Multi-sited Ethnography Research Articles

Difusión Espacial de la Devoción a Toribio Romo por Migrantes Mexicanos a Estados Unidos

The spatial diffusion of the devotion to Toribio Romo has intensified due to the migration of Mexicans to the United States. It will be discussed how, from the experience of mobility of believing migrants, the devotion to the saint extends to new territories and believers across different geographical scales, influenced by historical and socio-cultural contexts, which are reinforced and establish connections with their places of origin through religious practices and traditions through the image of Toribio Romo. To achieve this purpose, a bibliographical review of the spatial diffusion is presented to explain the expansion of the devotion.
 Additionally, the expansion of the devotion between Mexico and the United States will be mapped through fieldwork conducted under the methodology of multi-sited ethnography.

Beyond methodology: unveiling multisited entrepreneurship

PurposeMultisited ethnography has primarily been portrayed as a challenge for the following field-worker, with the researcher taking the central role and neglecting research participants also experiencing a multisited nature of their work. The authors argue that literature on multisited ethnography merely discusses multisitedness as a methodological theme. In correspondence, the authors propose to think of multisitedness not just as a methodological theme but also as an empirical theme.Design/methodology/approach The authors contend etic and emic perspectives to address multisitedness empirically, which enables researchers to compare and contrast the multisited topic of inquiry in academic “outsider” terms with the etic analysis and considering the perspective of the research participants' multisited experiences using the emic perspective. To show the fruitfulness of discussing multisitedness using the complementary etic and emic analysis, the authors present the example of Mennonite entrepreneurial activities in Belize, a heterogeneous group of migrants that established themselves as successful traders and entrepreneurs.Findings Through an etic multisited ethnographic perspective, the authors compare and contrast four communities of Mennonites in terms of their entrepreneurial activities, technology and energy use. Through an emic perspective, the authors demonstrate how Mennonites, while preferring an in-group focus, navigate their multisited entrepreneurial activities, which require interaction with the outside world.Originality/value The authors highlight the value of combining etic–emic reflections to acknowledge and include the multisited nature of many social phenomena as experienced by the research participants.

The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations: Methodological Suggestions

The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019–2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women’s peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), method of organization (archival practices like cataloging or digitization) and activists’ perspectives concerning future preservation and access. In order to overcome these challenges, we suggest six methodological principles which may apply to the study of civil society organizations that were established between the 1970s–1990s: the importance of identifying researchers’ positionality vis a-vis the archive; the politics of knowledge and intersectional identities; avoiding judgment of informal archival practices; identifying who sets the rules; silence and self-silencing; and recognition of invisible labor.

Do desastre ambiental à formação de uma rede migratória: o caso de Longarone e Urussanga

The article brings experience and report of field research, which sought to understand the genesis of the constitution of a migratory network since an environmental disaster occurred in Italy, 1963. This configuration forged connections between Longarone in Northern Italy and Urussanga, in Southern Brazil, causing consequences that permeate the search for cultural ties, family rescue and propagation of Italian tradition aspects transposed by the economic dynamics engendered. The methodology used was Multi Sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) and participant observation. The aim is to expose the repercussions of the establishment of such a network, which culminate in the displacement of Italian-Brazilians to work in Germany, changing the political, spatial and socioeconomic configuration of their hometown.

The geopolitics of fear: Pro-refugee resistance to Europe's racial security

This article explores pro-migrant resistance in the most vulnerable, yet understudied, spot of anti-immigrant regimes, the border city on major refugee routes. This piece is part of my multi-sited ethnography tracing gateway cities of Europe's Southern borders with the Middle East. Against the background of existing scholarship on the shrinking spaces of pro-migrant resistance, my findings expose an everyday urbanity that is inclusive and protective of refugees in the frontier city. However, rather than displaying festive snapshots of sanctuaries, the evidence shows that the pro-refugee resistance dwells in a highly contested and politicized urban space. Having received the main refugee flow from outside of Europe, the European Union tightened external borders following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. As the Mediterranean Sea gradually turned into a graveyard, Athens, the main gateway city in Eastern Mediterranean, was deeply affected. The in-depth analysis of a defiant neighborhood of Athens, Exarchia, uncovers the leverage of the border city to resist the taken-for-granted “global fear” of the Muslim refugee – a legacy of post-September 11 war on terror. Revealing intense emotions shaped by the geography of violent borders, my research points to the widely shared aversion to government-led fear. The article analyzes the dialectics between top-down securitization sustained by fear and bottom-up resistance empowered by feelings of trust, safety, and belonging. While civic disobedience is routinely attacked and repressed by the security regime, I document how the geopolitics of emotion persist in everyday sociability and empower locals with differing political agendas in their pro-refugee resistance. Accordingly, my main argument is that the geopolitics of emotion are integral in forming, transforming, contesting, interrupting, and even evading securitization of migration in the least expected geographies, Europe's racial borders with the Middle East.

