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Considering Silences in Narrative Inquiry: An Intergenerational Story of a Sami Family Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-04-03 Bodil H. Blix, Vera Caine, D. Jean Clandinin, Charlotte Berendonk
Through coming alongside a Sami family, we open spaces to contemplate multiple forms of silence. We argue that rather than the antithesis to narrative, silence is an integral part of narrative inquiry. As narrative inquirers we need to be wakeful to what is told and also untold, often simultaneously. We believe that narrative inquiry is not necessarily about breaking silences, but it is also about
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Being a Deliveroo Rider: Practices of Platform Labor in Nijmegen and Berlin Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-03-10 Peter Timko, Rianne van Melik
On-demand delivery platforms have become a common feature of urban economies across the globe. Noted for their hyper-outsourced, “lean” business models and reliance on independent contractors, these companies evade traditional employer obligations while still controlling workers through complex algorithmic management techniques. Using food delivery platform Deliveroo as a case-study, this paper investigates
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Bodies as Arenas of Experimentation: Experiencing Novel Ways of Running Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-03-10 Toomas Gross
Recreational running has been a widely popular form of leisure for half a century, and many countries have experienced a marathon boom in the past decades. In recent years, however, runners have started to run in new ways, often in unconventional settings, and compete in races with various alternative formats. Through an ethnographic approach that builds on in-depth narrative interviews with recreational
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Uncoupled: American Widows in Times of Uncertainty and Ambiguous Norms Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-03-10 Regina Kenen
This study uses the concept of uncertainty in general, and specifically objective and subjective uncertainty, as a framework for understanding how a widow experiences grief and attempts to reestablish her sense of self. It investigates how widows understand, internalize, and act on objective and subjective uncertainty and the interplay between them. Objective uncertainty usually refers to more concrete
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“We Do This at Dancing Rabbit”: Recruitment and Collective Identity Processes in the Ecovillage Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-03-01 Zach Rubin
This article outlines the various ways members of an intentional community erect barriers to entry in their village and lifestyle, and how they use boundary maintenance tactics to both protect their own personal spheres as well as the integrity of their mission and vision. Members of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage (“DR”) seek to create an alternative model for a more just and sustainable world. They face
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Negotiating Social Diversity in Residential Care for Older Persons Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-02-10 Tina R. Kilaberia
Studies have long noted challenges of diversity in the workplace. Growing evidence suggests that both the aging population and the workforce needed for health and social care will be more diverse than in previous decades. The confluence of older person and care worker diversity can result in suboptimal care. Drawing on 44 interviews, observations of 62 meetings, and a five-year immersion, this organizational
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Erratum to Practices of Ethnographic Research: Introduction to the Special Issue Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-02-01
Ploder, Andrea, and Julian Hamann. 2021. “Practices of Ethnographic Research: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 50(1): 3 – 10. DOI: 10.1177/0891241620979100
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“‘No Tough Guys Here?’: Hybrid Masculinity in a Boxing Gym” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-01-29 Watoii Rabii
In this article, I explore manifest and latent discourses about masculinity in a predominantly white, middle class boxing gym. In this gym, the owner and coaches promote a discourse that emphasizes love, bridgework, and sparring with care. This discourse is part of the gym’s white-collar boxing culture. A key part of this discourse is distancing themselves from other gyms, claiming they promote a violent
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“You Don’t Want to Feel Poor All the Time”: What SNAP Means to Low-Income Philadelphia Residents Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-01-27 Keith R. Brown, Colette Hanlon, Becki Scola
Through participant observation while grocery shopping, and 37 in-depth interviews with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients, we describe the social meanings of SNAP dollars to low-income Philadelphia residents. We make three contributions to the study of food insecurity and SNAP. First, we confirm the literature showing that SNAP covers less than half of a monthly food budget
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Pedagogies of Sport in Youth Detention: Withholding, Developing, or Just “Busying the Youth”? Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-01-27 Daniel Roe
This article examines pedagogies of sport in youth detention, drawing on ethnography (primarily participatory observations and interviews) at two all-male youth detention homes in Sweden. Focusing on youths’ experiences situated in discourse and practice, three pedagogies of doing sport in youth detention are described: withholding sport, busying with sport, and sport as developmental community. The
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“Are You Married?”: Gender and Faith in Political Ethnographic Research Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2021-01-27 Helene Thibault
