Multi-sited Ethnography Research Articles

Sobre o corpo racializado em campo: masculinidades negras e suas implicações para o trabalho de campo antropológico

This article aims to analyze the different ways structural racism is present in everyday life, starting from the development of the anthropological fieldwork. Thus, the experience of this study’s author is a starting point to this discussion, since, through an intersectional perspective, the black men have no place in the intellectual production. On the contrary, the black masculinity, through the naturalization of hegemonic perspectives, tend to be symbolically isolated, reduced to virility – sexual vigor – and physical strength, a target of fear, what through a necropolitic, seems to justify the so common executions of young black men. The reactions of surprise shown by the interlocutors reveal, through a multi-sited ethnography, that this racialized body can no longer be ignored in the discussion of the anthropological knowledge.

Capturing implementation knowledge: applying focused ethnography to study how implementers generate and manage knowledge in the scale-up of obesity prevention programs

BackgroundBespoke electronic information management systems are being used for large-scale implementation delivery of population health programs. They record sites reached, coordinate activity, and track target achievement. However, many systems have been abandoned or failed to integrate into practice. We investigated the unusual endurance of an electronic information management system that has supported the successful statewide implementation of two evidence-based childhood obesity prevention programs for over 5 years. Upwards of 80% of implementation targets are being achieved.MethodsWe undertook co-designed partnership research with policymakers, practitioners, and IT designers. Our working hypothesis was that the science of getting evidence-based programs into practice rests on an in-depth understanding of the role programs play in the ongoing system of local relationships and multiple accountabilities. We conducted a 12-month multisite ethnography of 14 implementation teams, including their use of an electronic information management system, the Population Health Information Management System (PHIMS).ResultsAll teams used PHIMS, but also drew on additional informal tools and technologies to manage, curate, and store critical information for implementation. We identified six functions these tools performed: (1) relationship management, (2) monitoring progress towards target achievement, (3) guiding and troubleshooting PHIMS use, (4) supporting teamwork, (5) evaluation, and (6) recording extra work at sites not related to program implementation. Informal tools enabled practitioners to create locally derived implementation knowledge and provided a conduit between knowledge generation and entry into PHIMS.ConclusionsImplementation involves knowing and formalizing what to do, as well as how to do it. Our ethnography revealed the importance of hitherto uncharted knowledge about how practitioners develop implementation knowledge about how to do implementation locally, within the context of scaling up. Harnessing this knowledge for local use required adaptive and flexible systems which were enabled by informal tools and technologies. The use of informal tools also complemented and supported PHIMS use suggesting that both informal and standardized systems are required to support coordinated, large-scale implementation. While the content of the supplementary knowledge required to deliver the program was specific to context, functions like managing relationships with sites and helping others in the team may be applicable elsewhere.

An assemblage of framings and tamings: multi-sited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology

ABSTRACT The social life of methods – the idea that research methods are an important topic of inquiry in and of themselves – has been receiving increasing interest in scholarship on the organisation of the economy and social life, including Science and Technology Studies (STS). In STS, especially ethnographic methods have been important for decades. This article develops an ethnographic methodology for the study of a very new case that challenges the assumptions underpinning many STS ethnographies. This case is the networked energy infrastructure, and we specifically focus on its risk management and markets. Drawing upon recent STS interest in multi-sited ethnography, the article’s research design is termed the multi-sited analysis of infrastructures (MSAI), and it develops the concepts of framing and taming to focus on meaning formation as mundane sense-making and as technicalised reasoning on different sites. We demonstrate these concepts in a multi-sited ethnography of energy infrastructure and its risk management and market activities in public regulation, special control rooms (including energy trading), and households. The article rounds up by explaining how the application of our methodology contributes to the advancement of interests in multi-sited ethnography, relating our research to the previous work in the fields of STS, infrastructure studies, and their methods.

Ciberactivismo menstrual: feminismo en las redes sociales

This article analyzes the use of digital platforms by groups and women who focus their work on the dissemination of the naturalization and depathologization of the female body and the menstrual cycle. This proposal of cyber-activism poses among its objectives the questioning of the blood taboo in order to transform the menstrual experience of young and adult women. Promote the use of ecological technologies and propose ways of corporal appropriation through feminine representations linked to a feminized notion of the sacred, a question that characterizes the female spirituality of alternative bases and ecofeminism in its symbolic constructions. Through digital ethnography and multisite ethnography, this article analyzes the ways in which menstrual cyber-activism is configured from the social networks, the symbols, discourses and narratives that these groups and profiles use to achieve their objectives, as well as the interweaving of feminist, ecofeminist and spiritual discourses on corporal appropriation, self-knowledge and self-care.

