Multi-sited Ethnography Research Articles

The followership paradox: The undervalued power of effective followers in early childhood education

Educators working in early childhood education play a critical role in enhancing outcomes for children and families through active leadership. However, there are persistent paradoxical perceptions regarding the practical implementation of followership alongside leadership. This article addresses this followership paradox, as a key finding drawn from a larger doctoral study that explored followership practices in Australian early childhood education settings. By examining educators’ understandings of followership through the lens of established followership theories, and employing multi-site ethnography and reflexive thematic analysis, contradictory understandings were unearthed. Despite observing educators enacting effective followership behaviours, participants predominantly hold negative connotations associated with the role. These findings highlight the urgent need to acknowledge and appreciate the role of followers and their impact in co-creating quality workplace outcomes in early education settings. The article argues for integrating followership training alongside leadership development to foster more cohesive early childhood environments.

Researching Care Platforms: Methodological and Ethical Considerations in the Broad Field of Domestic Platform Labour

This article presents a methodological reflection on the challenges of researching domestic and care work mediated by digital labour platforms. While knowledge production on gig work in the logistics sector has soared, research on care platforms is slow to catch up, especially in very relational forms of home-based work, such as eldercare. We take this uneven development in the literature as a starting point to unpack the empirical conundrums in this field. Drawing on our own experience with trying to recruit care platform workers in Germany between 2019 and 2024, we shed light on the ethical dilemmas we encountered and offer some lessons learnt. The article calls for long-term commitments, multi-sited ethnographies, longitudinal perspectives and mixed-methods designs to study care platforms in the future. Finally, we advocate for researching platform labour beyond the gig.

Enacting the border multiple in the post-welfare state: Registration of foreign-born persons in Finland

This article analyses border practices that are enacted through an array of migrants’ residence registration procedures in Finland. These practices extend to the country of departure and also take place upon arrival and settlement within a municipality, and they are intimately tied with the person’s access to social rights in the country. Building on critical border studies and Annemarie Mol’s idea of multiple ontologies we examine migrant stories, collected via multi-sited ethnography, that simultaneously testify to being targeted by diverse border practices and of being compelled to take part in doing the border. We address regulatory practices that modify and, indeed, reinforce inequalities between migrants. We argue that residence registration as a scattered border practice not only enacts different statuses for migrants but orders them hierarchically depending, for example, on the person’s migration status and nationality (EU/TCN). Furthermore, multiple regimes of knowledge production such as statistics on migrant population draw on the data recorded in the population register during the municipal registration process, which further extends the impact of this data. We show how the welfare state system, claimed to be universal, is highly conjunctural depending on the information the person receives from different interlocutors, and on the presumably apolitical “policy on the fly” enacted at the registration desk.

Practicing Multi-Sited Ethnography: Reflections, Strategies, and Tools for Qualitative Research on Transnational Migration

Practicing Multi-Sited Ethnography: Reflections, Strategies, and Tools for Qualitative Research on Transnational Migration

The cognitive and sociopolitical categorization of contemporary art through the becoming of Diva

ABSTRACT The emergence and dissolution of market categories are explained through segregated processes of cognitive, social and political categorization. We argue that market categories are in constant categorization processes that occur simultaneously day by day, following the ontological philosophy of becoming. With interdisciplinary research and inspired by multi-sited ethnography, we used more than 21 hours of recorded material, media articles, Facebook comments and visual representations to study the dynamics of the contemporary art market category through the becoming of Diva, land art in Pernambuco, Brazil. We highlight five theoretical contributions: (i) the difference between the speed of change at the core and periphery of a category; (ii) the speed of change as the intensity of interactional processes; (iii) cognitive categorization as apparent stability; (iv) the similarity between the socio-material structure of members and their respective category; (v) dynamics of a category as a result of cognitive and sociopolitical categorization.

