Multi-sited Ethnography Research Articles

Investigating the Internationalisation of State Nobility: A Reflexive Return to Double Game Strategies – An interview with Yves DEZALAY

This interview with Yves Dezalay focuses on his research strategy and the link between a Bourdieusian approach and a multi-sited ethnography. Yves Dezalay explains his strategy of doing interviews with the lawyers who are part of their “state nobilities”, in what order to interview them, with whom to begin and for what reasons. He warned about the dangers of trying to reproduce the ways of questioning elite actors as if they were important individuals without taking into account more socio genetic perspectives and especially the prosopography of the group and their respective positions. Collective biographies analysing the relations between the actors are the most important part of the research.

Everywhere and nowhere at once: the challenges of following in multi-sited ethnography

PurposeIn multi-sited ethnography, “following” (of, e.g. persons, objects and events) is used as a device to structure fieldwork. The purpose of this paper is to problematize and substantiate the notion of following, illustrating that, when adopting a “following” strategy, the endless number of potential trails one could follow may lead a fieldworker to be both everywhere and nowhere at once.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on the experiences and insights derived from a multi-sited ethnography of the strategic collaborations that emerged after the Dutch healthcare reform of 2015. Fieldwork was conducted between 2015 and 2017, and consisted of participant observations, shadowing and interviews.FindingsAn approach well suited to studying the contemporary problems that cut across organizational boundaries, multi-sited ethnography is both valuable and more challenging due to: (1) the continuous need to negotiate access, which stimulates the researcher to reflect on his or her positionality in the field; (2) the inevitable pressure it puts on a researcher to “unfollow” their field(s) and to regain critical distance and (3) its perplexing ability to highlight the lack of a whole, unveiling instead a plethora of perspectives across sites which may or may not align.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper ends with three key considerations for future multi-sited research endeavours.Originality/valueAlthough the metaphor of following can help to structure fieldwork, the practice of following in multi-sited ethnography is not as straightforward as it appears: there are countless potential “paths” to follow, and researchers themselves must decide which trails to choose and when to step back and “unfollow” their field(s).

Reconfiguring health knowledges? Contemporary modes of self-care as 'everyday fringe medicine'.

The contestation of expertise is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the field of health and well-being, on which this article focuses. A multitude of practices and communities that stand in contentious relationships with established forms of medical expertise and promote personalised modes of self-care have proliferated across Euro-American societies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in three domains – body–mind–spirit therapies, vaccine hesitancy and consumer-grade digital self-tracking – we map such practices through the concept of ‘everyday fringe medicine’. The concept of everyday fringe medicine enables us to bring together various critical health and well-being practices and to unravel the complex modes of contestation and appreciation of the medical establishment that are articulated within them. We find three critiques of the medical establishment – critiques of medical knowledge production, professional practices and the knowledge base – which make visible the complexities related to public understandings of science within everyday fringe medicine.

Media Ethnography in Diasporic Communities

Media and communication technology plays a crucial role in diasporic communities by helping members to maintain complex connections with their places of origin, and at the same time to live their life in the diaspora. The social interactions, belief systems, identity struggles, and the daily life of diasporic communities are indeed reflected in their media consumption and production. A researcher can apply media ethnography to uncover some of the deeper meanings of diasporic experiences. However, a researcher should not take media ethnographic methods lightly since a variety of issues must be addressed to justify its use as a legitimate approach. This article examines various forms of media ethnographic fieldwork (multi-sited ethnography), issues related to researching one’s own community (native ethnography), and the debates surrounding duration of immersion in ethnography research within the context of diasporic communities. Careful consideration of such issues is also necessary to establish the “ethnographic authority” of the researcher.

When the Ghosts Live in the Nursery: Postpartum Depression and the Grandmother-Mother-Baby Triad in Luzhou, China.

In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with ten families in Luzhou as part of a larger multi-sited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the grandmother-mother-baby triad model of infant care in interior urban China accentuates the pain of depressed postpartum mothers by making it difficult for them to rid their homes of the ghosts of past trauma and lost futures. Mothers resent and fear grandmothers even as they rely on them to care for their babies. Memories of trauma, perceived displacement by the grandmother as the mother figure for their babies, and lack of control over their households and children characterize postpartum mothers' experiences. Mothers primarily blame their mothers-in-law for their unhappiness even as they depend on themselves to "self-adjust."