Medellín in the headlines: The role of the media in the dissemination of urban models

The circulation of ideas about ‘best practices’ and policies shape multi-scalar governance networks. This paper examines the role of the international press, both as an actor and as a medium for the circulation of urban planning models. We aim to deepen the theoretical notions on the role of media, particularly the written press, in building narratives of ‘urban models’, and their circulation in other contexts. And second, by extending the reaches of multi-sited ethnography as the main methodological approach to follow policy mobility. This research monitored, and analysed news items published about Medellín on the digital editions of several newspapers across the globe between 2004 and 2017. The resulting examination shows, firstly, how the changes of the image of the city has been portrayed over time, with a growth of news items highlighting Medellín's urban model as an inspirational source for other cities in the world. Secondly, the research shows the importance of international media for building a particular storytelling about urban transformations. We argue that newspapers constitute a key informational infrastructure for urban policy mobility contributing to amplify mythical narratives of ‘urban models’ and to institute new metrics of good governance.

Essentialism as a form of resistance: an ethnography of gender dynamics in contemporary home births

ABSTRACT Feminist scholars have criticised the essentialist construction of femininity associated with ‘natural’ childbirth movements. Along these debates, planned midwife-attended home births stand as the typical representation of this counterculture. In this article, we present data from a multi-sited ethnography on Portuguese home births where we analyse how gender ideologies are reproduced and operationalised by families and home birth professionals. Our findings illustrate how home birth care and associated practices are configuring apparently contradicting gender ideologies. Essentialist perspectives, which conceive birth as an opportunity to reconnect with women's oppressed femininity, coexist with non-binary conceptions of gender, where masculinity and femininity are regarded as fluid forms of energy that everyone has in different degrees, and where men are potentially welcomed in the birth setting, either as fathers or as professionals. Given the androcentric references of modern obstetrics and the marginal position of home birth, we argue that essentialism was constructed as a form of resistance.

Care circulation and the so-called ‘elderly’: exploring care in 4G transnational Zhejianese families

ABSTRACT Studies on care in Chinese transnational families often rely on bi-generational exchanges, failing to capture how care circulates within the families from a fully-generational perspective. The so-called ‘elderly’ is a key group for understanding care and mobility in these families; nevertheless, the existing research focuses either on their role as children caregivers or sees them as dependent people, resulting in a polarized perspective which also fails to understand the fluidity of care roles along the life course. Moreover, the generic term ‘the elderly’ may refer to one of several generations (grandparents/ great-grandparents). Based on qualitative data from a multi-sited ethnography (in China and Spain), this paper explores the circulation of care within four-generation transnational Zhejianese families. In these, the gendered construction of care work is the norm, despite the fact that new spaces for challenging specific gendered roles and practices are being created. In contrast, a high level of plurality and fluidity in care exchanges and care roles across generations, time and space has been observed. These factors are shaped, to different degrees, by local and transnational contexts, with the Chinese culture-system playing a key role. Finally, the paper highlights the contributions of the grandparents’ generation to families and society.

The contestation of social memory in the new media: A case study of the 1965 killings in Indonesia

While today’s Indonesian democratic government remains committed to the New Order orthodoxy about the mass killings of 1965, new counter-narratives challenging official history are emerging in the new media. Applying mixed-methods and multi-sited ethnography, this study aims to extend our collaborative understanding of the most recent developments in this situation by identifying multiple online interpersonal stories, deliberations, and debates related to the case as well as offline field studies in Java and Bali. Practically and theoretically, we ask how the tragedy of the 1965 killings is contested in the new media and how social memory plays out in this contestation. The study finds that new media potentially act as emancipatory sites channeling and liberating the voices of those that the nation has stigmatized as ‘objectively guilty’. We argue that the arena of contestation is threefold: individual, public vs. state narrative, and theoretical. As such, the transborder space of the new media strongly mediates corrective new voices to fill missing gaps in the convoluted history of this central event of modern Indonesian history.

The impact of globalisation on gift systems: An exploratory study of Senegalese migration

This article highlights the impact of globalisation on gift systems. It is based on a multisited ethnography of traditional Soninke migration in France. Using Mauss’ seminal work as a starting point, the gift register can be used to highlight: (1) the embedding of gift in a total prestation system, (2) changes in the traditional forms of gift and the emergence of a new, hybrid form of gift as a result of Westernisation and (3) the resurgence of identity-related tensions at the individual and collective level as a consequence of the changes in gift forms.

