scholarly journals Gender and Space during Guatemala’s Holy Week: An Ethnographic Account

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Karen Ponciano

At midnight of Sunday, 9 April 2017, the Sunday known as Palm Sunday during Holy Week (Semana Santa), the streets of Guatemala City were packed with parishioners, passers-by, and strollers watching the procession of Jesús Nazareno de los Milagros, “King of the Universe”. The procession’s itinerary takes almost eighteen hours to complete and it is one of the most popular processions among Catholics in Guatemala. What was I, a female anthropologist taking notes and pictures, doing as part of the entourage of the image of Jesus? The question is not gratuitous because this specific space, namely, the entourage itself, is reserved exclusively for male bearers, the so-called cucuruchos. This ethnographic incursion took place within the framework of an ongoing research project on the construction of gender subjectivities in urban religious spaces in Guatemala City, a project that attempts to answer larger questions on the various processes of subject formation within religious spaces. In this article, however, I will focus exclusively on the construction of gender subjectivities during the celebration of the Holy Week in Guatemala City. This paper discusses how a religious space can be analyzed as a “place of encounter” that will intensify social relations coming from beyond, and going beyond, the processional space itself.

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-136
Author(s):  
Isabell Stamm ◽  
Michael Weinhardt ◽  
Marie Gutzeit ◽  
Matthias Bottel ◽  
Johannes Lindenau

In this article, we reflect upon the combination of crowd science and online teaching, which we refer to as Crowd Science infused Learning. We discuss Crowd Science infused Learning's conceptual design and its viability in sociology and related disciplines. For this purpose, our research project ‘Data Traces’ serves as an empirical case. In the project, we developed an online platform that provided a 45-minute teaching unit, training students in using different forms of digital data: websites, newspaper articles, and administrative register data. Afterwards, students were assigned to predefined, small-scale research tasks contributing to a real-world research project on the social relations in entrepreneurial groups. By completing the tasks, the students could apply their knowledge, gain insights, and contribute actively to an ongoing research project. This combination links students' learning experience with the collection of data for research purposes. We also implemented game elements in the platform's design to support students' motivation. After a brief outline of the Data Traces Project's chronology and key conceptual decisions, the article focuses on a critical discussion of the combination of crowd science and online teaching. Despite significant challenges, we believe that Crowd Science infused Learning is a promising approach and identify opportunities and conditions for a successful combination of crowd science and online teaching.


Author(s):  
Tao Jin

This presentation will report on an ongoing research project about the information needs of microenterprise owners in Louisiana. Microenterprises are those businesses with fewer than five employees or sole proprietorships with no employees. They exist across all industrial sectors and incorporate a wide spectrum of information needs.Cette communication présente un projet de recherche en cours s'intéressant aux besoins informationnels des propriétaires de microentreprises de la Louisiane. Les microentreprises comptent moins de cinq employés, y compris celles à propriétaire unique sans employé, et sont présentes dans tous les secteurs d'activités. Les besoins informationnels varient donc grandement.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110120
Author(s):  
Alessandro Jedlowski

On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the power dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them (as, for example, the Chinese soft power policies and their translation into specific media contents), and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors (producers and consumers of media) in the field.


Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Gilbert ◽  
Jessica Fields ◽  
Laura Mamo ◽  
Nancy Lesko

In 2014, Beyond Bullying, a research project examining LGBTQ sexualities and lives at school, installed private storytelling booths in three US high schools. Students, teachers, and staff were invited to use the booths to share stories about LGBTQ sexualities—their stories often invoked the pleasures and disappointments of being and having a friend. This article analyzes narratives of friendship as told in the Beyond Bullying storytelling booths. Drawing on Foucault’s (1996) interview, ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ we explore participants’ stories of friendship as heralding ‘new relational modes’ that chart a liminal space between family and sexuality. These relational modes of friendship disrupt the familiar trope of the ‘ally’ in anti-bullying programs and complicate what empirical research on LGBTQ youth calls, ‘peer social support.’ Theorizing friendship allows LGBTQ sexuality in schools to reside in an ethics of discomfort, which accommodates complex social relations and varied forms of desire, intimacy, and yearning.