Measuring the Middle: Technopolitics and the Making of Brazil’s New Middle Class

Between 2004 and 2013, an array of social policies converted Brazil into an international showcase of economic growth and income redistribution. Economists, policymakers, politicians and marketers heralded the end of endemic poverty and the incorporation of millions into a newly defined “middle class.” This article unpacks this story of inclusionary development by considering the controversies surrounding the production and circulation of large numbers, and how such controversies sustained the technopolitics of Brazil’s “new middle class.” I draw on multisited ethnography conducted in Washington, DC, Brasilia, and São Paulo among think tanks, governmental sectors, the World Bank, and market research institutes. By foregrounding the workings of a transnational network of experts, I chronicle how the middle-class language traversed circuits of science, policymaking, and market research. The article contends that methodological breakthroughs—including microeconometric counterfactuals and market ethnography—become salient fixtures in the public appraisal of inequality and in the creation of national political futures.

Voices of the poor: demystifying the nexus between rights and agency of Bangladesh’s tea workers

ABSTRACT This article aims to investigate the true situation of rights and agency of the Bangladeshi teagarden workers, drawing insights from James Scott’s theory of ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ transcripts and employing multi-sited ethnography. We collected data through qualitative in-depth interviews, case studies, focus group discussions, and direct observation for this study. Rights, in Scottian terms, are the public transcript to produce agency of the workers but they are, of course, facades. Agency does not truly exist for tea workers. The tea companies strategically dominate the workers for their profit maximisation and industrial sustainability, which constrains workers’ individual and collective bargaining capacity. Tea companies’ shrewd manipulation of public transcripts like managerial prerogatives, worker benefits like registration and free education and even use of alcohol addiction and corruption of the police and courts allow them to pursue a hidden transcript of domination and control. Co-opted trade union leaders, supported by the ruling Party, do little to protect workers’ rights and interests but join with the companies to squelch any attempt to create truly representative trade unions.

Beyond the 2008 crisis? Tracing global social protection arrangements amongst onward Andean migrants in Belgium

ABSTRACT After the 2008 financial crisis, migrants were particularly affected by restrictive migratory policies as well as welfare state budgetary cuts in family allowances, pension rights and unemployment benefits. In this context, this contribution looks into the experiences of Andean migrants that have moved onwards from another EU state to Belgium while trying to counteract these policies. The author argues that depending on their gender, class and ethnic locations Andean migrants are able to construct different sets of global social protection arrangements that allow them to protect themselves and their family members in various countries across Europe and Latin America. Data draws from a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 20 months in Belgium, Colombia and Peru with 85 participants that included the Andean migrants themselves as well as their family members. The analysis contributes to the literature on onward Intra-European migration as well as studies on transnational social protection.

How to make the white elephant work: findings from ethnographic research into Polish new cultural institutions

ABSTRACT Since the accession of Poland to the European Union in 2004, many new cultural institutions (NCIs) have been established. Our multisited ethnography investigates their potential as urban catalysts of social, cultural and economic life, and finds that NCIs fail to function as expected. They resemble the notorious ‘white elephants’, because they are so expensive to maintain that they sometimes fail to fulfil their primary functions. The emergence of these ‘white elephants’ has resulted from: (1) a policy based on a simplified and dogmatised version of cultural economics, especially an assumption that investment in cultural infrastructure can stimulate social and economic development; and (2) local authorities’ inclination to use the spectacular NCIs as ‘monuments’ symbolising their success. We show, however, that NCIs are not in all respects expensive burdens, since it was possible to transform some of them into active contributors, sometimes by forced adaptation, sometimes by preserving continuity with the ethos of culture work at the grass-roots level. Our results shed new light on the white elephant category.

Queer migration across the Sinophone world: queer Chinese Malaysian students’ educational mobility to Taiwan

ABSTRACT Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of Chinese Malaysian students’ educational mobility, this article discusses the experiences, everyday practices and future aspirations of my queer informants who went to Taiwan for university and returned to Malaysia after graduation. Through examining their narratives, this article has three objectives. First, it demonstrates how tensions between my informants’ ethnic and sexual identities are reconfigured and how new forms of queer relationality and subject positions have emerged via a distinctive process of student migration across the Chinese-speaking world. Second, it contributes to the theorisation of transnational queer Chinese cultures vis-à-vis an articulation of queer Sinophone Malaysia. Third, by way of conclusion, I present a case study of transnational queer activism and demonstrate how it is practised by returned migrants in everyday life settings.

