People Negotiate Research Articles

Walking with: understandings and negotiations of the mundane in research

Abstract Disruptions, and indeed spectacular disruptions, are understood and experienced by people in many different ways. They serve to both highlight and embed deep-rooted inequalities, changing experiences of the everyday and even challenging the very right to have an everyday. In this joint article we critically engage with conceptualisations of the mundane, exploring how people negotiate everyday life in contexts of unprecedented change. We take up Georges Perec’s call to take account of the everyday, focusing on examples from two ethnographically informed projects, both of which engage with creative practice. The first is long-term research in forced migration settings in North-Western Finland, which explores how people negotiate and re-negotiate linguistic citizenship and everyday life, in a policy context which restricts and limits. The second is a community arts and wellbeing project in the North of England, which investigated creative approaches to re-emergence from the Covid19 pandemic among people who had been particularly affected by isolation, including new mothers. In both projects, our data are drawn from fieldnotes from observations, reflections from our own participation, interviews and creative artefacts made by participants. In our analysis and discussion, we foreground ephemeral everyday moments and how individuals aim to hold up the mundane in the middle of major, internal and international crises. We consider how the ‘right to an everyday’ is central to understandings of being human, and draw on these experiences to show how ethnographic research, with particular emphasis on language(s) and creative practice, can shed light on lived experiences of the mundane and unequal experiences of and rights to the everyday.

‘Guaranteed contraband’: a cultural biography of kaçak tea in Gaziantep’s Iranian bazaar

ABSTRACT Every year, 80,000 tons of kaçak (contraband) tea, primarily of Sri Lankan and Iranian origin, makes its way to the markets of Turkey – itself the fifth-largest producer of tea in the world. While most kaçak commodities in Turkey face derision because they are understood as low-quality approximations of their formal counterparts, of dubious origins and lacking any guarantees of quality, many consumers of kaçak tea valorize it as an emblem of superior taste. Rather than being a target of derision, kaçak tea takes shape in its consumers ‘thin-waisted’ glasses as a sign of distinction. In this inverted hierarchy of values, the domestic produce is the commodity that is mocked for its weak flavor and inflated price, while the informal contraband commodity is prized. By tracing the cultural biography of kaçak tea, this essay advances a historically and geographically networked understanding of commoditization across the formal/informal divide. Studying ‘guaranteed contraband’ tea across Turkey and Iran proves productive for understanding how people negotiate and build dynamic hierarchies of taste, while transforming the confines of the formal national economy into new thresholds of conversion that draw upon formalization of informality as well as informalization of formality in market formation.

A Qualitative Model of Weight Cycling.

Weight cycling is a likely consequence of striving to lose weight after internalizing body image ideals, making upward social comparisons, and experiencing weight stigma. Despite weight cycling's potential physical and psychological consequences, the interplay of weight cycling, social pressures, and experienced and internalized stigma have not been qualitatively explored. Thus, through in-depth interviews of 36 weight-cycling adults, this study sought to understand how people negotiate weight cycling. Interviews informed the development of a qualitative model of weight cycling, which was derived from a theory-neutral inductive analysis. The model's stages included entering the cycle, undergoing the cycle, and challenging the cycle. Participants were triggered to enter the cycle due to weight stigma caused by social pressures. Within the cycle, interviewees internalized weight stigma and engaged in disordered weight management behaviors. Some participants challenged the cycle by becoming more self-aware and mitigating their toxic dieting behaviors. However, it was very difficult, if not impossible, for many to fully exit weight cycling and the restraints of previous weight management thinking and patterns. Our investigation underscores the seriousness of weight cycling and suggests ways to combat weight cycling on both macro and individual levels. It may also be useful to consider weight cycling as disordered eating in hopes of shifting society's dangerous focus on rapid weight loss.

