The Ethnographic Vignette as Innovative Tool in Intersectional Social Justice Activist Research

This chapter leverages ethnographic narratives written during the author's year of nearly daily ‘walking tourism' in New York City on the heels of 9/11 as a vehicle to illustrate an innovative approach to community-based research for intersectional social justice purposes. Since the 1990s, the author has employed creatively crafted vignettes as an activist researcher working with alliances of racial, gender, queer, economic, and labor organizations that joined together to conduct progressive intersectional social justice interventions in a conservative Western US state. Here the author extracts pieces of her “New York Stories” for use as vignettes that could be employed in practice-based research as discussion prompts to foster restorative dialogue and participatory action research efforts in community groups and organizations committed to the work of intersectional social justice.

Embodied Burning, E-Waste Epidemiology, and Toxic Postcolonial Corporality

This chapter introduces the ways in which e-pyropolitics are embodied by exploring the illness narratives and bodily distress experiences of several copper burners. The author draws on ethnographic narratives to explore how Agbogbloshie workers narrate, understand, and refer to their own bodily distress to make sense of the toxic exposures and environmental health risks they face. In addition to exploring how toxic embodiment and experience break down or reconfigure demarcations of body and environment, the author highlights the ways in which toxicity and corporality become the site of laudable environmental health risk mitigation efforts that ironically fail to transform or reduce toxic corporality in an enduring postcolonial context. In this way, the author explores how a solutions-based intervention in Agbogbloshie overlooks the complexity and diversity of eco-corporeal relations in a tech metal extraction zone where bodies, toxins, and economies intersect.

Composite actors as participant protection: methodological opportunities for ethnographers

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to persuade ethnographers to consider using composites for studies in which protecting participants from identification is especially important. It situates the argument in the context of the transparency and data sharing movements' uneven influence across disciplines.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews problems in maintaining confidentiality of research participants using pseudonyms and masking. It analyzes existing literature on composites, conditions of composite use and identifies composite actors as a form useful to place-based ethnography. Methodological aspects of composite actor construction are discussed along with potential opportunities composites offer.FindingsConstruction of composite actors is best accomplished by aggregating thematically during deskwork. Composites provide enhanced confidentiality by creating plausible doubt in the reader's mind, in part, through the presentation of aggregate rather than individual-level data.Originality/valueThis discussion advances the methodology of constructing composites, particularly composite actors, providing guidance to increase trustworthiness of ethnographic narratives that employ composites.

Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects

The article presents a methodography of a collaborative design workshop conducted with national and international statisticians. The workshop was part of an ethnographic research project on innovation in European official statistics. It aimed to bring academic researchers and statisticians together to collaborate on the design of app prototypes that imagine citizens as co-producers of official statistics rather than only data subjects. However, the objective was not to settle on an end product but to see if relations to citizens could be re-imagined. Through a methodography composed of two ethnographic narratives, we analyse whether and how a collaborative design workshop brought about imaginings of citizens as co-producers. To retrospectively analyse the workshop, we draw on feminist and material-semiotic takes on ‘friction’ as characteristic of collaboration. ‘Friction’, we suggest, can enlarge the repertoire of collaborative speculative practice beyond notions of rupture or consensus. Finally, we suggest that this analysis demonstrates the potential of methodography for opening up and reflecting on method in STS through eliciting the possibilities of collaboration.