How language power, white subalternity and compressed modernity frame highly-skilled non-Western migrants in an East-German company: insights from multi-sited ethnography

PurposeThis paper shows the benefits of multi-sited ethnography for global migration studies in management, in particular when cosmopolitan self-initiated expatriates meet a local setting.Design/methodology/approachThe author conducted a multi-sited ethnography to trace how a local East German research organization’s well-intended approach to integration becomes condescending.FindingsHighly skilled non-Western migrant employees who represent English-language cosmopolitanism are framed as negatively “foreign” by corporate discourses and practices. This phenomenon can only be understood if one follows the interconnections of language power, White subalternity and compressed modernity and if one considers the immediate surroundings, the historical context of East German identity and wider migration frames in Germany.Research limitations/implicationsMulti-sited ethnography, if power-sensitive and historically-aware, is suitable for understanding the multi-level phenomenon of global migration and identifying limiting framing-effects on management and organizations. Researcher standpoint is both its strength and its limitation.Practical implicationsManagers and companies can “imagine otherwise” and move beyond the unquestioned dominant frames limiting their problem analyses and, consequently, their strategies and actions.Social implicationsManagers and companies are enabled to move beyond individual- and corporate-level approaches to managing migration at work and can thus take up full social responsibility in the sense of good corporate citizenship on a global level. Global mobility researchers can work towards an inclusive migration theory.Originality/valueMulti-sited ethnography, in particular, one that is power-sensitive and historically aware, is an approach not yet applied to migration in the context of management and organization. By means of an example, this paper illustrates the value of this approach and enables researchers to understand its main principles. Compressed modernity and White subalternity are introduced as novel concepts structuring migration, and language power emerges as relevant far beyond the scope of the multinational corporation.

Multi-sited Ethnography on a Nexus in Religioscape

This article focuses on how and why to investigate shared religious places with the methodological approach of multi-sited ethnography. Places can be considered as interconnected nexuses in space that reveal social relations. In consequence, shared religious places are nexuses where various religious traditions manifest. Several places are connected by various religious groups, for example by visiting and building a network within the religioscape of a region. Researchers should consider this interconnection of places during their field research by frequenting connected nexuses. Thus, they are able to contextualize single shared religious places within the religioscape. This article aims to illustrate this methodological approach of multi-sited ethnography to investigate interconnected nexuses within a religioscape. This study exemplifies this approach using the case study of the St Naum monastery which is located in North Macedonia and visited by Christians and Muslims from various ethnic groups of this region. Hence, this article tackles the aim by asking: What is the religioscape of the St Naum monastery? Which places are connected with this monastery? And what information is gained about the monastery by frequenting the other places? This study is complemented by my experiences during field research in Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo.

Structuralizing Culture: Multicultural Neoliberalism, Migration, and Mental Health in Santiago, Chile

The arrival of Afro-descendant migrants, mainly from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has led to the emergence of new discourses on migration, multiculturalism, and mental health in health services in Chile since 2010. In this article, I explore how mental health institutions, experts, and practitioners have taken a cultural turn in working with migrant communities in this new multicultural scenario. Based on a multisited ethnography conducted over 14 months in a neighbourhood of northern Santiago, I focus on the Migrant Program—a primary health care initiative implemented since 2013. I argue that health practitioners have tended to redefine cultural approaches in structural terms focusing mainly on class aspects such poverty, social stratification, and socioeconomic inequalities. I affirm that this structural-based approach finds its historical roots in a political and ideological context that provided the conditions for the development of community psychiatry experiences during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in multicultural and gender policies promoted by the state since the 1990s. This case reveals how health institutions and practitioners have recently engaged in debates on migration and intersectionality from a structural approach in Chile.

Broadening Ethnographic Following: From Following Conflicts to Following Agreements and Silences in Vaccination Debates

ABSTRACT George Marcus’s methodology for multi-sited ethnography is widely discussed and applied in anthropology and the strategy of ‘following the conflict’ has been a fruitful approach to studying controversies and conflicts. Drawing on my shifting methodology in the initial stages of a digital ethnography project on vaccination-related online community forums, I explore ‘the war’ on vaccines using a broadened strategy that includes following agreements and silences within the controversy. By examining the debate in conjunction with medical anthropology research, I discuss how both vaccine-cautious and vaccine-confident forum members challenge conventional debate divisions, such as scientific–unscientific, evidential–anecdotal and genetic–environmental, while still adhering to medico-scientific discourses as zones of agreement. Whereas an agreement-oriented methodology contributes to research on liminal zones and reconfigured forms of bio-citizenship and literacy, the strategy of ‘following silences’ highlights the limits to liminality in a debate underpinned by adultism that silences the views of young people.

