Multi-sited Ethnographic Research Research Articles

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.

Desperate Aspirations among Paraguayan Youths

This article explores how young Paraguayan migrants, returnees, and not-yet migrants negotiate contradicting aspirations and desperations that they attach to urban and rural spaces in the present and future. While a protracted crisis of small-scale agriculture in Paraguay increases pressure to migrate, the economic crisis in Argentina challenges the established migration trajectories between rural Paraguay and Buenos Aires. The article shows how young adults continuously weigh up current living conditions and future prospects both “here” and “there” and are torn between leaving, staying, or returning. Based on multi-sited ethnographic field research, it reconstructs the ways in which they navigate between four ambiguous aspirations: security, advancement, belonging, and attachment. Whereas rural out-migration of young people is often interpreted as a yearning for modern city life, the analysis reveals that both rural and urban areas are linked with aspirations as well as desperations.

The iatrogenesis of obstetric racism in Brazil: beyond the body, beyond the clinic

In Brazil, Black women are disproportionately denied access to timely care and are made vulnerable to death by avoidable obstetric causes. However, they have not been at the center of recent initiatives to improve maternal health. This paper contends that the effectiveness of Brazilian maternal and infant health policy is limited by failures to robustly address racial health inequities. Multi-sited ethnographic research on the implementation of the Rede Cegonha program in Bahia, Brazil between 2012 and 2017 reveals how anti-Blackness structures iatrogenic harms for Black women as well as their kin in maternal healthcare. Building on the work of Black Brazilian feminists, the paper shows how Afro-Brazilian women experience anti-Black racism in obstetric care, which the paper argues can be better understood through Dána-Ain Davis’ concept of obstetric racism. The paper suggests that such forms of violence reveal the necropolitical facets of reproductive governance and that the framing of obstetric violence broadens the scales and temporalities of iatrogenesis.

Kava Rootz

This documentary film is a result of multi-sited ethnographic research between 2015-2019, which explores cultural identity, gender, music, and spirituality through contemporary and common kava practices. Drawing from over 17 years of participation in kava communities, this film is grounded in Tongan experiences, while also including a mobile and expanding Moana/Wansolwara/Oceanic perspective with contributions from Fijians, Sāmoans, Māori, and more. The knowledge holders in this film span across four territories, including Te Ika a Māui in Aotearoa, Utah (US) on Turtle Island, The Kingdom of Tonga, and Kamberra, Australia. They share a complex web of experiences, purpose, and tensions within the contemporary practices of common kava gatherings known in Tongan as faikava. Contemporary kava gatherings are spaces to release the pressures of modern life, nurture ancestral and social relationships, reveal truths, build community, produce and transmit knowledge, negotiate identity, heal, and foster positive well-being through comradery and openness. This film cannot cover all of the complexity of kava culture, yet attempts to be a meaningful introduction to the dynamic practices that are alive and expanding throughout the world.

PEDAGOGICAL MODEL FOR DECOLONISING, INDIGENISING AND TRANSFORMING SCIENCE EDUCATION CURRICULA: A CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA

In Africa, Science education curricula have been instrumental in promoting Western worldviews as being universal. An educational transformation and decolonisation of the school curriculum is required. A focus on an African worldview and an integration of the local context and community-based information is necessary for survival, i.e., Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS). While IKS is enshrined in the schooling curriculum, Educators experience challenges with implementing it, because the pedagogical strategies have not been clearly described. An in-depth qualitative study was conducted with the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) holders of the Zulu cultural group and Senior High School (SHS) Science teachers to explore how IK on environmental sustainability could be taught in South African science classrooms. The research employed an interpretivist, multi-site ethnographic, qualitative approach, and naturalistic research style. In-depth interviews were used to generate data from the purposively selected community persons. The thematically analysed findings were used to develop a culturally specific pedagogical model on how to teach IK in science classrooms: touring cultural places; demystifying indigenous practices and perception; utilizing indigenous pedagogies; teaching wisdom behind indigenous practices etc. The research recommends that future studies be conducted on applying the model in different geographical and cultural schooling contexts. Keywords: context sensitive curricula, pedagogical strategies, South African curriculum, Western worldview

Navigating legality: transnational mixed-status families and the U.S. family-based immigration system