Cosmologies and migration: on worldviews and their influence on mobility and immobility

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the concept of ‘cosmologies of destinations’ is a useful theoretical tool to provide an emic understanding of the social and moral meanings of migrants’ journeys. By this concept, I refer to the hierarchical representations of the world that orient migration journeys. Drawing from my multi-sited ethnography with Eritreans at home and abroad, I illustrate how migration destinations were mapped by my informants along an implicit but widely shared normative and moral scale, with different levels of perceived safety, individual freedom, social recognition and economic achievements. After charting the theoretical field concerning social imaginaries and cultures of migration, I show the importance of symbolic and moral structures for understanding my informants’ mobility choices at different stages of their migration process. I conclude by highlighting the potential of this concept to study the interplay of mobility and immobility, particularly in the framework of increasing constraints.

Gender roles in Nigeria’s non-violent oil resistance movement

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, Nigerians have engaged in non-violent protests against oil exploitation polluting their lands. This qualitative case study asks why Niger Delta women came to engage in seemingly separate, all-female protests starting in 2002, mobilizing in a long-standing resistance previously led by men. Using grounded theory methods, this multi-site ethnography draws on one-on-one interviews, participant observations, and university and non-governmental organization archival data. It finds that although women were indeed aggrieved by oil, their protests from 2002 to 2012 did not emerge autonomously from those of men, as described in scholarship elsewhere. Rather, these findings indicate that male elites may have had a role in initiating women’s collective action in response to their own failed prior negotiations, to increase the number of protesters, and to bolster men’s dialogue. This study provides a nuanced corrective to the Niger Delta narrative and expands our understanding of gender dynamics in social movements.

Distance runners in a dys-appearance state – Reconceptualizing the perception of pain and suffering in times of bodily distress

ABSTRACT This article will focus on the perception of pain and bodily distress among long-distance runners. It builds on Leder’s (1990) phenomenological notion of the Dys-appearing body. As opposed to bodily dis-appearance in which one can perceive his/her body as ‘absent’ or ‘being away’, bodily dys-appearance appears as being ‘ill’ or ‘bad’. The paper suggests three phenomenological dimensions in the way runners experience physical pain: first-person dys-appearance – which highlights the intrinsic personal relations between the distance runner and his/her body in pain; social dys-appearance – the way physical pain is socially negotiated in front of those who are watching him/her perform; and finally, socio-political dys-appearance – the body in pain as a product of a power relationship between distance runners and physiotherapists. The article draws upon data from multi-sited ethnography research that includes a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and website analysis. The data presented suggest that runners seek to control and manage pain through a dialog of alienation, which enables them to free themselves of the responsibility of being injured and to humanise their body. Moreover, it is suggested that the large audience in front of which the runners perform serves as a stage for gaining social recognition by instrumentalizing their pain in order to strengthen and solidify their running identity. Finally, the article highlights the susceptibility of the running body to the physiotherapist’s intentions, a reality in which they exercise control which tends to minimise runners’ resistance.

Revisión bibliográfica y consideraciones teóricas sobre el estudio de la movilidad geográfica en tiempos de crisis económica

El estudio de la movilidad geográfica no es algo nuevo, más bien el interés se acrecienta en tiempos de crisis económica. Esto es debido a que la movilidad geográfica suele adquirir una importancia central en la búsqueda de empleo cuando las opciones son limitadas, convirtiéndose, para muchos migrantes, en una estrategia de supervivencia. En el presente artículo se repasarán los principios que giran en torno al concepto de movilidad geográfica, un campo de investigación en auge, producto de las innumerables salidas de trabajadores migrantes a causa de la crisis económica acontecida en España en 2008. Para ello, se tendrán en cuenta los distintos tipos de movilidad (retorno, circularidad y reemigración) y las teorías que giran en torno a ella. Posteriormente, se analizará, a partir de los estudios más recientes, la movilidad geográfica internacional como estrategia de supervivencia, haciendo un repaso por el papel de las redes sociales, familiares y la perspectiva transnacional como escenario de análisis. Por último, indagaremos sobre la idoneidad de la etnografía multisituada como modelo teórico-metodológico en el estudio de la misma.

Techno-social reconfigurations in diabetes (self-) care.

