Participatory Ethnographic Research Research Articles

Beyond "toxic bodies": Multiplied rationalities of women's reproductive health in a high-risk environmental area (Taranto, Italy).

This study investigates women's reproductive health concerns in Taranto, a steel town and a "high-risk environmental area" in Italy. It draws on participatory ethnographic research (body mapping, interviews and fieldnotes) and analyses political and social aspects of women's reproductive health in relation to pollution. I argue that in highly polluted environments, both political rationalities and women's health concerns over their bodies are multiplied, extending beyond a focus on their bodies as shaped by toxic exposure. Women make sense of knowledge about their reproductive health and questions of responsibility in relation not only to societal norms, but also through reference to the wider polluted environment and the political-economic structures they inhabit. By focusing on women's own experiences, the study contributes to our understanding of women's agency over their environment-health relations and seeks to complicate women's role as environmental subjects beyond "toxic bodies".

Application of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) to Rural Communities in Kenya

There is growing evidence of the positive role ICTs can play in development, particularly in rural areas of developing countries using public services in the form of telecentres. Emphasizing proactive measures ensures ICTs serve as effective tools for social inclusion, social change, and widespread access, especially for the poor and disadvantaged communities. This research study explores the application of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) in a rural community in Kenya, by evaluating the Nguruman Community Knowledge Center (CKC), established in 2003 by a development organization. This study uses a participatory ethnographic research method that combines participatory techniques and ethnographic research, with the potential of feeding into action research. The research makes use of the communicative ecology approach in evaluating communication and ICTs for development. In this study, ICTs, particularly traditional ICTs (radio and television) significantly contribute to improving people’s living conditions by making information available that helps in solving real problems encountered. The expectations of community members who use these ICTs reflect their level of understanding of the relationship that exists between these tools and the improvement of their living conditions as well as enhancing development efforts. The study shows that the context and institutional framework for ICTs in Kenya are changing which reflects the government’s commitment to being part of the information society, especially in rural communities. Despite this, a gap exists between the aspirations of policymakers and the reality in rural areas owing to the poor state of ICT and general infrastructure.

ICT for Sustainable Development: Evidence from Nguruman Community Knowledge Centre, Kajiado County, Kenya

For over a decade, development partners have advocated the application of ICTs as tools for poverty alleviation especially targeting the agricultural sector. To provide an in-depth analysis of the impact of the CKC on the Nguruman community, the participatory ethnographic research methodology, combining participatory techniques and ethnographic approaches, was used. The use of this approach with the potential to feed into action research. I selected certain elements of the Ethnographic Action Research (EAR) developed by Tacchi and others. This research was undertaken in Nguruman, a rural Sub-location situated in arid and semi-arid land within the Olkiramatian Group ranch about 40 kilometers from Magadi town at the foot of the Nguruman escarpment in Kenya. The findings show a general view of Nguruman as being relatively developed. Participants originally from Nguruman compared its current state of development to earlier years and said it is developed. However, participants who are not originally from Nguruman say the area has considerable development when they compare it with other communities in Kenya. Like the participants from the focus groups, those from the interviews described development in terms of infrastructure such as roads, communication services, community institutions, and socio-economic conditions such as an increase in population, cultural issues, and education. Most of the participants, especially those originally from Nguruman, mentioned that the infrastructure of Nguruman has improved when compared to its former state some years back. For all the participants, the perceiving influencers of the development of Nguruman were commonalities in the emerging issues such as gender and cultural issues, illiteracy, and the value of education. A comparison of the participants’ communicative ecologies reveals different communication and information patterns and activities unique to each individual. Each individual uses different ICTs and links these ICTs to his/her social network to enhance communication and information patterns. Based on the findings, it is recommended that development communication that emerges from successful rural development calls for the conscious and active participation of the intended recipients at each phase of the development process. Rural development cannot occur without changes in the attitudes and behaviors of the people concerned. Emphasis should be on the planning of communication initiatives, focusing on dialogue rather than one-way communication as support to development initiatives.