The ecosystem of a ‘wealth-tech’ culture: the birth of networked financial subjects in South Korea

Starting with an online financial community in South Korea, this article explores the simultaneous production of a new form of subjectivity and a networked ecosystem of financial cultures. Using a multi-sited ethnography to track the movements of users as they moved across different spaces, this article finds that users gifted financial information to each other, blended laity and expertise, and reappropriated financial communities into a third place defined as an informal, public place hosting sociable conversations. Through the grafting of prosocial activities (e.g. sharing, gifting, and social networking) onto financial self-management, users were shaped as networked financial subjects and exhibited a distinctive mode of selfhood informed by both financial subjectivity and neoliberal networked subjectivity. At the same time, their practices spawned countless social, convivial groups as well as entrepreneurial financial gurus. By demonstrating the complex webs of on- and off-line groups, programs, relationships, and social networks, this article illustrates how the networked ecosystem of financial cultures brought the markets and commons into coalescence.

Mixed methods evaluation of a hospital group model using an embedded research approach: study protocol

IntroductionHospital group models represent an organisational form that aims to bring together multiple provider organisations with a central headquarters and unified leadership responsible for locally managed operating units, standardised systems...

Encounters with difference: Mental health nurses and Indigenous Australian users of mental health services.

This article presents findings from the multi-sited ethnography of mental health nursing practice as it relates to the care of Indigenous users of public mental health services in Australia. It provides an analysis of mental health nurses beliefs and ideas about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people encountered over the course of this research. The Indigenous service user was positioned as Other to the non-Indigenous mental health nurse, and to non-Indigenous service users. Cultural difference and the legacy of colonization, including its impact on the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, contributed to these beliefs of alterity. Despite emphasizing the differences with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in mental health services, nurses did not clearly relate this to Indigenous ways of understanding ill health. While cultural differences were recognized, what they meant for the nurses or their nursing practice was interpreted in different ways. In these circumstances, approaches towards care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people varied between nurses.

There and Back Again: How Consumers Live and Extend Narrative Brands

Extraordinary experiences create narrative worlds, defined as coherent, representative situation models woven from narrative elements. While narrative worlds are transitory, the challenge of returning to the everyday world has not been systematically unpacked. This study determines three dimensions of extraordinary experience that distinguish between the ranges of closing narrative worlds: intensity, engagement, and temporality. A multi-site ethnography of live action role-play identifies the challenge of closing a narrative world as “bleed”: the influence of consumers’ feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in the narrative world on those in the everyday world. Four types of bleed are found: disembedding, dissipation, disembodiment, and romantic. Consumers can cope with bleed by enacting strategies from one of two groups: keeping the portal to the narrative world open or closing the portal, resulting in either advantageous transformation or disadvantageous trans-mutilation. The findings have theoretical implications for understanding portals, narrative transportation, and extraordinary experience as well as practical implications for managing the capitalization of—and consumer distress from—experiential consumption.

Strategically “Out of Place”: Unemployed Migrants Mobilizing Rural and Urban Identities in North India

Increasing numbers of young people are migrating across the Global South to pursue tertiary education and find employment. In north India, though, as elsewhere, migrants are often unable to realize the kind of social mobility to which they aspire. This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed male migrants perform identities to contend their marginality. Through a multisited ethnography, during which I accompanied participants to their rural villages as well as the regional city of Dehradun, I argue that young men strategically mobilize identities that register them as “out of place.” By drawing together critical migration studies and mobilities literatures, I show how young men perform rural identities in urban areas and urban identities in rural ones to realize status and respect. In a context of widespread unemployment and uncertainty, this is an important strategy through which migrants seek to position themselves as worthy youth with meaningful prospects, at the same time as they leave open the possibility of both rural and urban futures. Key Words: identities, India, migrants, mobilities, young men.

Family project or individual choice? Exploring agency in young Eritreans’ migration

ABSTRACTSince the beginning of 2010s, the movement of unaccompanied minors from Eritrea has significantly increased and has become the object of international concern. This migration is often explained by media and humanitarian actors as the mechanical reaction to recent conscription campaigns by the Eritrean government. However, these explanations fail to consider that young people's mobilities emerge from a context of protracted crisis. Building on the literature on chronicity and crisis in the African context, this article examines what it means to be young in Eritrea and how it relates to the motivations for and the dynamics of youth migration from the country. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, the article points to the active role of young migrants – even minors – escaping from contexts of protracted crisis. While analysing the structural constraints faced by Eritrean girls and boys, I first show how migration in this context is often seen as a crucial step to reaching adulthood that has significant gender differences. Then, I explore the interactions between family expectations and individual agency by analysing my informants’ mobility patterns outside Eritrea and in secondary movements towards Europe. While most available literature tends to portray young migrants’ trajectories as the result of structural circumstances or family projects, I illustrate how many of my informants often undertook their journeys without family consensus to pursue personal aspirations as well as communal values regarding moral worthiness and family well-being.