Modern slavery and social protection in Northern Ghana: A decolonised perspective

Many recent discourses on modern slavery have dedicated attention to gendered dimension of trafficking, labour exploitation and sex work, among others. However, many debates pay little attention to the structural inequalities and limited social protection structures. Using mainly primary data drawn from a multi-sited ethnography in the Wa West District of Ghana, this paper provides evidence that challenges the popular view that women are passive and powerless actors who are vulnerable to exploitation. Its central argument is that people’s experiences of gender division of labour, limited social protection, climate change and historical inequalities are central to the causes of vulnerabilities and adaptive strategies. The paper provides a deeper contextual understanding beyond the sensationalism of many mainstream modern slavery advocates. It departs from the hegemonic rescue and rehabilitation strategies and demonstrates women’s agency through self-help social protection structures. The paper broadly calls for a decolonised approach to rights and humanitarianism. A transformative solution to women's vulnerabilities requires respect for the views of the affected women and strategies against the structural socioenvironmental factors which produce the conditions necessitating women’s entry into exploitative jobs.

Ultrasound scans as risk rituals in obstetric prenatal care in South Africa

In this article I examine collective maternity risk understandings and practices from the dual-perspective of obstetricians and pregnant persons, focusing in particular on the role of ultrasound scans. Contributing to socio-cultural theories on collective risks, I draw upon data from a two and a half year, multisite ethnography that traced fourteen women and seven obstetricians’ corresponding experiences of private-sector childbirth in Cape Town. My findings show that ultrasounds, as habitual practices, are well-established as safe, yet generate medico-legal risks for obstetricians and delivery risks for pregnant women, while managing risks to the unborn. The unborn, culturally sanctioned as precious, emerges as central to the purposes of the ultrasound risk ritual that warrants both self-protective precaution and collective duty on behalf of both social groups. Directed by the same injunctions but for markedly different ends, this dual-perspective suggests an important addition to the risk rituals literature, while adding further important insights into the literature on ultrasounds. By examining the ultrasound scan as risk ritual with a dual-function, the unborn as the object of the risk ritual is both at-risk and poses risks to the groups taking part. Legal processes, risk aversion, and technocratic obstetric care delineate the unborn as a risk that 1) places obstetricians in danger of litigation for negligence 2) places women in danger of delivery by c-section within high-risk birthing cultures, and 3) reconfigures birthing intervention as normal and necessary.

Dialectical Emotional Labour in Digital Person-branding: The case of digital influencers

This article examines the emotional labour of digital influencers to extend our understanding of the processes of transmutation of workers’ emotional systems. According to Arlie Hochschild, transmutation occurs when workers’ emotional systems are engineered into commercial and organizational settings for economic profit. To date much work has been carried out within formal organizational settings on ‘surface acting’, which often leads to self-abuse, burnout and depersonalization, and ‘deep acting’, which is associated with feelings of personal freedom. We use a multi-sited ethnography of digital influencers’ emotional work practices to show how so-called ‘person-brands’ labour on the self through dialectical process between emancipating one’s person-brand and exploiting oneself. We suggest a new mode of emotional labour in which transmutation happens in practices where influencers display their private actions to the public and where they transfer commercial agendas into their private realm and exploit their selves. Consequently, digital influencers work under the condition that they must self-exploit to succeed, and we demonstrate how they do this in seven distinct work practices. While we suggest self-exploitation to be a condition of digital influencers’ work, we question whether this is a boundary condition in the transformation to become more powerful person-brands where work becomes more individualized and subjectified.

A Tale of Two Cities: the intrinsic spatial logic of courier protests

AbstractProtests differ and so do protest outcomes. This is also the case in food delivery gig work, which is characterised by frequent labour unrest. Various cross-country analyses have pointed to the importance of the national context for the strategies and outcomes of courier protests. However, as the article shows, the protests already differ at the level of different cities. To analyse this, the study argues that the heterogeneity of protests in platform-mediated courier work is due to the spatially distinct logic of the respective cities. The research is based on two case studies of food delivery platforms in Germany, which were investigated with a mixed methods research design consisting of interviews, multi-sited ethnography and a survey. The findings show that the intrinsic logic of the two centres of courier protests studied (Cologne and Berlin) played a central role in the composition of the protesting groups, their strategies and subsequently the outcomes. However, it turns out that intrinsic logics are not homogeneous and in fact may exist in various forms, which can be complementary or in conflict with each other and are supported and realised by different social groups. In addition, the size of the cities also proves to be decisive for the dynamics of the protests.