In this article, I look at how political ethnography can contribute to the study of religious dynamics within conservative religious communities. Based on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan within conservative Muslim circles, I take a reflexive stance by arguing that my informants used my status as a single foreign woman to steer interactions toward those of my religious conversion and need for marriage
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Making Food Manageable – Packaging as a Code of Practice for Work Practices at the Supermarket Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-12-23 Lukas Sattlegger
While packaging-free stores are in the uptake, single-use packaging remains a constitutive element in self-service supermarkets. Portraying packaging as an actor in workplace practices, the article provides novel explanations for the supermarkets’ struggle to reduce packaging. The ethnographic analysis shows that food packaging is crucial for the functioning of supermarkets. This is in contrast to
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Performing Gender and Political Recognition: Israeli Reform Jewish Life-cycle Rituals Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-11-02 Elazar Ben-Lulu
Anthropologists see life-cycle rituals as a significant way to understand gender roles and identities in religious communities. While in the past, these compulsory rituals involved a significant change in a person’s social status, today many of their traditional features have been transformed. This ethnographic inquiry examines Bat Mitzvah ceremonies (coming of age rituals for girls) in Israeli Reform
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Practices of Ethnographic Research: Introduction to the Special Issue Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 Andrea Ploder, Julian Hamann
Ethnographic research is the product of multiple practices. It is an assemblage of seeing and looking, hearing and listening, handling objects, describing, interviewing, recording, reading, documenting, and working with data—transcribing, storing, transforming, sharing, labelling, coding, sequencing, comparing, interpreting, visualizing, and quoting—as well as many other practices. They occur in all
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Material Practices of Ethnographic Presence Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-10-31 Stefan Laube
Ethnographic research is a thoroughly material matter, but the involvement of material things in performing ethnographic methods is hardly investigated. Referring to my own research in various fields of digitalized work, I offer a reflexive analysis of the material production of ethnographic presence. In particular, I reflect on how clothing, field notes, and a camera contribute to making ethnographic
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Distributing Reflexivity through Co-laborative Ethnography Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-11-03 Patrick Bieler, Milena D. Bister, Janine Hauer, Martina Klausner, Jörg Niewöhner, Christine Schmid, Sebastian von Peter
In ethnographic research and analysis, reflexivity is vital to achieving constant coordination between field and concept work. However, it has been conceptualized predominantly as an ethnographer’s individual mental capacity. In this article, we draw on ten years of experience in conducting research together with partners from social psychiatry and mental health care across different research projects
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“Pocketing” Research Data? Ethnographic Data Production as Material Theorizing Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-10-31 Christine Neubert, Ronja Trischler
We analyze the relations between ethnographic data and theory through an examination of materiality in research practices, arguing that data production is a form of material theorizing. This entails reviewing and (re-)applying practice-theoretical discussions on materiality to questions of ethnography, and moving from understanding theory primarily as ideas to observing theorizing in all steps of research
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Video Analysis and Ethnographic Knowledge: An Empirical Study of Video Analysis Practices Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-11-30 Christian Meier zu Verl, René Tuma
This paper discusses the practical foundations of ethnographically informed video analysis by investigating empirically one of the core activities of video research in sociology: the video data session. Most discussions are shaped by methodological considerations, little is known however about actual video analysis practices. By making these practices itself an object of analysis, we do show how interpretation
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On Spiritualist Workers: Healing and Divining through Tarot and the Metaphysical Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-10-22 Melissa F. Lavin
In the following article, I explore how tarot card readers (and other spiritualist workers) “control the future” to heal and empower their clients, emphasizing the porous roles of therapy and advocacy that assorted “psychics” perform. I examine how these workers navigate interactional trials, including misassigned identity, ethical challenges, and interactional boundaries in readings at psychic fairs
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Contractually Sterilized: Migrant Mothers and Carceral Politics in the Gulf Coast Cooperation (GCC) Countries Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Pardis Mahdavi
Migration to the Gulf Countries of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait has become increasingly feminized in the past two decades. Women make up the majority of migrants to the Gulf, and while they often migrate during their most fertile reproductive years while they labor in the Gulf, they are prohibited by contract from becoming pregnant—leading to a situation of what I call “contractual sterilization