Subjugated knowledges, contested spaces and African Christianity: An appraisal

Religion mediates and shapes how people negotiate and navigate their existential realities. Christianity accentuates the belief in Jesus Christ and prescribes how that belief should influence the worldview and actions of people. One of the challenges of the reception of Christianity in Africa is that African Traditional Religion remains the cosmic lens through which Christians confront their spiritual and ethical dilemmas and choices vis-à-vis the exhortations of the Bible message. This paper examines the force of the Christian message for African Christians. It looks at how the Christian message was presented, how African Christians appropriate the gospel message and how they fill the ‘gaps’ in their practice of Christianity. As movies bring to bear stories about lived realities and shape attitudes and behaviour, this paper also examines the reception of the Biblical message by reviewing a selection of African movies. I argue that Christianity must provide answers to the critical questions and unmet needs essential to Africans. To achieve this would require paying attention to what Michel Foucault describes as the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges,’ which take into account naïve knowledges operating at local or regional levels but serve as the local discursivities that amplify how the ‘subjugated knowledges’ influence the reception of the Biblical message in the African cultural matrix.Contribution: This paper reveals the enduring cross-pressures of Africans as they are invited to subjugate their primordial knowledges and practices to the orthodoxy of mainstream Christianity. It cites the examples of neo-Pentecostal and para-Christian enactments as offering possible insights into a need for Christianity to be more responsive and functionally relevant to the African reality. Such an approach resonates with the orientation of HTS Teologiese Studies (HTS) towards scholarship that is discursively dynamic and contextually sensitive to the multilayered contexts, cultures and cosmologies of the African Christian.

Fat and deserving: navigating the visibility and visuality of non-normative bodies in online medical crowdfunding

ABSTRACT Medical crowdfunding is an individualizing and privatizing response to healthcare inequalities, in which citizens use online platforms to share (written and visual) stories about health-related needs in order to elicit donations. We present data from a study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on critical theory and fat studies to analyze weight-loss-related campaigns, with a focus on visibility and visuality. We highlight the complexities involved in making fat (and otherwise non-normative) bodies acceptable, marketable, and deserving to online audiences. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of text and images, across nineteen public Givealittle campaigns related to intentional weight loss, we identified five main themes relating to how the fat body was presented. These themes include: unwell bodies, transitional bodies, active bodies, objectified bodies, and wretched bodies. We show that the ability of particular bodies to generate specific moral emotions (that can, through these platforms, be turned into care/healthcare access) depends largely on their relationship to normative ideas of the “good” body. Our analysis offers insight into how people negotiate hierarchies of deservingness, based on entrenched normativities, while living in non-normative bodies. More specifically, we show how people pursuing intentional weight loss use images to regulate themselves according to a wider anti-fat and neoliberal logic of deservingness. We explore images on crowdfunding campaigns as a form of both media labor and moral labor, highlighting the double-bind of the digital gaze upon bodies that are unable to access privileged states of health without being made visible to scrutiny.

Libraries as felt spaces: Atmospheres, public space and feelings of dis/comfort

This paper contributes to debates on urban atmospheres by delving into the atmospheric and emotional qualities of public libraries, highlighting the importance of their atmospheric dimensions as micro urban spaces in shaping city life. Geographic research into public libraries is growing, stressing their importance as key spaces of sociality in fragmented cities. However, less is known regarding their role as vital settings of atmospheric experiences and shared emotions. Situated within a larger project that investigates public libraries as key convivial spaces in stressed urban environments, this paper presents findings from the micro geographies of three public libraries in Bremen, Germany. It finds that atmospheres of welcome and sociality can foster feelings of being-in-place and belonging in and beyond the library, while also creating feelings of discomfort and unease that people negotiate in often careful ways.

Contested Care: COVID-19 Surveillance and Health Data in the Workplace

Within the ongoing disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, technologically mediated health surveillance programs have vastly intensified and expanded to new spaces. Popular understandings of medical and health data protections came into question as a variety of institutions introduced new tools for symptom tracking, contact tracing, and the management of related data. These systems have raised complex questions about who should have access to health information, under what circumstances, and how people and institutions negotiate relationships between privacy, public safety, and care during times of crisis. In this paper, we take up the case of a large public university working to keep campus productive during COVID-19 through practices of placemaking, symptom screeners, and vaccine mandate compliance databases. Drawing on a multi-methods study including thirty-eight interviews, organizational documents, and discursive analysis, we show where and for whom administrative care infrastructures either misrecognized or torqued (Bowker and Star 1999) the care relationships that made life possible for people in the university community. We argue that an analysis of care—including the social relations that enable it and those that attempt to hegemonically define it—opens important questions for how people relate to data they produce about their bodies as well as to the institutions that manage them. Furthermore, we argue that privacy frameworks that rely on individual rights, essential categories of “sensitive information,” or the normative legitimacy of institutional practices are not equipped to reveal how people negotiate privacy and care in times of crisis.