“I Have to Start All over Again.” The Role of Institutional and Personal Arrival Infrastructures in Refugees’ Home-making Processes in Amsterdam

In this study, we take the concept of arrival infrastructures as a starting point to explore refugees’ home-making processes in Amsterdam. This concept allows us to look beyond formal infrastructures set up for refugees and to take a closer look at all (f)actors playing a role in refugees’ processes of “starting all over again”. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research in a community centre for refugees, we describe the role of institutional as well as personal infrastructures in material and affective terms and show how these are related to refugees’ sense of belonging in the city. We illustrate that refugees become entangled in a web of reception/asylum seekers centres and civic integration requirements that facilitate and constrain their home-making processes in a new place. It is more the informal, personal infrastructures that enable refugees to build social and affective ties in the city. Nevertheless, refugees are still struggling with social isolation and a lack of participation due to their limited opportunities and the relatively closed character of Dutch society. This impacts their sense of belonging and comes at the cost of their integration in the city. These insights raise not only questions on the current organisation of arrival infrastructures for refugees, but also show the need to move towards a multidimensional integration model that includes the role of (civil) society in the destination society in the refugees’ integration processes.
 * This article belongs to a special issue on "Refugee Migration to Europe – Challenges and Potentials for Cities and Regions".

‘Bad parents’, deportable subjects: borders and deportability in the everyday lives of undocumented families in Belgium

ABSTRACT While research has addressed the multiplication of borders inside and across the nation-state and the threat of deportation in the lives of undocumented migrants, little analysis has been dedicated to the particularities of families’ experiences. Based on participatory ethnographic research, this article examines how undocumented families experience and contest exclusionary bordering practices that interfere in the privacy of their family lives in Belgium. I argue that, in order to naturalise and legitimize these families’ ‘deportability’, the state mobilises normative logics about parenthood and childhood that construct undocumented parents as ‘bad parents’, while designating their children as ‘innocent’ and ‘at risk’. Going against these dominant logics, the undocumented parents at the heart of this ethnography contest and reshape the terms upon which the state constructs their ‘deportability’ by reconfirming their role as ‘good’ parents and, instead, problematise repressive migration policies that push them into marginality and misappropriate the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’. In the conclusion, I demonstrate how these insights open new avenues for understanding more broadly the dynamics between the family and contemporary migration regimes.

Reimagining Livelihoods: An Ethnographic Inquiry into Anticipation, Agency, and Reflexivity as India's Impact Ecosystem Responds To Post‐Pandemic Rebuilding

The COVID19 induced lockdown in India and consequent migration of workers severely affected the economy. When the migrants returned to urban areas, newer challenges surfaced around the scale and nature of jobs on offer, as well as the skills and aspirations of workers. In this paper, we follow a social impact project focused on livelihoods and post pandemic rebuilding, to explore the trails of ethnography and how its engagement along multiple networks shapes its possibilities as a research method that helps foreground emic perspectives. In doing so, we analyse agencies and social relations from the field, and their role in shaping project imaginaries. Anchored in original, long‐term participatory ethnographic research, our paper thinks alongside Appadurai (2013) to surmise that anticipation is imbricated in the coming together of a grounds‐up ‘ethics of possibility’ and a top‐down ‘ethics of probability'. Importantly, we turn to Actor‐Network Theory as a framework to understand the multiple assemblages in our research field which (continue to) challenge existing knowledge practices and open up new lines of inquiry for ascertaining emergent areas of research and innovation. Such coeval realisations of aspirations and resources are evidenced on multiple occasions as we engage with designers, skilling experts, entrepreneurs, and technologists. These range from beauticians in peri urban areas following the country's leading Instagram influencers to keep themselves abreast of the latest trends in metropolitan cities as a way of compressing spatial and temporal barriers (Field Notes 2020), to delivery boys who found meaning in working as gig‐workers even though it implied precarity, and telemedicine entrepreneurs who realized that factoring in the social (of community health workers who they worked with) in the sense of integrating biomedical responses to the pandemic was essential for the success of their technological interventions (Field Notes 2021; Burgess and Horii 2012). Thus, our paper argues that future making as at once a means and an end is ‘not just a technical or neutral space’ but a ‘cultural fact’ (Appadurai 2013).