Author(s):  
John Liep

John Liep: A Wilderness of Taboos: The Quest for a Culinary Structure Recent anthropological research in Melanesia has focused on the construction of the person, theories of conception and procreation, and flows of substances through social relations and persons. There will often be a correspondence between substances such as sperm and biood, bodily parts such as bone and flesh, and contrasting foods that are gendered. An asymmetric constitution of the person and a clear structuration of food prestations between affinal sides may exist. A study of these themes on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea yielded frustrating results. No clear idea of contrasting, gendered body aspects was found. Further, a large number of food taboos for menstruating, pregnant and lactating women was distributed in clusters that were amenable to various logics of interpretation without any total structural logic appearing. This negative result is explained by the absence of any sustained practice of asymmetric marriage and corresponding complementary prestations between affines, which would reproduce an ordering asymmetric structure of the person and of the universe of foods.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Marella Feltrin-Morris

As part of an ongoing research project, this essay examines a number of translators’ prefaces to Dante’s Divine Comedy, summarizing recurring patterns and then focusing on deviations from the norm. The majority of these prefaces tend to follow a script, particularly in the case of retranslations of classical texts, which require an acknowledgment of past translations, a homage to the authority of the source text and a display of the translator’s expertise. However, occasional detours from the predictable constellation of themes deserve closer scrutiny, since they give a more authentic voice to the individuals who engaged with the text in its deepest form, not merely within the confines of a prescriptive formula, but expanding the potential of this unique space towards new avenues of discovery.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Ignagni ◽  
Ann Fudge Schormans

At the heart of this paper is a collaboratively created script representing a line of analysis from the Reimagining Parenting Possibilities Project. The script is performed as a forum theatre scene used to disseminate findings from this ongoing research project. Forum theatre, an exemplar of Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed,” invites audience members into a scene, inventing through embodied performance and improvisation analyses and interventions in shared social dilemmas (Boal, 2006). The project rests upon our joint investments in exploring how the denial and containment of parenthood for people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities stems from enduring ableist views as to who is deemed “fit” to raise future citizens, and related efforts to erase disability. We introduce this work with a prologue – offering context for the ableist dynamic and intimate injustices that unfold in the scene. We also provide some background on how we developed the scene, attending to the democratizing and transformative potential of our methodology. Finally, by way of an epilogue, we sketch a number of questions about the scene’s potential to promote intimate and disability justice.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 450-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loene M. Howes

Methodologists have urged researchers who use mixed methods to justify their methodological choices and provide greater clarity about the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their approaches. This article outlines the reasoning process undertaken in an endeavor to develop philosophical clarity for an applied, interdisciplinary, mixed methods research project about the communication of scientific evidence in the legal system. I used Greene’s domains of methodology for social inquiry as a framework for addressing reflexive questions about assumptions. Flowing from the domains of values and philosophies, the logic of inquiry was developed before the implications for the integration of findings and reporting of research were outlined. Early engagement in reflexive questioning provided a foundation for methodological refinement throughout the ongoing research journey.


Author(s):  
Norah Jean-Charles ◽  
Paola Spoletini

This research is being conducted to provide requirements analysts with a supportive tool to use during elicitation interviews. In these interviews that were conducted as part of the overall project, stakeholders were asked a series of questions while wearing the Empatica E4 wristband and being recorded through various voice recording platforms. As a part of an ongoing research project, stakeholders have been interviewed using voice recordings and the Empatica E4 wristband to gather biofeedback data. Requirements analyst need support during elicitation interviews because of the ambiguity that arises during communication making it harder to collect proper requirements. In order to provide features such as visualizing the biofeedback collected from the Empatica E4 wristband and the voice waves, questions such as how to create a user-friendly application and how to synchronize the biofeedback and voice data must be researched. In conclusion, creating this mobile application would to assist requirements analysts in carrying out assessments during elicitation interviews.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document