ABSTRACT As ‘legal’ immigrants, Mexicans with U.S. lawful permanent resident status have the rare opportunity to petition for immigrant visas for certain eligible family members. This article draws on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out over six years in Guanajuato, Mexico and Connecticut, United States, to examine the experiences of transnational mixed-status families with access to the U.S family-based immigration system. For some families, legalisation is perceived as a crucial resource. For others, legalisation poses a threat to family and community ties. Legalisation is not an inevitable or natural outcome of access to the family-based immigration system. Rather, it entails a complex process of negotiation among family members with different degrees of influence, and divergent and shifting goals. Families often find that engagements with the family immigration system yield unintended repercussions for children’s social mobility. Legalisation decisions have temporal dimensions, as intimate family decisions must be made according to a timeline imposed by U.S. immigration law. This transnational approach to mixed-status family experiences reveals that legality is a status worthy of study in its own right, and that legal statuses – while they may not be enforceable beyond the borders of the state that creates them – have power that shapes transnational family life.

Geophilia: Ethnographic Fragments on the Vitality of Fossils

Drawing from multisite ethnographic research conducted at four Canadian UNESCO World Heritage natural sites, this writing focuses on the geosocialities of fossils and argues that fossils are alive: vitalist matter capable of affecting and being affected by the geosocial meshworks in which they are entangled. In the present writing, these relations are explored through more-than-representational ethnographic fragments intended to enliven the geophilia of fossils by underscoring the way they are animated through affect, memory, performance, narrative, possibility, and imagination.

Building Educational Resilience Through Transnational Mobility Trajectories: Young People Between Ghana and The Netherlands

This study investigates how young Ghanaians’ mobility between Ghana and The Netherlands relates to their educational resilience. Based on 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic research following 30 youths of 16–25 age group, we deploy a socio-ecological approach developed in social psychology to identify three resilience-building mechanisms: connection to motivational others, active recollection and comparative confrontation. These mechanisms have to date remained outside of the purview of resilience research and research on migration and education, as these fields focus on the nation-state rather than the transnational context in which young people operate. They thereby ignore mobility patterns that make other contexts relevant to young people’s educational resilience. As such, we expand the socio-ecological model of resilience to include transnational elements and show how mobility can positively relate to education and the resilience of migrant youth.

Decay, dirt and backwardness: interpretations of the socialist heritage in Hungary by first and later generation Australian-Hungarians

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contrasts the ways in which first and later generation Australian-Hungarians respond to dirt and decay in the physical environment of Hungary during their journeys there. Given the growing trend of diaspora tourism, it is now more important than ever to consider tourism at the level of tourist subjectivity.Design/methodology/approachThe material stems from multi-sited ethnographic research in two distinct periods.FindingsIn particular, the paper argues that, while the first generation relies on images internalized in the diaspora and the youngsters rely heavily on a popular Western backpacker discourse, they both share an orientalistic view of Hungary.Originality/valueThis paper aims to energize greater discussion about, and debate over, the connectivity between diasporas and tourism. In attempting to merge the two disciplines, the meta-narratives that have influenced the different generations’ perceptions are analyzed.

Anatomy of a crisis: governing youth mobility through vulnerability

ABSTRACT In 2018, the Italian Coast Guard rescued 190 migrants onboard an overcrowded vessel from Libya. Held at sea for five days, the Italian government finally permitted the Coast Guard to dock in Catania, Sicily, yet refused to allow the migrants to disembark. This article begins by dissecting the anatomy of this crisis, tracing the diverse actors and institutions involved in its creation and resolution through first-hand accounts. Multi-sited ethnographic research reveals how a diverse set of actors enlisted a hierarchy of vulnerability to secure the release of migrants onboard, privileging unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in particular. The article examines how this hierarchy has proven effective in legislating specialised protections and services and accessing limited humanitarian aid. However, a hierarchy of vulnerability has two paradoxical yet mutually reinforcing consequences. First, focusing on the vulnerabilities of increasingly narrow categories of individuals, such as unaccompanied children, distracts from examining how state policies produce vulnerability. Second, the humanitarian organisations’ emphasis on vulnerability re-inscribes social boundaries, making state protections and services progressively difficult to access. In so doing, both the state and humanitarian organisations govern youth mobility through vulnerability.