Racial capitalism and epistemic injustice: Blindspots in the theory and practice of solidarity economy in Brazil

This article performs a socio-spatial analysis of the political discourse, agendas, and organizing spaces of the Solidarity Economy Movement (MSE) in Rio de Janeiro as a lens to examine how racialized power–knowledge dynamics and race-based socio-spatial inequalities can be replicated in the process of institutionalization of social movements’ agendas. It discusses adverse implications stemming from the MSE’s political choice to disproportionately focus on policy-centrism over grassroots organization as its priority strategy. It also analyses the failures of the white leadership of the movement to acknowledge Black economic traditions, Favela economies, and Black solidarity economies as pivotal experiences to understand and challenge racial capitalism.I draw on two years of participatory ethnographic research in Favela City of God and in Solidarity Economy marketplaces and political spaces across Rio de Janeiro. This paper elucidates a gap in the literature on Solidarity Economy in Brazil in terms of theorizing around race. I contend that a colorblind class-first Marxist approach, in tandem with the perversive myth of racial democracy in Brazil, underpin the movement’s conceptual shortcoming in addressing how racialization is co-constitutive of both capitalism and solidarity economies. I show how such neglect has displaced Black women favela dwellers as knowledge producers and weakened the base support of the movement in ways that is debilitating to its organizational capacity.I argue for the epistemic and political contributions that Black communities’ expertise with solidarity economies can make to critical analysis of racial capitalism and solidarity economies as well as to the endeavor of rethinking political economy.

Representing ‘Place’: City Climate Commissions and the Institutionalisation of Experimental Governance in Edinburgh

Against the backdrop of increasingly fragmented and poly-centric urban climate governance, this article examines the establishment of city climate ‘commissions’ as an experimental means of addressing the challenge of climate change at the city-scale. In doing so it addresses the question: What constitutes diversity in voices and perspectives when trying to represent the city as a place for climate action? To answer this question, the article presents an analysis of the Edinburgh Climate Commission’s establishment, drawing on participatory ethnographic research carried out by a researcher embedded within the project team. The account of how this new mode of urban governance was both conceptualised and then put into practice offers a new institutional angle to the literature on urban ‘experimentation.’ Through our reflective analysis we argue that aspirations to ensure pre-defined ‘key’ industries (high carbon emitters) are accounted for in commissioner recruitment, and an over-emphasis on capturing discernible ‘impacts’ in the short term (by involving organisations already pro-active in sustainable development) hindered an opportunity to embrace new perspectives on urban futures and harness the innovative potential of cities to engage with the multifaceted nature of the climate challenge. Furthermore, new insight into the relationship between local authorities and other ‘place-based’ agents of change opens up important questions regarding how to balance the attainment of legitimacy within the political status quo, and the prospect of a new radical politics for urban transformation.

Participatory Research in Mesoamerica and Data Protection in Europe (and Elsewhere)

AbstractThis essay examines the tensions between participatory ethnographic research methods and newly emerging legal regimes of data protection and privacy. Drawing on the example of recent grant‐funded research in Mexico, the essay charts how the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation impedes the practices and ethos of participatory research in significant ways. In particular, new legal requirements about data collection, access and storage, and “the right to be forgotten,” effectively preclude integrating community members into research planning or data collection. As countries around the world move toward more robust and comprehensive data protection and privacy laws, the issues raised in this essay are likely to become more pressing in many different research contexts in the future. [Mexico, data protection, participatory research, privacy laws].

‘We just get a bit set in our ways’: renewing democracy and solidarity in UK trade unions

In a broader context of austerity, sustained financial pressures and policies of restructuring and outsourcing have steadily eroded traditional features of UK public sector employment such as job security, fair reward and collective representation through trade unions. This article examines how a UK trade union representing local government workers attempted to respond more effectively to radical restructuring plans. By engaging in a process of democratic experimentation, full-time officials from above and activists from below sought to challenge the existing ‘insider’ relationship between branch officers and management, which was seen as ineffective in responding to a severe disruption in the regulation of local government employment. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research, the findings show the importance of leadership in the processes towards union renewal and the tensions and struggles underlying democracy and solidarity. Union renewal is presented here as a dialectical process and set of responses involving both strategic direction from above and membership pressure and activism from below.