From the Mosque to the Town Square: Some Reflections on Islam, Youth, Social Movements, and Citizenship

An observation of the dynamics of the citizen participation of young people defined as Muslims who frequent Madrid’s mosques and squares raises the possibility that these young Spanish Muslims are developing their own civic/political participation as citizens and natives. This indicates a particular religious/cultural identification disassociated from the predefined religious view that characterizes them as actors in a process born out of their aspirations as citizens. For the most part, children of immigrants share an everyday experience in which they are defined by their religion, while also expressing their desire to break away from labels and distance themselves from the identification of Islam as experienced in immigrant communities, institutionalized Islam in mosques, associations and cultural centres, and the Islam of convert activism. The journey from the mosque to the town square is one taken time and again by these young people—followed during a multisited ethnography involving six years of research—that clears the way for a religiosity that is closely tied to the everyday experiences of young people continuously hearing about other situations (e.g., the war in Syria, the protests during the so-called Arab Spring, the 15 May Movement). In the process of differentiation and confrontation with Islamic people in the Spanish context, new association-building and new activism have emerged, with some connections to European youth associations and a growing commitment to global causes like the fight against Islamophobia and against international terrorism (the ‘Je suis Charlie’ movement) and feminist causes (#MeToo).

Imagining and tinkering with assistive robotics in care for the disabled

Abstract The media and political-managerial levels focus on the opportunities to re-perform the Scandinavian welfare states through digitization. Especially in Denmark, this trend is prominent. Welfare technology is a Scandinavian notion used to point at assistive technologies intending to support the elderly, the disabled and care providers. Feeding assistive robotics (FAR) is a welfare technology relevant to citizens with no or low function in their arms. Despite national dissemination strategies, it proves difficult to recruit suitable users. There have been many promises for the potential of assistive robotics including more cost-efficient healthcare delivery, engaged patients and connected care providers. However, the realities of enacting assistive robotics, whether as patients or care providers, can be complicated in ways often unanticipated by government agencies and technology developers. This study discusses governmental agencies’ and technology developers’ visions with regard to what robotics may do and argues that these visions intertwine with affected stakeholders’ organizing of theirworlds. On this founding, the article discusses the resulting tinkering during implementation. The study exemplifies and demonstrates how ethnography can be used as an important method in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) research. The Actor Network Theory idea of ‘follow the actor’ inspired the study that took place as multi-sited ethnography at different locations in Denmark and Sweden. Based on desk research, observation of meals and interviews the study examines sociotechnical imaginaries and their practical and ethical implications.Human and FAR interaction demands engagement, sustained patience and understanding of the citizen’s particular body, identity and situation. The article contributes to the HRI literature by providing detailed empirical analysis based on an ethnographic studywhere political strategies, technology developers’ assumptions and affected stakeholders’ everyday hassles are in focus at the same time.

Un/Doing Ethnicity in Intervening Swiss Street-Level Bureaucracy. A Police Service and a Child Welfare Service – an Ethnographic Perspective

Abstract The article presents the empirical findings of a multi-site ethnography in two organizations in Swiss street-level bureaucracy. We examined both a municipal child welfare office and the police force of a medium-sized city. The focus was on the question as to whether and how ethnic differentiation takes place in such public agencies and what role it plays at work. The findings suggest that un/doing ethnicity follows an instrumental logic and that it is executed in manifold and ambivalent ways.

Exploding the Hourglass: Next-Level Intercultural Theatre Research

Ric Knowles’s Performing the Intercultural City draws on ten years of multi-sited ethnography to chart and theorize the complexities of contemporary intercultural theatre.

From participant observation to participant action(-to-be): Multi-sited ethnography of displacement in Cyprus

The field–fieldworker encounter in the contemporary ethnographic circumstances creates moving fields where the archetypal Malinowskian conventions have been experienced as insufficient practices. Calls were made for theoretical reconfiguration of a fieldsite from bounded single site to a multi-sited one. This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in an abandoned village, demonstrating how a fieldsite circumstantially oscillates from online to offline, factual to imaginary when attachment is still resilient and the desire to return is still alive. Its contribution to literature is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates how to adjust the academic qualitative inquiry to ensure a move towards the desired social changes by cultivating the role of the ethnographer from participant observer to a participant in action in the era of ‘public-or-perish’. Secondly, it adds an important dimension to multi-sited ethnography: a new ‘future’ site, a new stroke to George E. Marcus’s ‘spatial canvas’ in the process of place-making.