Local–translocal–postlocal: Emerging affordances for multi-sited ethnography

This article proposes a systematization of the within, between and beyond sites through which ethnographic field-making takes shape. It draws on fieldwork in Brazil, Greece, Nigeria, the UK and the social media among congregations affiliated with postcolonial Nigeria’s denominations of Pentecostal orientation. The main argument builds upon the conceptual continuum local–translocal–postlocal. Whereas the local exists through familiarity, the translocal emerges at the overlapping of familiarities, and the postlocal as a gesture of familiarity’s reconfiguration. This systematization advances epistemological and ethical extents of multi-sited ethnography, as it is premised upon the revision of designations identifying the research subject(s) as a ‘Nigerian Pentecostal diaspora’. While introducing a knowing of locals, translocals and postlocals over nationally, denominationally and diasporically bounded individuals, the continuum re-theorizes multi-sited-ness under local, translocal and postlocal affordances. In questioning identity designations, the paper foregrounds nuanced positionalities of ‘field’ constitutors to destabilize subtle conventions of totalization and the alterity-ipseity divide.

What is quality in long covid care? Lessons from a national quality improvement collaborative and multi-site ethnography

BackgroundLong covid (post covid-19 condition) is a complex condition with diverse manifestations, uncertain prognosis and wide variation in current approaches to management. There have been calls for formal quality standards to reduce a so-called “postcode lottery” of care. The original aim of this study—to examine the nature of quality in long covid care and reduce unwarranted variation in services—evolved to focus on examining the reasons why standardizing care was so challenging in this condition.MethodsIn 2021–2023, we ran a quality improvement collaborative across 10 UK sites. The dataset reported here was mostly but not entirely qualitative. It included data on the origins and current context of each clinic, interviews with staff and patients, and ethnographic observations at 13 clinics (50 consultations) and 45 multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings (244 patient cases). Data collection and analysis were informed by relevant lenses from clinical care (e.g. evidence-based guidelines), improvement science (e.g. quality improvement cycles) and philosophy of knowledge.ResultsParticipating clinics made progress towards standardizing assessment and management in some topics; some variation remained but this could usually be explained. Clinics had different histories and path dependencies, occupied a different place in their healthcare ecosystem and served a varied caseload including a high proportion of patients with comorbidities. A key mechanism for achieving high-quality long covid care was when local MDTs deliberated on unusual, complex or challenging cases for which evidence-based guidelines provided no easy answers. In such cases, collective learning occurred through idiographic (case-based) reasoning, in which practitioners build lessons from the particular to the general. This contrasts with the nomothetic reasoning implicit in evidence-based guidelines, in which reasoning is assumed to go from the general (e.g. findings of clinical trials) to the particular (management of individual patients).ConclusionNot all variation in long covid services is unwarranted. Largely because long covid’s manifestations are so varied and comorbidities common, generic “evidence-based” standards require much individual adaptation. In this complex condition, quality improvement resources may be productively spent supporting MDTs to optimise their case-based learning through interdisciplinary discussion. Quality assessment of a long covid service should include review of a sample of individual cases to assess how guidelines have been interpreted and personalized to meet patients’ unique needs.Study registrationNCT05057260, ISRCTN15022307.