Implications of Protest and Reform for Domestic Governance in Ethiopia

The nexus between protest–transition–reform situated in a larger frame of Ethiopia’s political dynamics anchored in historical narratives and theoretical debates are presented in this paper. Moreover, the genesis and the dynamics surrounding the rolling out of the post-2018 Ethiopia’s transition are examined from the vantage point of prospects for entrenching a stable democratic dispensation in the country. To this end, the political economy approach, along with presenting ethnographic narratives that are pertinent to the subject under study, is used as an analytical lens. Also, document review of journal articles, official and academic reports, internet blogs, and newspaper and other media posts was undertaken to substantiate findings from primary sources. The paper concludes that the ongoing Ethiopian transition unfolded by paving avenues for opening up space for negotiating unsettled issues surrounding state-society relations in a context of a relatively liberalized political economy. However, the envisioned model of transition is constrained by different factors characterized by a split in the ranks of the ruling coalition, intergroup conflicts, and rising unmet expectations that resulted in the absence of peace and stability. Besides, the prevailing weakness of democratic institutions and polarized inter-ethnic relations, the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic stalled the progress of the transition process.

Telling Tales?

The ethnographic representation of violence is a controversial issue, involving debates about (avoiding) sensationalism or (acknowledging) emotionality, for example. Less considered is how the subjective nature of ethnography and the fact that ethnographic narratives are always situated can have ramifications for both interpreting and representing violence, particularly in the context of longitudinal ethnographic research. Drawing on my investigations into Nicaraguan gang dynamics begun in 1996, this article explores the subjectivity of the longitudinal ethnographic experience of violence both in and out of “the field” through three specific examples. These highlight in different ways how ethnographic understanding is highly situational and time-bound, meaning that longitudinal research is particularly prone to episodes of discomfiting conceptual disjuncture. At the same time, it is precisely this that arguably imbues it with exceptional power and insight.

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Bover cemetery is located in the middle of the villages of Shnogh and Teghut of the Lori region of the Republic of Armenia, to the west of the central part of Bover church, at an average altitude of 930 m above sea level. According to the results of excavations in 2012, it turned out that the tomb No. 45 is a cultburial tomb. A dog was buried in that partially damaged tomb (beginning of the 1st millennium BC). The contemporary archaeological material both from Armenia and the surrounding regions shows that such burials were typical of the mentioned period. The archaeological materials, are certainly linked to ethnographic narratives, which make it possible to draw up a general picture of this phenomenon.

Participatory Mapping with Herders in a Climate Adaptation Research Project

Declining grazing lands threaten the livelihoods of Fulɓe herders in Burkina Faso and other parts of Africa. I used GIS to spatially represent ethnographic narratives about land use and land cover changes. In a place where maps were unavailable or treated as closely held community secrets, I used participatory mapping to offer participants the opportunity to control the process and resulting maps. Our project sought to understand environmental challenges from a fine-grained emic perspective using high-resolution satellite imagery and focus groups. I reflect on challenges of conducting fieldwork in one’s home country, which made it easier to build relationships and interact with officials. At the same time, however, I faced the intersecting challenges of “being an outsider and a woman” as I interacted with Fulɓe men and that of being “too educated” in interacting with women.

How the Tenth Indian Survived: An Indigenous Reclamation

The lack of longitudinal multicultural research in academia leaves no other option for the illumination and transformation of education towards more diverse and equitable opportunities than to acknowledge and incorporate the experiences of those previously marginalised by the mainstream through the study of ethnographic narratives, such as this one, which seeks to inform and enlighten all readers. In this article, the author encapsulates her personal experience as an adoption survivor and her journey of reclamation through education.

Where There Is No Formal Social Welfare System for an Indigenous People

This chapter on “Where There Is No Formal Social Welfare System for an Indigenous People: Entrepreneurship, Watchmen, and the Reinvention of the Maasai Warrior” addresses the transformation of the Maasai moranism (warrior society). As a marginalized indigenous group, the Maasai have not benefitted from any important social welfare or safety net programs. The chapter interrogates the evolution of an entrepreneurial spirit among young Maasai men who have joined the ranks of the massive informal sector to become watchmen (security guards) in cities and small townships in both Kenya and Tanzania. The chapter draws from ethnographic narratives about the “fierceness” of the Maasai in global capitalist expansion and their economic marginalization. The overriding question is: In what ways is the proliferation of the phenomenon of Maasai watchmen a reaction to the community’s marginalization?