This article focuses on the ways in which a flash glucose monitoring system, FreeStyle Libre®, is introduced and used by people living with type 1 diabetes, their relatives and healthcare professionals. It draws on a multi-sited ethnography in a variety of clinical and daily situations, and on interviews with caregivers and people living with diabetes. We explore how the users develop knowledge-in-practice, and consider the use of self-management technologies to be largely dependent on locally grounded and situated care acts, and resulting from the relational, pragmatic and creative maneuvering of technology-in-practice. Our findings show that adjustments between users, their bodies and the technology are required, and show the reflexive work and practices of patients and relatives who learn to use the device in a proper way. Moreover, we reveal that practitioners see this technology as a tool that not only improves self-care practices but also clinical practices, and that wearing and using this new medical device may become a moral injunction for self-improvement. Our results illustrate the techno-social reconfigurations at work and the development of new ways of feeling, thinking and acting in diabetes (self-) care.

Occupied from within: Embodied memories of occupation, resistance and survival among the Palestinian diaspora

This article explores the relationship between the body, memory and past violence. Drawing on the narratives of Palestinians who grew up in the occupied Palestinian territories, but who are now living in Poland and the UK, it examines how their bodies serve as vehicles for remembering their life under occupation. These memories of harassment, control and fear, which are mediated through their bodies, reveal the all-encompassing character of the Israeli occupation that has accompanied them through their childhood and adolescence. This article examines how these ‘body memories’ continue to affect participants' present, arguing that the memories of past violence need to be considered when analysing how migrants transition to new environments. The article closes with a reflection on the subversive potential of migrants' affective bodies as sites of ‘counter-memories’ that speak against the ongoing practices of Palestinian dispossession. These arguments are based on a two-year, multi-sited ethnography, which included oral histories from three generations of Palestinian refugees and migrants, as well as their descendants, who are now living in Poland and the UK.

Experimental Trajectories of Young Users of Psycho-active Prescription Drugs in Urban Indonesia

In Indonesia, a country with stringent drug laws, psycho-active prescription drugs (PPDs) have become popular among urban youth as they are seen to be safe – both medically and in terms of the risks of being arrested. During the ChemicalYouth project, which involved a multi-sited ethnography in urban centers in South Sulawesi (Makassar, Gowa, and Maros) and in Yogyakarta, we found that young people encourage each other to try out different kinds of PPDs to determine which (combinations) work best for them. Sharing their experiences, they jointly build up knowledge that guides their ‘experimental trajectories’ (Raikhel and Garriott 2013). The experimental trajectories of youths are enabled by pharmacies, where young people can buy PPDs, and private sector doctors who sell and prescribe PPD prescriptions. When certain PPDs become harder to get, young people will try out new substances in their search for happiness, highs, and the confidence and stamina needed to perform precarious informal sector jobs such as sex work, street singing, and helping people park their cars. Across the sites, the researchers encountered young people realizing that they had become addicted to PPDs. Simultaneously, health workers lack instruments to prevent harm related to PPD use as they work in public sector harm reduction programs designed narrowly to address illicit heroin addiction. We argue that educational interventions need to address the desires and aspirations for good enough lives that are reflected in young people’s creative poly-drug use practices, and the iatrogenic effects of unregulated pharmaceutical markets that enable medicalization of precarious lives.

Researching Queenila and living in-between: multi-sited Ethnography, migrant epistemology and transnational families

ABSTRACTI explore multi-sited ethnography as a method and methodology in an increasingly globalized world wherein migration and separation are social facts in the histories of families in the Philippines. I argue that multi-sited ethnography and migrant epistemology is a compelling methodology in investigating precarity under neoliberalism as the method mirrors the social realities both migrants abroad and their families in their homelands. In this paper, I argue that the study of transnational life and families requires the participation and epistemology of migrant women that includes an interrogation of the political and economic institutions that pulls families apart. Based on qualitative data gathered through multi-sited ethnography on Filipino transnational families, I provide evidence that the transnational social process of ‘multidirectional care’ emerge when the Filipino transnational family is the unit of analysis through an ethnography of multiple sites, instead of migrants and families left behind as mutually exclusive. Throughout the paper, I reflect the implications of multi-sited ethnography on the research participants and ethnographer involved in the study.