Pushing too far? Negotiations of non‐compliance and resistance to the COVID‐19 cabin ban in Norway

AbstractMany societies experienced pushback against governmental COVID‐19 measures. When the Norwegian government made it a punishable offence to spend the night at privately owned cabins in the first phase of the pandemic, this resulted in discussions and pushback. Basing our research on in‐depth interviews at three different time points during the pandemic, we ask how Norwegian participants discursively explain why the cabin ban was the first measure that evoked pushback in Norway. We conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), exploring three overarching explanations provided by the interview participants. In the first explanation, the pushback was presented as a result of the cultural importance of the cabin. Here, participants partly legitimised the pushback when constructing it as a predictable reaction in this cultural context. In the second explanation, participants constructed the pushback as an expression of ‘cabin people’ in particular and Norwegians in general being ‘too privileged’ to acknowledge the measure's necessity. Here, the pushback was constructed as an illegitimate reaction. In the third explanation, participants explained the pushback as a result of people seeing the measure as meaningless. This interpretation constructs pushback as a legitimate response to an illogical measure. These different constructions illustrate the complexity of compliance with COVID measures, where people negotiated individual freedom against solidarity, and compliance against critical thinking. The article contributes to the understanding of people's negotiations of resistance and pushback against restrictive measures. We argue that social psychological theory and research need to acknowledge the temporal, contextual and ideological specificities in understanding compliance and non‐compliance.

The “salt” of life

AbstractIn 2015, during the cease‐fire in Ukraine, Misha, a Cossack, a veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya, and a “volunteer” in the ongoing war, waited impatiently to be called back to the front, smoking in his truck parked across from his apartment in St. Petersburg. Misha's commitment to a life of combat is an invitation to think of war not as an interruption of ordinary life but as an ongoing, corroding presence in contemporary Russia. In turn, his truck's liminality, moving between home and front, pushes us to reconsider domesticity in its relationship to this ongoing presence of war. From the perspective of Russia, domesticity does not appear to be an obvious object of aspiration and a stable space of return “after war.” More poignantly, domesticity turns out to constitute the shifting ground of relationships at play when people negotiate ethical commitments and achieve a form of attachment to life—what Misha called the “taste” or the “salt” of life.

An Interactionist Approach to BTLG Pride

Within and beyond Symbolic Interactionism, sociological studies of bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and gay (BTLG) populations have expanded dramatically in the past two decades. Although such studies have invigorated our understanding of many aspects of BTLG life and experience, they have thus far left BTLG Pride relatively unexplored. How do BTLG populations experience Pride, and what insights might such efforts have for sociologically understanding such populations and events? We examine these questions through an interview study of bi+ people (i.e., sexually fluid people who identify as bisexual, pansexual, or otherwise outside of gay/straight binaries; Eisner, 2013). Specifically, we analyze how bi+ people negotiate both (1) experiencing Pride as “outsiders within” the broader BTLG population (Collins, 1986), and (2) framing who Pride is for and what it means in practice. In so doing, we demonstrate how Interactionist analyses of certain groups’ meaning making around and experiences of Pride can expand existing sociologies of BTLG populations, bisexual experience, and Pride.

Young Muslims’ religious identities in relation to places beyond the UK: a qualitative map-making technique in Newcastle upon Tyne

ABSTRACT Transnational relations can play an important role in young people’s identity negotiations and transitions to adulthood. In this article, we explore how young British-born Muslims construct and contest their religious identities and experience their changing religious identities from their lateteens until their early-twenties. We analyse how places beyond the UK shape their religious beliefs and identities in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England, and present a methodological tool to understand young people’s complex and changing (religious) identities and spatialities. We draw on in-depth interviews – including map-making methods – with a small number of young Muslims living in Newcastle upon Tyne whose parents migrated from Pakistan or Bangladesh. This article contributes to youth geographies, by illustrating that when the participants begin to negotiate ‘being Muslim’ more independently, the spatial orientation of their religious identities starts to change as well. We show that the changing meaning and importance of the places beyond the UK should be understood in relation to other spatial notions when explaining religious identity negotiations of young people. Moreover, the paper provides a methodological contribution in demonstrating how map-making can help to examine young people’s identities and changing relationships to places in a transnational context.

Perceiving and problematizing ‘invisibility’ in English language education and criticality: a duoethnographic dialogue

ABSTRACT The dominant social, political and educational narrative of ‘homogeneous Japan’ has been both perpetuated and challenged inside Japan and abroad. Transdisciplinary scholarship and critical communal voices have highlighted Japan’s history as a site of diversity and complexity. the diverse ways people negotiate being, becoming and belonging as ‘Japanese’ and/or as members of Japanese society, and the marginalization individuals and groups have faced due to the homogeneity narrative. This article presents two researcher-practitioners employing duoethnographic inquiry to dialogue regarding how critical frameworks in applied linguistics and English language teaching (ELT) seek to account for identity negotiation, experience and (in)equity in Japanese society, and ELT therein. In sharing, probing, reflecting on and reimagining their stories dialogically, the authors discuss one key concern: in limiting their scope to addressing ‘essentialized and idealized nativeness in English’ dominant approaches to criticality have rendered individuals’ broader negotiations of identity and community membership, ‘invisible.’ The authors invite readers to engage with the dialogue herein, and reflect on what frames their own ‘seeing.’