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Ethnographic Gameness: Theorizing Extra-methodological Fieldwork Practices in a Study of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-10-17 Christian Johann Schmid
This article theorizes the fieldwork experiences that I gained while studying outlaw biker subculture. Drawing on Bourdieu’s practice theory and Goffman’s dramaturgical interactionism, I argue that ethnography in practice is pre-disposed by the ethnographer’s primary habitus, which shapes symbolic interaction. To substantiate this claim, I disclose my own upbringing in a troubled working-class family
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The Anatomy of a Battle Jacket: A Multimodal Ethnographic Perspective Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-08-21 Lauren O’Hagan
The battle jacket—a sleeveless denim jacket customized with band patches—is a staple item of clothing for heavy metal fans. This paper brings together social semiotic analysis and ethnographic insights to explore three different types of battle jacket: the “classic” jacket, the “tribute” jacket, and the “modern” jacket. It discovers that, despite the jacket’s assortment of bold images, colours, typography
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“We Offer Nuffle a Sausage Sacrifice on Game Day”. Blood Bowl Players’ World-building Rituals through the Lens of Theory of Sociocultual Viability Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-08-08 Benedict E. Singleton
This article explores the world-building activities of players of the tabletop game Blood Bowl—a game that parodies American Football within a fantasy setting. It utilizes a ritual framework to focus on players’ activities relating to the considerable amount of luck inherent to the game. Based on fieldwork and survey data, it interprets players’ rituals and other actions as an effort to enact a particular
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Institutional Ethnography and the Materiality of Affect: Affective Circuits as Indicators of Other Possibilities Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-08-06 Debra Talbot
Many studies have utilized institutional ethnography (IE) to reveal the social relations that govern how things are put together at the frontline of work, particularly in the public sector and education. The focus has generally been on restrictive practices associated with accountability regimes of new public management. Less analytic attention has been paid, however, to discovering ways in which workers
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Glocalizing Women’s Empowerment: Feminist Contestation and NGO Activism in Iran Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-08-06 Fae Chubin
Through an ethnographic study of a women’s empowerment program in Tehran, and in-depth interviews with its workers, I examine the hegemony of liberal feminist conceptions of empowerment among secular and cosmopolitan middle-class activists and NGO directors. This study demonstrates that activists’ liberal conception of agency inadvertently erased the agency of the marginalized clients and their rights-based
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Back to the Sicilian Landing Sites: Exploring a Borderland through a Refugee Gaze Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-07-27 Luca Queirolo Palmas
This article is based on a shared ethnographic experience centered on a trip back to a crucial landing site in Sicily. Searching for the evocative and emotional dimension of a border zone, the research follows a refugee, who is now living within the institutional reception system in Northern Italy, wandering and rediscovering the moment of his arrival three years after having been rescued. The dialogue
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Digital Migrating and Storyworlding with Women We Love: A Feminist Ethnography Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-07-23 Barbara Dennis, Lucinda Carspecken, Pengfei Zhao, Samantha Silberstein, Pooja Saxena, Suparna Bose, Dajanae Palmer, Sylvia Washington, Alycia Elfreich
This contemporary feminist ethnography draws on in-depth ethnographically-anchored lifestory interviews with loved ones and uses digital media (such as ArcGIS) to expand the ethnographic collection around the globe. Members of the FRC conceived of the WomenWeLove Project as an opportunity for the lesser-told stories of six ordinary women from different places to take center stage. By digitizing the
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“How Come This Man Is Homeless?” An Ethnographic Exploration of Identity Work among Volunteers in a Diner Serving to the Homeless Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-07-22 Miray Hamarat, Ozge Merzali Celikoglu
In this study, we explore the identity work among volunteers in a local restaurant in one of the metropolitan cities of Turkey, which serves to paying customers by daytime, and free food to the homeless in the evening. Our setting, which we call The Diner, is a local attempt to help homeless people whose number increases day by day. Through ethnographic fieldwork, we found that the volunteers at The
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Social Media Representations of Law Enforcement within Four Diverse Chicago Neighborhoods Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-07-22 Aparna Sodhi, Nathan Aguilar, Deanna E Choma, Jackie Marie Steve, Desmond Patton, Marie Crandall
The perception of excessive use of force by law enforcement towards minorities has become an increasing focus of attention in the national media and public consciousness. With greater ability to record conflicts using smartphones and dissemination of videos via social media, the public may more readily judge the circumstances of law enforcement interactions. The purpose of this study was (a) to understand
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Structural Inequality, Homelessness, and Moral Worth: Salvaging the Self through Sport? Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-06-21 Jordan Koch, Jay Scherer, Rylan Kafara