Aging in Timorese Exile: (Im)mobilities of Care and Intergenerational Relationships

ABSTRACT This paper discusses transnational care and border regimes in the context of the East Timorese exile in rural Indonesia. Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research, it explores the ways older people cope with family separation and life in exile, their aspirations, when and how transnational care becomes “on hold”, and how they deal with the impossibility of meeting intergenerational and cultural obligations. Analyzing care using the lens of “circulation”, the paper attends to the asymmetries entailed in intergenerational relationships as well as to how uneven power relations of border regimes shape transnational care exchanges. In the context of “aging in exile”, the paper underlines the importance of understanding older persons’ narratives as they are linked with the ambivalences of other family members across generations. The paper argues that the forms of immobility withholding or limiting caregiving can transcend physical boundaries. They can include the social and emotional borders conflict-divided communities build against one another over time. These “imaginary” borders require us to think about the additional asymmetries entailed in precarious familial relations and how this affects the multiple meanings of care in the context of contemporary border regimes and amid enduring legacies of violence.

Cutting out the surrogate: Caesarean sections in the Mexican surrogacy industry

Childbirth practices shed light on cultural values, ideologies of gender and motherhood, and social inequalities. Transnational, commercial surrogacy presents a useful lens through which to view the social dynamics that shape childbirth experiences. Surrogacy challenges dominant views on the naturalness and inevitability of maternal-fetal bonds because it involves the separation of gestation from motherhood. What ideologies inform childbirth practices in the consumer-driven context of surrogacy in which the woman giving birth is neither the consumer nor the "mother"? Based on multi-sited ethnographic research between 2014 and 2017 and in-depth interviews with 120 participants in the Mexican surrogacy industry, I argue that doctors draw on normative ideologies of kinship, gender, and maternal-child bonding to justify and normalize the use of Caesarean sections among surrogates. The ideology espoused by these doctors reinforces the notion that maternal-fetal bonding is natural and inevitable, constructs women as irrational and driven by hormones, and presumes that bonding between surrogate mothers and the children they gestate is detrimental to the surrogacy process. Furthermore, the proffered justifications for the Caesarean sections reproduces stereotypes about poor Mexican women as risky patients, contributes to the "disposability" of their labor, and reinforces a hierarchy in which the perceived interests of intended parents and children are elevated above those of surrogate mothers. This article contributes to social science studies of medicine by demonstrating how classist and racist stereotypes, and folk notions of kinship, gender, and maternal-child bonding are biologized in medical practice.

Classed and gendered transitions in youth activation: the case of Finnish youth employment services

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of youth activation in reproducing classed and gendered youth transitions. A large body of research on transitions examines how structural conditions continue to pattern youth transitions in the context of detraditionalization and individualisation. What is often missing from these analyses, is the role of institutional actors and youth policies. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic research in employment services in Helsinki, Finland, this article explores the role of youth activation and welfare conditionality in NEET young people's transitions. Youth activation refers to a complex mix of employment services, prevention of social exclusion, active labour market policies and welfare conditionality. The article shows how the seemingly supportive practices provided by youth employment services channel young people to a limited number of occupational tracks at the lower end of the labour market in a gendered manner. This channelling is institutionalised in the services’ organisational structures and practices, and strengthened by welfare conditionality. The consequence is a powerful institutional pattern that structures and restricts youths’ transition paths.

Human capitalisation in activation: Investing in the bodies, selves and skills of unemployed youth in Finland

ABSTRACTThis article analyses how processes of ‘human capitalisation’ work in various labour-market activation services aimed at young people in Finland. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic research on activating workshops, public employment services, and career counselling for youth in the Helsinki metropolitan region of Finland in 2014–2016, we trace sites and instances of human capitalisation. Capturing processes through which previously non-economic areas of life become economised, human capitalisation marshalls abilities, skills, knowledge and a consumeristic understanding of self-responsibility. Its promise is a more flexible workforce that can be adjusted to the varied demands of the labour market in the future. Taking a Foucauldian approach to governmentality, our research demonstrates that activation practices focus on generating a form of human capital that enhances a particular relation to and understanding of one’s self, body and skills.

Transnational Practices and Migrant Capital: The Case of Filipino Women in Iceland

Filipinos have been moving to Iceland in increasing numbers since the 1990s, primarily for employment opportunities and to reunite with relatives. They are the third largest group of immigrants in Iceland and the largest group from Asia. The majority of them work in low-income jobs in the service and production sectors where they do not utilize their education. Many arrived with the help of relatives already living in Iceland. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research, this article examines the diverse mobilization of migrant capital in Iceland and in the Philippines. The analysis draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and transnational theories to highlight how Filipinos draw on formal and informal resources in Iceland and their transnational social field in mobilizing their capital. Their extended kin groups in Iceland and networks back in the Philippines are important in building migrant capital in Iceland and in the Philippines. The study shows that this mobilization is not only affected by structural factors in Iceland, such as racialization, but also by economic position and cultural capital in the Philippines.