Fragile Bonds of Recognition: Exploring the Social Underpinnings of Sentiments of Exclusion in Post-1989 East Germany

AbstractRecently, as a corollary of intensified efforts to understand the rise of right-wing populism, the topic of social recognition has gained renewed attention in sociological research. It seems that a sense of misrecognition and exclusion is shaped as much by cultural as by economic factors. Just how these elements are interlinked, however, remains a black box. In this article, I offer an empirical contribution to this problem: I demonstrate that social recognition is nourished in everyday interpersonal relations and that people negotiate ideas of economic deservingness in their social surroundings—so much so, in fact, that they make social ties dependent on them. The article studies the case of the post-1989 societal shifts in formerly communist-ruled East Germany, a context marked by a pervasive sense of social exclusion today. In interviews with 41 individuals who lived through this rupturing process, I identify a crucial dynamic of social misrecognition in how respondents evaluate other peoples’ strategies of coping with the economic fallout of this time and how they draw—often deeply personal—boundaries between themselves and others on these grounds.

Rendering land touristifiable: (eco)tourism and land use change

Critical research concerning ecotourism has revealed the activity’s socio-economic impacts, including low-wage employment-based dependencies for many rural communities. While these dynamics are important, a crucial aspect of the ecotourism industry that falls outside this conventional sort of dependency is land use dynamics, specifically land use change, sales and entrepreneurship. We examine these dynamics in Corbett Tiger Reserve, India, where promotion of (eco)tourism since the 1990s has influenced significant changes in local land use. These changes were initially facilitated by outsiders buying land and setting up hotels and resorts in villages adjoining the Reserve. Empirical research reveals that while this initial boom of outsiders buying land has waned, land owning villagers are now setting up tourism enterprises on their own land, thereby diversifying land use from agriculture to tourism. Critical agrarian research has shown that material and symbolic factors influence farmers’ decision-making regarding land use change. An agrarian studies perspective thus facilitates a nuanced understanding of tourism-related land use diversification and change. By bringing agrarian and ecotourism studies approaches together here, we contribute to both by emphasising the importance of (eco)tourism in agrarian change and of attention to land use change in ecotourism studies to understand how rural people negotiate and navigate (eco)tourism in relation to land use. We also contribute to tourism geographies more broadly by highlighting how land use decision-making shapes local spaces in the course of ecotourism development. We draw attention to the broader processes of and impacts of ecotourism that shift generational rural land use influenced by changing values of land outside a protected area. Rendering land touristifiable deepens villagers’ dependence on the market and alienates them from their land. Ecotourism commodifies nature, and we show that this commodification extends to rural land outside of ecotourism zones per se.

Gender, culture and morality: A case study of young people’s negotiations of sexual intimacy online

This study adds to the existing literature on mediated sexual intimacy by exploring young people’s negotiations of sexual self-representations online within a culturally diverse sample. We apply a discourse-theoretical analysis to the data gathered using our visual creative methodology consisting of six focus groups with youngsters between the ages of 13 and 20 years old (N = 57). Although the representation of youth in public and academic discourses is often White, gendered and heteronormative, diversity is growing within digital youth cultures. Our analysis shows that this diversity affects the moral negotiations of young people by providing specific understandings of gender in relation to ethnic–cultural and religious identities.

"They stand in the middle now": Pathways to meeting psychological needs by adolescents who are refugees from sub-Saharan Africa.