This urban ethnography explores how a group of men experiencing homelessness collectively produced an economy of moral worth and socially beneficial labor within and through a weekly sport-for-development program in the distinct settler-colonial context of Edmonton, Alberta. For over two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based
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Punishing Fieldwork: Penal Domination and Prison Ethnography Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-06-11 Michael Gibson-Light, Josh Seim
Ethnographic studies inside prisons are especially difficult to execute. In addition to facing amplified challenges in gaining site access, earning subjects’ trust, and tolerating the exhaustion of fieldwork, researchers who collect participant observation and in-depth interview data behind bars must confront an explicit asymmetrical power relation. Prison ethnographers penetrate, to varying levels
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“Church Is Important to Our Clients”: Autonomy, Community, and Religious Expression within a Long-term Care Organization Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-06-04 LaTonya Trotter
Autonomy and selfhood are primary concerns for scholars of long-term care. Previous work has shown how organizational routines threaten client autonomy and disrupt access to the material and symbolic resources that ground the biography of the self. In this article, I examine how a group of African-American older adults within an adult day service center ameliorated these threats through religious expression
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Practices of Writing in Ethnographic Work Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-06-03 Larissa Schindler, Hilmar Schäfer
Although the practice of writing is key to the production of ethnographic knowledge, the topic remains understudied. Using material from our own ethnographic research in the fields of air travel and cultural heritage as data, we develop a reflexive account of ethnographic writing. We examine in detail the practices of jotting down observations, writing field notes, analytic annotating, ordering and
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Talking Shit, Egos, and Tough Skin: Humor Among Elite Black Men Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-05-26 Joseph A. Guzman
Extant research considers humor integral to the Black experience. Previous work on the topic, however, mainly focuses on humor among lower-class Blacks and remains disconnected from broader sociological research on humor and small group culture. Drawing on semistructured, in-depth interviews with 29 members and over 30 months of participant observation this article explores humor in an elite Black
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Gendered Governmentalities and Neoliberal Logics: Latina, Immigrant Women in Healthcare and Social Services Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-05-12 Jennifer Bickham Mendez
This ethnographic research with Latina, immigrant mothers and health care and social service workers in Williamsburg, Virginia analyzes the production of insecurities in immigrant women’s lives, as...
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Leaving Gangs in Cape Town: Disengagement as Role Exit Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-05-05 Dariusz Dziewanski
A lack of scholarship on gang leaving in Cape Town, South Africa creates the impression that joining gangs is a death sentence. However, this paper shows that gang members can disengage, even amidst the scarcity of an emerging city. It combines life history research with Ebaugh’s (2013) role exit theory in an analysis of the disengagements of 24 former gang participants. Research considers the various
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The Value of Five Cents: Mismatched Meaning Making at a Bottle and Can Redemption Center Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-05-05 Sarah Iverson
Drawing on a year-long ethnography at a non-profit bottle and can redemption center, this study examines the mismatched meanings ascribed by recyclers (or “canners”) and redemption center management to recycling work. Canners primarily make sense of the work for the money it puts in their pocket and for its autonomous work conditions. By contrast, management imbues canning with moral meaning, linking
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Generation V: Millennial Vegans in Israel Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Liora Gvion
This study asks how and why veganism becomes a way of constructing generational identities and worldviews. Focusing on Israeli millennial vegans, I argue that veganism enables millennials to constitute a generational mode of thought that differentiates them from preceding generations through three interrelated practices: replacing evidence-based knowledge with other types of information, based on personal
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Inside Happiness Groups: Everyday Happiness, Self-Awareness, and Resistance Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-03-24 Avihu Shoshana
This article offers a phenomenological examination of happiness through ethnographies in self-help groups for happiness (happiness groups). The ethnographies reveal three major happiness scenarios—increasing self-awareness, eliminating self-awareness, and the art of not being yourself—with the increasing self-awareness scenario revealed as the most prevalent of the three. The findings describe the
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Security Culture: Surveillance and Responsibilization in a Prisoner Reentry Organization Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-03-10 Francis B. Prior
As they have become increasingly common, prisoner reentry organizations have become a topic of interest to ethnographers, particularly those focused on race crime and justice. Reentry organizations are typically understood in terms of the social services they provide with the purpose of easing their clients’ social reintegration after incarceration. However, ethnographers of nonprofit prisoner reentry