Migration, collective remittances and religion: the growth of Alevi worship places (cemevi) in the rural homeland

ABSTRACT The influence of transnational engagements on emigrant villages has attracted noticeable scholarly attention, however, the religious dimension of the link between migration and remittances remains largely unexplored. Providing an ethnographic study exploring the dynamics and meanings involved in the growth of cemevis in villages, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon, something that has received less attention in studies of migration and transnationalism. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of the British Alevi community in London and their villages in the Afşin-Elbistan region in Maraş province in Turkey, the paper discovers how and to what extent these transnational interactions shape places and social and religious spaces in the villages. The paper describes rural cemevis built by migrants as “remittance cemevis’ that form a channel between the diaspora and homeland and allow migrant Alevis to expand their role in the village community and influence social and cultural life.

Exploring Silicon Valley Imperialism

This book review assesses “Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times.” The book is a multisited ethnography that explores Siliconization or the expansion of Silicon Valley imaginaries at a global scale. The review highlights the methodological strategy and the discussions around infrastructures and entrepreneurship, alongside other topics, to connect the book with similar research. A highly critical work on the hegemonic ways to design, construct and promote technology in the context of nation-building, it unravels the possibilities of an antifascist and postsocialist ethnography, setting the grounds for expanding the role of academia in techno-capitalism critique.

‘Could this really be a place for me?’ Women’s experiences in game jams and video game communities

ABSTRACT Video game communities, as new emerging creators of contemporary culture, have been identified as paradigmatic gendered contexts and are considered essential for understanding gendered contextual dynamics in contemporary society. This research is based on a multi-sited ethnography study of five game jams as contexts of creation and participation in video game communities, to which was added discussion from eight focus groups and an online forum with 30 female participants. It explores and discusses three analytic emerging dimensions about the perceived gendered dynamics, experiences, interactions and characteristics of these contexts through the women’s perspectives, silences and meanings. In particular, it focuses on the unequal representation and uncovered power dynamics between men and women, the perceived gender stereotypes, and the internalised discourses. Considering the perceptions of devaluing women´s capacity, experience and knowledge, is discussed the impacts on women’s participation. The importance of decoding the video game-gendered contexts is reinforced to create gender-integrated and gender-sensitive environments towards a more diverse and inclusive gaming culture.

Boundary-making in Conservation: The Configuration of Environmental Ontologies in the Andean Páramos

Unique high Andean ecosystems in South America as the “páramos” have been the object of conservation plans in the last decade. In Colombia, this spurred heated discussions when their conservation was promoted through the cartographic demarcation of their boundaries: what counts as “páramo” and what kind of activities should be allowed there have been highly contested topics. As part of a multisited ethnography that studies the case of páramos conservation with biologists, geographers, and campesinos in the Sumapaz region of Colombia, I argue that the analysis of boundaries is a crucial matter in the unfolding of conservation. By analyzing how boundaries are configured, coordinated, and contested in the conservation of páramos in Colombia, I advance an ontological approach to boundary-making as practices embedded in the concrete transformation of environmental worlds through the involvement of multiple agents such as humans, plants, and technologies.

The circular economy futures in the making: Transformativity and object ontologies in food waste practices in Finnish households, supermarkets and biogas plants

This article examines how food waste practices in households, supermarkets and biogas plants contribute to enacting potential circular economy (CE) futures. The article is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted in Finland during 2019–2021. The analysis focuses on the transformativity of practices, exploring how the CE as a societal transformation is made in hands-on practices at different sites. With the transformativity of practices, I refer to the future-in-the-making aspect of practices—that is, the capability of practices to change both the practices themselves and the materials entangled with and within the practices. I conceptualise three different dimensions of transformativity of practices (habitual, planned and experimental) that simultaneously enact both the ontologies of food waste and potential CE futures differently. The article argues that present practices are not projected towards only one potential CE future—but rather multiple potential CE futures—and that these futures are based partly on contradictory rationalities. I suggest that a focus on the different dimensions of the transformativity of practices and their rationalities enables practice-based research to better articulate how the changing goals of practices can shape different societal transformations and futures, such as the CE.