When Latin American Feminism Shapes Psychoanalysis: Acts, Defiance, and Appropriations

ABSTRACT Research on psychoanalysis and politics has traditionally focused on the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis. The relationship between activism and psychoanalysis has been less extensively studied. There is a gap in the literature regarding the impact of collective action on psychoanalysis, including its theories, institutional policies, and clinical practices. This article aims to address the gap by analyzing the impact of the recent wave of Latin American intersectional feminist mobilizations on psychoanalysis. Through a multi-sited ethnography conducted with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic organizations in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in 2022 and 2023, I argue that intersectional feminist mobilization has influenced psychoanalysis through acts of citizenship that are expanding the boundaries of the psychoanalytic field. This impact is evinced by collective acts of defiance, the diffusion of feminist protest tactics, and the adoption of reactivation practices that challenge, reframe, and reconfigure psychoanalytic concepts.

Using practice theories to understand, analyse and articulate followership in early childhood education sites

ABSTRACT This article delves into a methodological approach that challenges traditional followership and leadership research. It presents the application of Nicolini’s theory-method package, involving three tools of theory, methods, and vocabularies to articulate data. The theory-method package is a valuable tool for researchers in Australia and globally employing a practice-based approach to study work practices and educational systems. The package was used to analyse and articulate followership practices by integrating followership theories, multi-site ethnography, the theory of practice architectures and reflexive thematic analysis. Through these innovative lenses, the study provides fresh insights into how followership is practiced in early childhood settings. Notably, it challenges established leadership theories by emphasizing the multidimensional intricacies of followership practices, which extend beyond traditional leader-follower relationships. The study underscores the importance of choosing appropriate theories and methods when examining social practices within education systems. It highlights the value of adopting a practice lens to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of followership. This research both advances understandings of followership and identifies broader implications for the study of followership in educational contexts. It also highlights the need to navigate the seductive allure of theories and to embrace reflexive trepidations as part of the analytical journey.

Becoming a (Neuro)migrant: Haitian Migration, Translation and Subjectivation in Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted over 14 months in northern Santiago, I examine how the introduction of a series of health policies and the global mental health agenda has interacted with and impacted Haitian migrants in the context of a postdictatorship neoliberal Chile (1990–2019). Specifically, I explore the interactions between health and social institutions, mental health practitioners, psy technologies, and Haitian migrants, highlighting migrants’ subjectivation processes and everyday life. I argue that Haitian migrants engage with heterogeneous subjectivation processes in their interactions with health and social institutions, challenging normative values of integration into Chilean society. These processes are marked not only by the presence of, or exposure to, psy interventions and mental health discourses but also by the degree of compatibility between a psychiatric and neurological language and Haitians’ ideals and moral frameworks.

Home and Journey in Experiences of the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy

This paper explores the experiential reality surrounding the Divine Liturgy, a Byzantine rite in Orthodox Christianity that has remained central to Eastern practice globally since Late Antiquity. The article draws on multi-sited ethnography in the glocal context of the Orthodox Church of Finland (OCF), a national church of minority and a site of multicultural interaction. Our analysis shows participants articulate their experiences with the Liturgy in an epistemology of interiority by which (1) they constantly, if unevenly, and agentically engage with the Liturgy in a form of individual, vernacular artistry. This interiority is (2) both sensorial and interpretative, and (3) ambivalently grounded in motifs of being “at home” and, at the same time, “on a journey.” That is, participants from different backgrounds make a connection to the Liturgy both as a spiritual and a literal home, relating to different elements—Finnish, Karelian, Byzantine, and Church Slavonic—in its ritualistic aesthetics. At the same time, Liturgy emerges as a perpetual journey of new openings and glimpses, informed by past experiences and life trajectories, and participants relate to these two aspects simultaneously.

Taking their Word(s)

Abstract Various adults seeking migratory testimonies actively pressure young people ‘on the move’ to Europe, categorised as ‘unaccompanied minors’ (UAMs), to ‘open up’ and share their stories. The suspicion that hangs over their minority and over the credibility of their stories can cause the adolescents to modify their biographies, to conceal, alter or invent elements. How can the researcher bond with them and produce reliable qualitative data without reproducing forms of ‘biographical violence’? Based on a multisited ethnography ‘on the move’ in Morocco, Spain and France, this article invites exploration of young people's shifting biographies throughout their journey to Europe. It supports the idea that the scientific and ethical challenges of collecting the voices of young people can also constitute levers of scientific knowledge.