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White, Male, and Bartending in Detroit: Masculinity Work in a Hipster Scene Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-02-26 Margaret Anne Murray
The hipster scene in Detroit, Michigan, is explored via participant observation and in-depth interviews. Participants used hipster norms as a resource for masculinity dilemmas, including a lack of white- or blue-collar jobs and stable female partners. The analysis examines how these men successfully enacted their progressive values in some arenas (read: gender) but not in others (race relations). More
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Doing Waiting: An Ethnomethodological Analysis Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-01-24 Ruth Ayaß
Waiting is an activity that is virtually carried out by everybody at every time and everywhere. In contrast to other occupations, such as playing the piano, it does not require painstaking training efforts. Notwithstanding, we do possess methodically employed techniques of indicating to others that we are waiting—that is, we make our waiting recognizable as such. Many forms of waiting in everyday life
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Soldiers and Scholars: Ritual Dilemmas among National Religious Combat Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2020-01-11 Nehemia Stern, Uzi Ben-Shalom
This article explores how the practice of Jewish rabbinic law within the combat ranks of the Israel Defense Forces can be used as an ethnographic medium through which anthropologists may better contextualize the social and political tensions that characterize Jewish religious nationalism in Israel. We argue that national religious combat soldiers rarely turn to rabbinic legal tracts, or to the overlapping
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Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-12-07 Max Papadantonakis
In this article, I show how groups and individuals maintain racialized symbolic boundaries at the micro-level of personal interactions. Using data collected during an ethnographic study in Athens, Greece, where I worked as a fruit vendor in a street market, I detail how local Greek vendors and immigrant workers use language, gesture, olfaction, along with their interpretations of faith and sexuality
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Between Boredom, Protest, and Community: Ethnography of Young Activists in a South African Township Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-12-05 Jérôme Tournadre
This article is based on an ethnographic study of the young activists of a South African poor people’s movement. It questions the finding that some of the young poor people in the Global South are trapped by a boredom linked to their socioeconomic incapacity to fully enter into adulthood. Young people are here apprehended through their position within the collective, but also in the framework of the
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Exploring the Implications of Culturally Relevant Teaching: Toward a Pedagogy of Liberation Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-10-25 Dari Green
Schools in America may provide opportunities for upward mobility while also perpetuating social inequality. The inequities found in the US public school system probably result in such a highly stratified society. Conditions found in many schools and classrooms are often a microcosm of the same conditions and factors present in the broader American society. Scholars and education reform activists often
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“You’re a Sociologist, I Am Too . . . ”: Seducing the Ethnographer, Disruption, and Ambiguity in Fieldwork with (Mostly) Undocumented Youth Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-10-22 Sophia Rodriguez
The article is about a set of methodological disruptions that occur in ethnographic fieldwork and what these disruptions mean for ethnographic studies, including analysis, representation of data, and experiences of the ethnographic self. This article documents the process of a minoritized high school youth, Queen, entering the research space and the emergent relations among Queen and Latinx undocumented
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Between Surveillance and Sousveillance: Or, Why Campus Police Feel Vulnerable Precisely Because They Gain Power Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-10-22 Masamichi Inoue
Utilizing historical and ethnographic data, this article explicates a thesis that involves a paradox—campus police feel vulnerable as the “surveyed” precisely because they gain power as the “surveyor.” Toward this end, first, I identify a dramatic change in the status and function of campus police from watchmen to law enforcement professionals in the 1960s-1970s as a key historical context in which
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I Second That Emotion: A Collaborative Examination of Emotions Felt in Course Administration Work Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-09-21 Lindsey B. Anderson, Kristina Ruiz-Mesa, Ashley Jones-Bodie, Caroline Waldbuesser, Jennifer Hall, Melissa A. Broeckelman-Post, Angela M. Hosek
Course administrators hold a unique position in academe—one that requires high levels of emotion management as part of the job. This research utilized a collaborative autoethnography to explore how workplace emotions were experienced in the basic communication course. The experiences were presented through vignettes written and analyzed by seven course administrators from programs across the United
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On the Margins of College Life: The Experiences of Racial and Ethnic Minority Men in the Extracurriculum Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-08-23 Blake R. Silver