Gendered violence, frontline workers, and intersections of space, care and agency in Dharavi, India

The resilience and activism of marginalised urban populations have played an important role in imagining urban politics in Indian cities. Similarly, the issue of sexual violence against women in public spaces became a significant part of urban politics in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case. However, subsequent activism and research have paid lesser attention to other pervasive experiences of intimate violence and structural inequalities that confront marginalised urban populations, particularly poor women and children. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research with frontline workers engaged in an NGO’s violence prevention program in Dharavi, Mumbai, this paper re-inscribes ‘gender’ and ‘violence’ as experiential concepts into the urban framework. I use the term ‘intersection’ as a heuristic device to examine how frontline workers come to understand gender as a relationship of inequality that produces conditions of violence. I term this intersection ‘gender/violence’. The second intersection, ‘frontline’, further underscores how negotiations of the public–private divide in urban spaces, women’s caring labour in supporting survivors of violence and the resultant forms of gendered agency are interconnected. I argue that such a holistic understanding of women’s everyday actions of resisting and negotiating structural and gendered violence contributes to recent urban scholarship on gender and violence and furthers our understandings of agency, solidarity and resilience.

Acts for Refugees’ Right to the City and Commoning Practices of Care-tizenship in Athens, Mytilene and Thessaloniki

During the recent refugee crisis, numerous solidarity initiatives emerged in Greece and especially in Mytilene, Athens and Thessaloniki. Mytilene is the capital of Lesvos Island and the main entry point in the East Aegean Sea, Athens is the main refugee transit city and Thessaloniki is the biggest city close to the northern borders. After the EU–Turkey Common Statement, the Balkan countries sealed their borders and thousands of refugees found themselves stranded in Greece. The State accommodation policy provides the majority of the refugee population with residency in inappropriate camps which are mainly located in isolated old military bases and abandoned factories. The article contrasts the State-run services to the solidarity acts of “care-tizenship” and commoning practices such as self-organised refugee housing projects, which claim the right to the city and to spatial justice. Specifically, the article is inspired by the Lefebvrian “right to the city,” which embraces the right to housing, education, work, health and challenges the concept of citizen. Echoing Lefebvrian analysis, citizenship is not demarcated by membership in a nation-state, rather, it concerns all the residents of the city. The article discusses the academic literature on critical citizenship studies and especially the so-called “care-tizenship,” meaning the grassroots commoning practices that are based on caring relationships and mutual help for social rights. Following participatory ethnographic research, the main findings highlight that the acts of care-tizenship have opened up new possibilities to challenge State migration policies while reinventing a culture of togetherness and negotiating locals’ and refugees’ multiple class, gender, and religious identities.

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

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

Territorialising social movements

Following the mass mobilisations and occupations of urban squares since 2011 that came as responses to the global financial crisis, the spatial practices of social movements have undergone crucial transformations. This paper addresses these through the case of Athens and contends that the territorialisation of movements in urban space occurred through the centralisation of counter-austerity struggle in the occupied Syntagma Square and, following this, through the dispersal of spatial practices that emerged out of the squares across the city. In the first instance, solidarity, mutual aid and collective self-organisation practices articulated in the occupied square introduced new collective action repertoires; while, in the aftermath of Syntagma, these were transposed in local groups, solidarity initiatives and networks that produced new territorialised forms of struggle and solidarity in Athenian neighbourhoods. Through these, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on contestation ‘from below’ emerging in urban contexts of austerity as constitutive of contemporary contentious politics. The arguments raised here on the transformations of movements occurring during and due to austerity span the period between 2011 and 2014 and empirically draw on participatory ethnographic research conducted in Athens, Greece between October 2012 and May 2013.

Contentious spatialities in an era of austerity: Everyday politics and ‘struggle communities’ in Athens, Greece

Opposition to austerity politics manifested through mass mobilizations and the ‘squares’ movement’ in Athens over the past few years constitute key ‘moments’ in contemporary social movement debates. Nevertheless, the dispersal and grounding of an emergent bottom-up democratic politics in everyday life contexts and across neighbourhoods in the following period still remain analytically nascent. This paper addresses the key role of everyday politics in broader contestation and articulations of alternatives to austerity through the notion of ‘struggle communities’. First, it shifts the analysis of social movement, from ‘moment’ to ‘process’ and the quotidian, constructed at the neighbourhood level. Second, through a case study of a local campaign in the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, it locates the spatiality of struggle communities and their processual, often contradictory, constitution. Third, it discusses the possibilities and limitations for an alternative community politics to emerge and potential links to broader struggles in an era of deepening austerity in Europe and beyond. The paper methodologically draws on participatory ethnographic research conducted in Athens, Greece between 2012 and 2013.