This study explored the psychological needs of refugee youth from sub-Saharan Africa resettled in a large city in Southwest United States. We utilized the framework of Basic Psychological Needs Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) which proposes that competence, relatedness, and autonomy are universal psychological needs. We examined the challenges to meeting these needs and resolutions to these challenges. Integral to understanding these needs was to place them in the context of a bicultural model of adaptation. Of particular interest was discovering how these young people negotiate and reconcile home and host cultural demands while meeting needs. From July 2019 to August 2020, semistructured individual interviews (N = 44) were completed with youth, parents, and cultural experts. Data were analyzed using a hybrid inductive and deductive approach and thematic content analysis. Active engagement, assertion, and self-advocacy were delineated as important pathways to achieve competence. Relatedness needs were served by inclusive ties, and frequently included other "outsiders." Autonomy came from self-sufficiency, agency, and "voice." Altruism was common, extending beyond ethnic community, and promoted competence, relatedness, and empowerment. Conflicts between family and host culture were managed by accepting parental authority. Parents contributed to integrating home and host cultures by flexibly interpreting traditional rules. Our findings illustrate the strengths of these youth who manage tremendous challenges to meeting their psychological needs. We highlight how in the process of cultural adaptation they retain ties to their home culture. They choose diversity in their relationships and find agency and purpose by supporting others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cultural Intelligence and Cross-Cultural Differences in Writing Ability for English Learner

Culture is one of the leading agents in making people negotiate with each other. Cultural intelligence is not an exception in this matter and can significantly affect learners’ education. This study explains cultural intelligence, its’ theoretical background, definition, contents, knowledge, facets, and the effect of this phenomenon on education especially writing ability. Moreover, this study explains the development stages and domains of cultural intelligence while individuals are confronted with unknown situations. The most significant factor that can define cultural intelligence is the contexts and situations that stimulate this intelligence. Also, some assessment processes are examined concerning cultural intelligence. In addition, this study conducted a review on the relationship between cultural intelligence and writing ability. Some recent examinations regarding cultural intelligence and other fields of studies and variables were reported. Finally, this review found that cultural intelligence can impose a negative or positive effect on counterpart variables.

Discordant benevolence: How and why people help others in the face of conflicting values.

What happens when a request for help from friends or family members invokes conflicting values? In answering this question, we integrate and extend two literatures: support provision within social networks and moral decision-making. We examine the willingness of Americans who deem abortion immoral to help a close friend or family member seeking one. Using data from the General Social Survey and 74 in-depth interviews from the National Abortion Attitudes Study, we find that a substantial minority of Americans morally opposed to abortion would enact what we call discordant benevolence: providing help when doing so conflicts with personal values. People negotiate discordant benevolence by discriminating among types of help and by exercising commiseration, exemption, or discretion. This endeavor reveals both how personal values affect social support processes and how the nature of interaction shapes outcomes of moral decision-making.

The body politics of successful ageing in the nexus of health, well-being and energy consumption practices

In this paper, we introduce the idea of the bio-socio-material body to think through the body politics that emerge within the nexus of health, well-being and domestic energy consumption as people age. Our work draws upon an ethnographic study with older Australians in regional New South Wales, Australia. We enrich social practice theory conceptualisations by foregrounding the body as a dynamic bio-socio-material entity that shapes and is shaped by practices. In doing so, we draw attention to the body politics of managing health, well-being and energy consumption while trying to age successfully. We identify that the bio-socio-material dimensions of the body play an important role in how health, well-being and energy practices are performed. Energy practices are bound up in understandings of health and well-being as an ongoing and contingent process. Here, the use of energy and appliances becomes integral to how people negotiate and work towards successful ageing. We found that embodied practices of health, well-being and energy consumption are linked to biological, emotional, affective, social and material concerns that create body politics. These include tensions and challenges relating to health and vitality, caring for the sick and the dying, maintaining good mental health, the affordances of buildings and appliances, energy affordability and billing anxiety, social connectedness, and pleasures and pains. We raise questions emerging from our research on the implications for successful ageing. We call for attention to how health, well-being and energy are imbricated and for policy and programmes that better support older people to navigate the nexus of health, well-being and energy consumption as they age.

To negotiate or not negotiate: professional boundaries surrounding mobile device usage

ABSTRACT With the widespread ownership and usage of mobile devices combined with the subsequent challenges usage poses on relationships, this research examines how people negotiate time spent on mobile devices (smartphones and/or tablets) accomplishing professional tasks. Participants in this study were the users of the mobile device within a full-time managerial level position. Diverse organizational representation included, but not limited to health care, engineering, public relations, finance, education, and distribution management industries. Using qualitative methods and semi-structured interviews, data analysis unveiled what negotiation means when using mobile devices in any capacity for professional reasons within the domestic (familial) sphere. Management-level organizational members share how parameters (sometimes called boundaries or borders) are both in and out of their control when using mobile devices to communicate professionally. Within their control was the users’ ability to engage or disengage, while also challenged with situations out of their control due to organizational directives. This research re-conceptualizes the concepts of Clark’s (2000) Work/Family Border Theory. While this data was gathered prior to Covid19, understanding this balance has current and future relevancy from an academic and applied perspective.