Coworking Spaces in the Global South: Local Articulations and Imaginaries

ABSTRACTBuilding on scholarly explorations of the nuances of labor conditions in emerging knowledge economies in the Global South and the glocalization of the digital labor market, this paper examines how coworking spaces in the Philippines are designed and organized. In particular, we explore the role that these alternative workspaces take in addressing the unique needs of local digital platform workers or online freelancers. The Philippines ranks third, after the United States and India, among the countries with the greatest number of online freelancers. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography of coworking spaces in Metro Manila, including interviews with coworking space managers as well as Filipino online freelancers, the paper explores how the latter perceive the role and experience the value of coworking spaces. Echoing Oreglia and Ling’s notion of “digital imagination,” we find that digital workers sustain a unique sense of “aspirational belonging” to coworking spaces which we describe as a state of willingness to maintain a positive perception of these spaces without any certainty of realizing their promised benefits. We also argue that the very same qualities that render coworking spaces aspirational for online Filipino freelancers function to regulate a degree of in/exclusivity of urban spaces.

Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 30s by Kristine Alexander

Reviewed by: Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 30s by Kristine Alexander Stephanie Spencer Alexander, Kristine – Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 30s. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017. Pp. 283. When the pupils of Eleanor Brent-Dyer's fictional Chalet School ask their headmistress permission to start a Girl Guide Company in Jo of the Chalet School (1926), she observes "the Guide movement gives you a big outlook, and strengthens one's idea of playing the game" (p. 261). Support for the movement in a series that focused on shared values between girls of different nationalities demonstrates both the universal appeal of the movement and its popularity. It was taken as axiomatic in the series that the addition of a Guide Company enriched a community and promoted values of international citizenship, thrift, and female domesticity. The rapid rise in the popularity of the Guide movement after its foundation in 1909 by Robert Baden-Powell by the 1920s had generated a membership of more than a million girls in more than 40 countries. The emphasis on international cooperation also reflects the peace aspirations of the League of Nations after the First World War. Although such aspirations were compromised after 1945, the Guide movement retained its popularity despite profound changes in constructions of girlhood. Kristine Alexander examines the movement at the height of its popularity and also goes some way to explaining the tenacity of its appeal in the post-war world. Alexander's meticulous research focuses on Canada, Britain, and India and analyzes the organization using a range of sources, including scrapbooks and diaries from those involved in the day-to-day activities. It offers an introduction to the movement and a detailed exploration of the emphasis on housekeeping, motherhood, and matrimony, alongside preparation for citizenship and international sisterhood. Alexander teases out the tensions inherent in the racial and classed hierarchies that can make the topic an awkward one for examining concepts of girlhood in the mid-twentieth century. It complements research by Tammy Proctor and Sian Edwards and reflects the increasing interest in the Guiding phenomenon in histories of youth culture. The book is sustained by a "multi-sited ethnography" that explores girls' agency and the way that they interacted with ideas of femininity that both transcended nation and were a product of racial and class hierarchies within their borders. Alexander offers an insight into the problems associated with researching organizations that have been the subject of criticism for promoting and prolonging imperial mentalities. She discusses the gatekeeping by the archivists of the organizations and the deliberate culling of material that might have compromised the carefully constructed representations of universal sisterhood. Five thematic chapters focus on familiar aspects of Guiding that are nuanced by regional differences. Unsurprisingly a chapter is devoted to the promotion of homekeeping, [End Page 663] mothercraft, and matrimony, detailing ways in which girls interacted with the gender conservatism associated with the movement. She argues that Guiding also created space for those who rejected traditional ideals. One of the strengths of the book is that the movement is not seen in isolation from contemporary events; membership in India was complicated by issues of child marriage with many girls leaving between the ages of 12 or 13. Alexander emphasizes how in Canada and Britain the emphasis on self-discipline and the drawing out "natural" mothering instincts counteracted concerns over the irresponsibility of the "modern" girl as she emerged in popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Women in Canada, Britain, and India were increasingly enfranchised over the period, and Alexander discusses the preparation for active citizenship that was inherent in Guiding. Citizenship is understood as a set of practices rather than the rights and responsibilities model identified by Alfred Marshall. She draws out the tensions between models of training that effectively promoted a "familial and tolerant British dominated global empire" (p. 85) and local assertions that Guiding was fundamentally non-political. Alongside the emphasis on intellectual education for citizenship, Guides were encouraged to be prepared to deal with a wide range of accidents to counteract assumptions of female weakness in the face of adversity. Alexander uses diary entries...