Whose Utopia? Our Utopia! Competing Visions of the Future at the UN Climate Talks

Social movements move and grow by autopoesis—by calling their prospective ranks to order using public pronouncements replete with consequential assumptions about the world as they see it. In the same way, governing bodies and vested economic interests stake out opposing public positions. In the wake of the crucial international climate negotiations in Paris, December 2015, at which the nations adopted the first truly universal climate treaty, we look back over five years of participatory ethnographic research inside the UN climate talks and the social movements for climate justice, identifying key lifeworld assumptions inscribed in the public position-taking of central economic, public, and political sphere actors. Our findings include grounds for skepticism that UN climate policy can transcend the power of the fossil fuel companies to attenuate both international ambitions and national contributions to the universal effort, but also an exciting possibility that climate justice philosophy and tactics, aided by bold counter-spectacle techniques from the Occupy movement, might return to the stage in the coming years and lead the necessary deep culture shift that decarbonization will require.

Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying children's perspective on school. It presents ‘children writing ethnography’ as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of ‘what is happening in the classroom’ is explored through writings produced in class by 10-year olds. The ‘messy’ ethnographic data are examined within the framework of narrative ethnography using the idea of ‘small stories’ that capture everyday interaction. Furthermore, both material and embodied meanings in the writings are discussed. New materialist theories and the idea of nomadic make it possible to account for the connectivity between the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. The author suggests that engaging with children's free-flowing ethnographic writing serves as a productive way to conduct participatory ethnographic research, as well as to investigate contemporary childhoods in all their complexity.

More than Playgrounds: Locating the Lingering Traces of Educational Anthropology

When anthropologists of education, who embrace an activist or action-focused orientation, locate their work within community-based settings, they bear a responsibility to act in ways that not only produce new knowledge but that are also responsive to the immediate circumstances. Katherine Schultz's Presidential Address evokes two related tensions: one is a tension of temporality wherein the contexts of our research may seek and demand greater urgency in how we enact ourselves than may be typical of anthropological work. A second tension involves how knowledge is produced in and about these contexts. Both of these tensions are explored through a discussion of Kathy's research and a long-term, community-based project located in an alternative to detention program where I have been engaged in participatory ethnographic research for close to a decade.

Photography as a pedagogical tool for shedding light on ‘bodies-at-risk’ in physical culture

In Western countries, given current global public health imperatives around obesity, the lack of engagement with and compliance to normative health-related physical cultures is a concern for young people of ethnic minority backgrounds (particularly females) and low socio-economic class. These groups represent cohorts of young people more likely to be physically inactive and unhealthy compared to other groups, and thus are framed as ‘bodies-at-risk’ or portrayed as a ‘problem’ by neoliberal projects of the body in public health. What remains hidden in the enterprise of the fit body produced by a Western physical culture of healthism, however, is how sport and physical and health education in schools continue to reproduce inequalities of gender and race/ethnicity that heavily bear upon some young people's bodies in local sites. To problematise the body-at-risk discourse, this visual participatory ethnographic research conducted in inner-city, state-funded schools in the Midlands region of the UK, aimed to reveal the visual dimensions of embodiment as expressed by young people of different ethnic backgrounds in the local contexts of their lives. Student-researchers used digital cameras to create visual diaries entitled Moving in My World to express their thoughts, feelings and ideas, and to ‘speak for themselves’ about their knowledge of their own bodies, sharing their embodiments. What moving in their worlds meant to young people varied significantly based on differences of cultural background, gender negotiations and opportunities for, and choices in, their engagement with physical activity. The student-researchers’ visual diaries captured a heterogeneity of meanings about the moving body that young people construct and represent in their creation of the hybrid physical cultures of their daily lives.

Imagination in Creative Design

This paper unpacks the notion of imagination presented in the I5-system of knowledge creation along several theoretical contributions and process models from “knowledge science”, creativity research and design studies. It aims at conceptual clarification and integration around the key notion of “insight moments” across various levels of abstraction from system perspectives through foci on groups and individuals to mental activity. This work is meant to serve as a conceptual foundation for micro-analyses of in-vivo data of creative design processes based on protocols of participatory ethnographic research and interview accounts from first, second and third person perspectives.