Poetic desirability: refugee men’s border tactics against white desire

ABSTRACT This article explores how former refugee men position their desirability as they un-settle in European countries. The masculine performance of desirability is examined through the intersectional lens of racialization, affective bordering, sexualities, and erotic encounters. The paper builds on multi-sited ethnographies, conducted mainly in Greece and Germany between 2012 and 2022, centred around masculinities in border activist movements. During first encounters, the men in this study would position themselves as autonomous desirable beings. However, they quickly experienced dismissal or sexual objectifications. They were sexually desired as exotic but discarded as potential life partners, due to the lack of aspirational labour and uncertain legal status. Thus, their beings became depleted in the technologies of the white desire that exploits marked bodies. In affective response, they negotiated the terms of their recognition. Their tactics included shaming women’s choices, deflating local men’s hegemony, forming reciprocal contracts, and visioning love in the future. This pattern continued through men’s engagements across European borders and was repetitive. Therefore, I argue that they performed a ‘poetic desirability’ to position their masculine beings as equal and in resistance to the bordering violence of white (un)desire.

Researching Lay Perceptions of Inequality through Images of Society: Compliance, Inversion and Subversion of Power Hierarchies

Increased inequalities around the globe have led social researchers to invent innovative methodologies to study how people subjectively perceive inequality and imagine society. This article presents the development of an arts-informed method, ‘drawing of society’, applied to a multi-sited ethnography of everyday inequalities in two major post-industrial cities of Russia. It contributes to the debate on lay perceptions of social structure by looking at moral and symbolic signifiers of inequality. Building on multi-sensory data, I argue that workers and professionals tend to imagine Russian society as divided between a small group of the rich and a large group of the poor and as consisting of social classes. Ordinary people self-identify with the poor and perceive their position as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Depending on their lived experiences, research participants express their sense of inequality through the narrative strategies of compliance, inversion and subversion of power hierarchies.

“Been there, done that but also not quite:” Discoveries and limitations in an evaluative, short-term, and multi-sited ethnography of the boy scouts of America

This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of a team-based, multi-site, evaluative ethnography. In this study, a team of qualitative researchers deployed participant observation methods to assess the level of standardization and local adaptation in the training curriculum for adult leaders in the Boy Scouts of America. While the umbrella organization remained consistent over the course of the 12-months project, researchers completed intense intervals of observation in 13 different settings across the United States over the course of a year. We reflect on the benefits and challenges that fast-paced, evaluative ethnographic approaches offer for applied settings as well as insight into the complexities of team-based field work with regards to positionality, legitimacy, and relationships between researchers.

Connecting place and placing power: a multiscalar approach to mobilities, migrant services and the migration industry

This paper historically situates and explores the strengths of multiscalar analysis, at a moment when the term ‘multiscalar’ has been adopted by researchers within the intersecting scholarships of migration, mobilities, and urban studies. Developed by critical geographers to speak about the intersection of processes of capital accumulation, governance, and urban regeneration, the meaning of multiscalar has become diffuse and conflated with terms such as entwined networks, multisited ethnography and assemblage. Countering these trends, this paper develops as a ‘multisighted’ explanatory framework. A multisighted analysis begins with individual local actors, their motivations and emplacements, and explicates the dynamics of power that extend across multiple units of governance and contribute to processes of capital accumulation. To illustrate the strengths of this approach, the paper draws from a study of the provision of migrant services, which local interlocutors in a relatively impoverished east German city label ‘the integration business’. The arrival of Ukrainian migrants in 2022 is shown to have further enmeshed multiple interrelated individuals, migrant-serving projects, charities, foundations and governmental institutions into networks that supported migrant settlement and became intertwined in a globe-spanning migration industry.

Cultures of Migration: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Rural-Urban Migration in Finland

Cultures of Migration: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Rural-Urban Migration in Finland

Unraveling State governance in the Chilean Cordillera: Privatization, precariousness, and arrhythmia

This article discusses how communities from the Chilean cordillera negotiate their presence and reproduction with the Chilean State. We analyze people and animals' mobility through a multisite ethnography, which took place between 2021 and 2022. In this context, communities seem independent while facing the weak and inconstant State presence. However, processes of change concerning extractive economies, decreasing State aid, and consequences of climate change complicate the practices once thought to be autonomous in the mountain range. The State appears to favor certain degrees of independence through arrhythmic governance. Such an arrangement allows a fluctuating and unstable relationship that, despite the grip of the State, translates into emergent forms of autonomy that nonetheless end up being a specific type of precarization. In this sense, mountain communities maintain, complicate and, on occasion, deepen the relations of dependence towards a State that they either ignore or elude. Finally, the intertwined movements of neoliberalization, environmental stressors and precarious State governance are elements that deepen the production of an arrhythmic State movement; which also redistributes agency among actors on the terrain.