Recent developments in anthropological methods for the study of complex societies

The focus of traditional anthropology has been on the “simple and primitive” tribal societies that still exist. The question of how anthropology can carry on to study complex civilizations, especially those with a long history like Chinese civilization, has gained attention due to the discipline’s development and expansion. Anthropologists around the world have developed several significant research methods in the study of complex societies in response to this challenge. Taking anthropology research in China as an example, these methods include not only the summary and improvement of Western anthropological methods applied by Chinese scholars to Chinese practice but also methodological innovations based on traditional Chinese research paradigms and explorations of anthropological fieldwork methods in the digital age. In China, the latest advancements in anthropological methods for studying complex societies can be seen in historical anthropology, multi-sited ethnography, internet anthropology, and Rapid Anthropological Assessment. This effectively responds to many doubts about whether anthropological fieldwork methods are capable of studying complex societies and spurred anthropology’s reciprocal adaptation to new fields of study and contemporary needs. In this sense, anthropological research on complex societies is entirely possible, feasible, and necessary.

Artisanal collaborations in the Mexican fashion industry: The case of Otomí embroiderers and Carla Fernández

The present article aims to demonstrate the intersected relations between Indigenous communities and designers in the fashion industry. These interrelations are explained through a case study between Dotnit, an Otomí embroidery cooperative, and the Mexican designer Carla Fernández. An extensive multi-sited ethnography was carried out between 2013 and 2017 in Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo, and Mexico City. Both places were explored with the purpose of understanding the complex relationships between the local and the global through the introduction of tenango embroidery into the fashion world. This research aims to understand the consumption of Indigenous textiles in a glocalized world by following the paths of diversion that tenango embroidery navigates through artisans, designers and consumers. Through the article, interrelationships among different agents will be examined in an effort to understand the complexities within artisan–designer dynamics.

Aiming at the 'proper' body: How exoskeletons foster 'risky' bodies and conflicting knowledge regimes.

Exoskeletal devices are new technologies that have been developed in the medical field to provide assistance and rehabilitation for persons with motor impairments. Among these impairments, spinal cord injury and stroke are the most common. Drawing on materials collected during multi-sited ethnography conducted in France, Germany and Switzerland from 2014 to 2019, I suggest that exoskeletons contribute to a more general process that I identify as 'aiming at the "proper" body'. As they materially craft motor impaired bodies but also are responsible for datafication and dataveillance, exoskeletons allow to categorise new aspects of 'risky' bodies. Simultaneously, they foster conflicts between experts' perspectives about rehabilitation practice and the users' phenomenological experiences that exoskeletons aim to transform. After describing how exoskeletons expand the realm of contemporary medical technologies in their purpose of 'aiming at "proper" bodies' while being 'miraculous', I identify two conceptions of 'risky' bodies: a first one related to materiality, a second one to processes of digitalisation to which exoskeletons actively participate. Finally, I investigate some conflicting levels between the regimes of expert knowledge and the phenomenological experiences of the users and reassess the latter's role in rehabilitation practice with exoskeletons.

Democratizing Platform Work from Below

This article aims at contributing to the debate on democratizing work by looking at platform work and food delivery in particular. Based on an extended multi-sited ethnography, the article analyses two relevant case studies of workers' organisations, the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain in the UK and the grassroots group Deliverance Milano in Italy. First, it shows how efforts to democratise and decommodify platform work, as well as the issue of decarbonisation, take shape collectively from below and through conflict in order to compensate the absence of a robust and effective regulatory system. Therefore, it is primarily an effort to create a dêmos with the right to demand rights. Second, the conflict emerges as a means of improving working conditions, denouncing greenwashing practices, an opportunity for collective learning and experimenting practices of resistance. Due to these reasons, practices of conflict inspire the renewal of collective representation strategies in non-standard working contexts with a workforce scattered and casualised. Finally, the struggles for democratization, decommodification and decarbonisation in food delivery show that the contribution of independent unions and grassroots group plays a fundamental role, complementary to that of well-established trade unions and public institutions.