The transnational Sowa Rigpa industry in Asia: New perspectives on an emerging economy

This article advances the hypothesis that “traditional” Asian pharmaceutical industries are rapidly growing in size and prominence in contemporary Asia, and identifies a lack of empirical data on the phenomenon. Addressing this gap, the article provides a quantitative outline and analysis of the Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan, Mongolian and Himalayan medicine) pharmaceutical industry in China, India, Mongolia and Bhutan. Using original data gathered through multi-sited ethnographic and textual research between 2014 and 2019, involving 232 industry representatives, policy makers, researchers, pharmacists and physicians, it assembles a bigger picture on this industry's structure, size and dynamics.Revealing a tenfold growth of the Sowa Rigpa pharmaceutical industry in Asia between 2000 and 2017, the study supports its initial hypothesis. In 2017, the industry had a total sales value of 677.5 million USD, and constituted an important economic and public health resource in Tibetan, Mongolian and Himalayan regions of Asia. China generates almost 98 percent of the total sales value, which is explained by significant state intervention on the one hand, and historical and sociocultural reasons on the other. India has the second largest Sowa Rigpa pharmaceutical industry with an annual sales value of about 11 million USD, while sales values in Mongolia and Bhutan are very low, despite Sowa Rigpa's domestic importance for the two nations.The article concludes with a number of broader observations emerging from the presented data, arguing that the Sowa Rigpa pharmaceutical industry has become big enough to exert complex transformative effects on Tibetan, Mongolian and Himalayan medicine more generally. The quantitative and qualitative data presented here provide crucial foundations for further scholarly, regulatory, and professional engagement with contemporary Sowa Rigpa.

Making Sharing Work: Migrant Community Groups and Informal/Formal Work

Migrant and refugee communities are at the forefront of highly feminised and precarious community sector work. Facing insecure labour contracts and contingent, competitive funding for activities, these communities routinely move between paid and unpaid work. Drawing on multi-sited and participatory ethnographic research and 30 semi-structured interviews with women of different African backgrounds living and working in western Sydney, this article explores the relationship between collective sharing practices and life as precarious workers. The sharing of material resources, information and support takes place beyond designated ‘workplaces’ and on a continuum of activity that moves between the formal and informal, public and private, productive and socially reproductive. This article uses a practice-based approach to foreground the social world of working migrant women. In doing so, it sheds light on the hidden, precarious work of an increasingly marketised community sector and the everyday and emergent ways that marginalised communities respond to precarious work under neoliberalism.

Homebirth fines and health cards in rural Tanzania: On the push for numbers in maternal health.

Over the last two decades, there has been a global push to improve maternal health by increasing numbers of facility births in low- and middle-income countries like Tanzania. While recent scholarship has interrogated the increasing hegemony of numbers and metrics in global health, few have ethnographically explored how this push for numbers and its accompanying technologies affect the lived experiences of parturients and those who care for them during pregnancy and childbirth in rural communities. Based on seven months of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in three different rural communities in Mpwapwa District in 2016, this article explores how mothers and nurses in Tanzania experienced the push for numbers in maternal health, particularly as that push is enacted through homebirth fines and health cards. Intended to reduce maternal mortality, policies meant to increase facility births in rural Tanzania can inadvertently decrease access to care for the most marginalized community members, while simultaneously enticing under-resourced and over-burdened health workers to sanction non-compliant women while doing nothing to improve the wider health systems in which they work. Ethnographic interviews with mothers, nurses, and government leaders show how homebirth fines exacerbate structural inequalities in healthcare access, excluding some of the poorest women from the healthcare services they desire. Additionally, weekly participant-observation conducted at each of the community health dispensaries highlights the way female nurses engage in improvised and often punitive tactics with health cards, key documents for women to be able to access free national healthcare services. While the new sanctions can help lessen the heavy workloads of healthcare workers at rural dispensaries, they also lead to worsening relationships between nurses and the communities they serve. By prioritizing the perceptions and negotiations surrounding homebirth fines and health cards, this paper shows the unintended consequences of indicator-driven care, which most negatively affect the poor.