIRGITTA J. JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music and the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include music in African American churches, change and identity in Black popular music, and gospel archiving. She has published articles in the Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology Forum, Liturgy, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, and The Grove Dictionary of American Music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (1): 163–167. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.163 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Birgitta J. Johnson; Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2022; 75 (1): 163–167. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.163 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance is an innovative contribution to contemporary Black sacred music and religious life scholarship. Jones uses multi-sited ethnographic research to anchor her analysis of the layered nuances of race, sexuality, gender, and gender presentation in Black Pentecostal religious communities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The diverse settings for musical and rhetorical performances of Black masculinity, gender, and sexuality that Jones traverses in Flaming? are timely additions to an emerging area of Black music research in America. Throughout the book’s eight chapters, she uses insightful case studies to center the spoken and unspoken sentiments of Black male Christian musicians living and working in a society in which their humanity has been historically and violently contested. At the same time, these men are members of a religious community in which Black masculinity is often lionized in overtly... You do not currently have access to this content.

Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands

The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather than being presented as exacerbating ethnic tension, economic development was frequently deployed as a panacea for conflict in ways that rendered borderland residents increasingly precarious. In this article, we draw on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out between 2014 and 2020 in Myanmar's borderlands and along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor to examine how aid donors' support for displaced ethnic minority populations is supplanted by widespread geoeconomic hope for the ameliorating effects of capitalism. We home in on the role of aid flight, special economic zones, and China's Belt and Road Initiative to argue that geoeconomic hope surrounding Myanmar's deepening integration into circuits of global capital obscures processes of surplus precaritization in which populations progressively approach the point at which they become absolutely surplus or beyond reabsorption into labor markets. The article contributes to emerging scholarship on migrant labor exploitation, supply-chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of BRI in Myanmar's borderlands and beyond.

Frontiers of cosmopolitanism: Educational enclaves and the extractive roots of international schools.

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in the international school sector, we show how cosmopolitan claims of openness mirror a relative closure and ‘offshore-like’ enclavement. To do so, we build upon the notions of modularity and extractivism, which we use as heuristics to analyse social and spatial practices of defining boundaries. Gazing beyond the main foundational myth of international schools, we first outline their concomitant extractive roots. Second, we shed light on the conditions of international teachers’ circulation worldwide. Third, we examine the territorial entanglements and disentanglements that characterise international schools. Finally, we investigate the tensions induced by a cosmopolitan educational ethos whose discourse of inclusion is inevitably paired with practices of exclusion.

Female migration in the Cape Verde islands: From islandness to transnationalism

Following island studies scholars’ suggestion to think “with the archipelago” in order to denaturalize and de-territorialize the object of study and grant more attention to decolonization processes and mobilities, this paper uses a gender perspective and multi-sited ethnographic research to explore changes in Cape Verdean identity perception related to islandness and migration issues. The tension between ‘openness’ and ‘closure’ is significant in the case of Cape Verde, where the relationship between the island and islanders represents a condition of being in the world. The sea opens to the outside, but it also closes off and imprisons islanders within the borders of the island. Before the 1970s, when most Cape Verdean migrants were men, inside/outside boundaries were played out as gender boundaries along the male/female opposition: external/internal, Terra Longe (the outside world)/Terra Mamaizinha (the motherland), danger/security. On the isle of Santo Antão, however, this has been changing with the gradual feminization of emigration to Europe. This shift has revolutionized the previous sense of home, giving rise to a new form of transnational female family that connects places of immigration and places of origin while also reorienting Cape Verdean female belonging from insular to transnational.

Girls’ education and sexual regulation in Malawi

ABSTRACT Sexual regulation has been a core component of formal schooling in Southern Africa since its inception, with discipline central to teachers’ work. Yet internationally funded, girl-focused development programs give new shape and legitimacy to teacher interventions on student sexuality. Building on a combined two years of multi-sited ethnographic research in Zomba, Malawi, we show how teachers and mother groups used NGO-sponsored activities to surveil and regulate girls. We argue that, as they implemented projects, school-based actors mediated between transnational logics about the power of girls’ education and deeply historic understandings of schooling and girlhood. Teacher and mother group members remade programmatic components in ways that intensified discipline for some girls and ignored others. We theorize this differentiation as a pragmatic response to local socio-economic constraints and argue that, as a result, techno-rational programs designed to keep girls in school may instead push some out.

The Social Life of the “Forever Chemical”

This article examines the social life of PFAS contamination (a class of several thousand synthetic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and maps the growing research in the social sciences on the unique conundrums and complex travels of the “forever chemical.” We explore social, political, and cultural dimensions of PFAS toxicity, especially how PFAS move from unseen sites into individual bodies and into the public eye in late industrial contexts; how toxicity is comprehended, experienced, and imagined; the factors shaping regulatory action and ignorance; and how PFAS have been the subject of competing forms of knowledge production. Lastly, we highlight how people mobilize collectively, or become demobilized, in response to PFAS pollution/ toxicity. We argue that PFAS exposure experiences, perceptions, and responses move dynamically through a “toxicity continuum” spanning invisibility, suffering, resignation, and refusal. We off er the concept of the “toxic event” as a way to make sense of the contexts and conditions by which otherwise invisible pollution/toxicity turns into public, mass-mediated, and political episodes. We ground our review in our ongoing multisited ethnographic research on the PFAS exposure experience.

Democratizing ownership and participation in the 4th Industrial Revolution: challenges and opportunities in cellular agriculture

The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cultured cells and/or genetically modified yeast. Our exploration of this space involved multi-sited ethnographic research in both (a) the cellular agriculture community and (b) alternative economic organizations devoted to open source licensing, member-owned cooperatives, social financing, and platform business models. Upon discussing how these latter approaches could potentially facilitate alternative sociotechnical pathways in cellular agriculture, we reflect upon the broader implications of this work with respect to the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enduring need for public policy reform.