Today, racial and ethnic minority (REM) men complete college at lower rates and perceive a less welcoming campus climate than their white and female peers. Although these disparities in perceptions and outcomes are well-documented, we know less about how they are produced. Drawing on an ethnographic study at a four-year public university, I examine the experiences of REM men in the extracurricular
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“We Make Our Own Rules Here”: Democratic Communities, Corporate Logics, and “No Excuses” Practices in a Charter School Management Organization Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-08-23 Garth D. Stahl
Recently, there has been growing debate over the managerial and leadership practices of expanding charter school networks, often referred to as Charter School Management Organizations (CMOs). CMOs—which typically serve low–socioeconomic status students of color—are deeply tied to education reform efforts in the United States. Many CMOs consistently promote the belief that education can and should borrow
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Fighting Gendered Battles: On Being a Woman in a Contemporary Gaming Community Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-07-18 Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley
This scholarly personal narrative (Nash 2004) draws on the author’s experiences as a woman in a male-dominated gaming community. In such a space, being a woman who plays the game problematizes notions of gender for both the author and for her most-often male opponents. When playing the game, she operates in a liminal space between expert and outsider because of her gender identity. At the same time
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Strangers in the Neighborhood: Violence and Neighborhood Boundaries Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-07-03 Kevin J. Brown, Frederick D. Weil
New Orleans experienced elevated rates of violent crime throughout the thirty years between 1985 and 2015. Violence was disproportionately represented in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. This study explores the lived experiences of residents from one such neighborhood, using individual interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. The data indicate that neighborhood boundaries
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“Nothing About Us Without Us”: Reading Protests against Oppressive Knowledge Production as Guidelines for Solidarity Research Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-06-19 Dilara Yarbrough
Drawing from my analysis of sex worker and homeless protests as well as my experience doing ethnographic research with people experiencing homelessness and people in the sex trade, I put forth recommendations for ethical, policy-relevant research with groups of people who experience routine, normalized violence, and who are frequently silenced and misrepresented by academics and policy makers. This
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Human Values and Digital Work: An Ethnographic Study of Device Paradigm Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-06-14 Hameed Chughtai
I examine Albert Borgmann’s concept of device paradigm as a way to underscore the significance of human values in one’s engagement with digital work in an organizational setting. Device paradigm explains the pervasive patterns of everyday engagement with information technologies as devices that facilitate prosperity without burden and efforts and, in so doing, can downplay the human values in practices
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Digital Ethnography in an Age of Information Warfare: Notes from the Field Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-06-10 Philip R. Kavanaugh, R. J. Maratea
In this article we engage the nature and role of the Internet in ethnographic research and reflect on how ethnographic methodologies may be adapted when researching digital forms of communication. We further consider how recent shifts in both the production and dissemination of textual discourse in networked media environments complicates conventional approaches to digital ethnography. Drawing on examples
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Male Dominance under Threat: Machoism Confronts Female Defiance in Israeli Gyms Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-03-06 Esther Hertzog, Assaf Lev
The article discusses macho culture in Israeli gyms. It describes male trainees’ efforts to preserve their dominance, facing female trainees’ threat to undermine it. The article analyzes means, such as military icons, physical battles, and vocal expressions, used to convey male dominance at the gym. Two gyms in the metropolis of Tel Aviv were studied by the male researcher for three years, and one
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Contested Identities: African Diaspora and Identity Making in a Hair Braiding Salon Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-02-22 Nicole Dezrea Jenkins
Most scholars of intersectionality argue that categories of inequality transform one another. In their empirical analysis, they routinely situate specific categories as master statuses, for example, “black woman” or “immigrant woman.” A growing group of scholars has begun to question the stability of these categories, arguing that context complicates even seemingly stable categories. Drawing on two
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Front Business–Back Business: The Social Anatomy of Small-Time Drug Dealing in a Mexico City Neighborhood Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (IF 1.295) Pub Date : 2019-02-22 Piotr A. Chomczyński, Roger Guy, Rodrigo Cortina-Cortés
Research introduced here draws on over two years of ongoing qualitative work of low-level drug dealers in a Mexico City neighborhood. Through interviews and participant observation, we explore the social mechanisms that sustain and facilitate informal drug dealing. Our findings indicate that the sale of illicit products, especially drugs, is a needed supplement to household income that expands and
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