{"title":"Music for Mental Health: An Autoethnography of the Rory Gallagher Instagram Fan Community","authors":"L. O’Hagan","doi":"10.1177/08912416231162077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416231162077","url":null,"abstract":"Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a major increase in anxiety and depression. For many, online music fandoms have offered an important platform to combat loneliness and aid well-being. In this study, I use autoethnography, supported by psychosocial theory on recovery and sociological theory on music fandoms, to track my personal journey of recovery (2020–2022) from a mental health crisis through the support of the Rory Gallagher Instagram fan community. Specifically, I investigate how the community acts as a positive support mechanism for well-being, how my relationship with Rory and his music has changed since joining the community, and how knowledge of Rory’s own personal struggles, coupled with my own experiences, have empowered me to become a mental health advocate. Overall, the study brings attention to the importance of online music communities as informal, holistic regulating agents for mental health conditions and offers alternative ways for health services to approach mental health care.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42755140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Helping Mom Die: An Auto-ethnographic Account of Preparing for Death","authors":"D. Wysocki","doi":"10.1177/08912416231160776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416231160776","url":null,"abstract":"This article is about a journey that I took with my mother as she left us. It is an article using an autoethnographic approach which allows me, the writer, to use both my personal pain and thoughts as a way to give peace, understanding, and perspective of the time before my mom’s death. This article is also about giving a framework for those who will also go through the same experience with an aging parent, to both take away the stigma of death and to help the reader be present in a tough situation. For me, it was an honor to be with the woman who brought me into this world and to be able to be alone with her as she left.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41940446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Weeding Out the Weak: Labor, Gender, and Disability in a U.S. Fossil Fuel Boomtown","authors":"C. Labuski","doi":"10.1177/08912416231153059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416231153059","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 has radically reshaped the labor dreams of many U.S. workers. This essay uses pre-pandemic fieldwork in an oil and gas “boomtown” to consider post-work imaginaries in the wake and midst of COVID-19. I use feminist and disability studies perspectives to argue that economic analyses must not only move beyond the discourse of “jobs” but must also attend to gender-based and ableist modes of discrimination that persist even in so-called booming economies. I posit the figure of the economically productive worker, asking how routine practices of identity-shaped discrimination undermine the capacities of some to embody this figure. My interview-derived and ethnographic data suggest that economic self-sufficiency is a woefully inadequate model for meeting the material needs of people, and that labor innovations such as a universal basic income are necessary to achieve the kinds of flourishing sought by those participating in the “great resignation.”","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49624403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“He’s Agonal”: An Insider’s Look into the Impact of Moral Injury Suffered While Policing on the Westside of Chicago","authors":"Patrick J. Burke","doi":"10.1177/08912416221087362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221087362","url":null,"abstract":"In this study, I seek to contribute to the literature on self-change and moral injury by providing an autoethnographic account of the processes through which I incurred “moral injury” while giving first aid to gunshot victims as a police officer on the Westside of Chicago. In particular, I aim to address the causes and consequences of failing to find a new identity that would allow me to adjust to repeated trauma. The second aim focuses on illustrating why many police officers working in extremely violent neighborhoods tend to disassociate from victims and potential victims. The analysis of the narratives I present on providing first aid to shooting victims shows that my religiously based moral norms were particularly transgressed by several key mechanisms. In the conclusion, I discuss how future research on moral injury can benefit from incorporating the theory of self-change. I also encourage future research on moral injury to focus on police officers working in extremely violent neighborhoods and consider using autoethnographic methods to pursue such research.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45506385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Addressing the Methodological Challenges that Cloaked Profiles Pose to Digital Observations","authors":"Thea Rabe","doi":"10.1177/08912416221135498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221135498","url":null,"abstract":"Although digital ethnographic studies concerned with online misinformation have focused on analyzing the contents shared by “cloaked” profiles (concealed or fake identities), less attention has been given to the epistemological and ontological dilemmas that cloaked profiles pose to digital ethnography. This article deals with these issues by asking: how can digital ethnographers determine who and what we are observing? And how can we conduct online observations when confronted with cloaked profiles? Drawing on field research, this article argues that researchers would benefit from including more critical reflections on the presence of cloaked profiles and learning how to apply digital skills for how to unveil cloaked profiles. Such practices will challenge a commonly accepted ontology that online profiles represent human behavior and enhance researchers’ digital literacy and ability to recognize cloaked profiles. Finally, applying techniques to unveil cloaked profiles will arguably strengthen the hermeneutic process of knowledge production in digital observations.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49428489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mujeres Guerreras: Negotiating Women’s Empowerment in Colombia","authors":"Zareen Thomas","doi":"10.1177/08912416221126519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221126519","url":null,"abstract":"This research is based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with a formalized youth hip-hop organization in Colombia whose broad work with youth included a mission of women’s and girls’ empowerment. Throughout this article, I show how young women, through their affiliation with this professionalized organization, utilized city spaces to articulate opposition to gender-based inequalities and marginalization, within a larger context of protracted armed conflict and everyday violence. In these spaces, women configured themselves as hip-hop “guerreras” (warriors) and “luchadoras,” (fighters) to convey their fortitude while minimizing risk. I argue that they balanced “uncivic” modalities of hip-hop with a civic language of empowerment to garner support for their labor and causes. By examining women’s NGO affiliations and their creative performances, I show how women simultaneously reinforced sanctioned rhetoric of empowerment while strategically carving spaces to craft media intended to challenge dominant ideologies.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47316386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Moral Discourse of Free Speech: A Virtual Ethnographic Study","authors":"Julia Goldman-Hasbun","doi":"10.1177/08912416221129880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221129880","url":null,"abstract":"Freedom of speech has long been considered an essential value in democracies. However, its boundaries concerning hate speech continue to be contested across many social and political spheres, including governments, social media websites, and university campuses. Despite the recent growth of so-called free speech communities online and offline, little empirical research has examined how individuals embedded in these communities make moral sense of free speech and its limits. Examining these perspectives is important for understanding the growing involvement and polarization around this issue. Using a digital ethnographic approach, I address this gap by analyzing discussions in a rapidly growing online forum dedicated to free speech (r/FreeSpeech subreddit). I find that most users on the forum understand free speech in an absolutist sense (i.e., it should be free from legal, institutional, material, and even social censorship or consequences), but that users differ in their arguments and justifications concerning hate speech. Some downplay the harms of hate speech, while others acknowledge its harms but either focus on its epistemic subjectivity or on the moral threats of censorship and authoritarianism. Further, the forum appears to have become more polarized and right-wing-dominated over time, rife with ideological tensions between members and between moderators and members. Overall, this study highlights the variation in free speech discourse within online spaces and calls for further research on free speech that focuses on first-hand perspectives.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46786695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affective Infrastructures of Immobility: Staying While Neighbors Are Leaving Rural Eastern Siberia","authors":"V. Orlova","doi":"10.1177/08912416221130940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221130940","url":null,"abstract":"Framing “immobility” as already containing mobility, this research asks why people stay in conditions of economic disadvantages and social abandonment even when they have tangible opportunities to leave. Based on ethnography conducted in Eastern Siberia, this research investigates how people throughout the region maintain connections to one place: the village of Anosovo. I argue that the notion of “affective infrastructure” can encapsulate a multiplicity of ties connecting people to places. Affective infrastructure refers to the capacity of “hard” infrastructural agglomerations—such as pipes, wires, and buildings—to evoke feeling, and to the “social” infrastructure such as kinship ties, memories, attachments, and human–nonhuman relationships. Seeing people as always already included in the agglomerations of affective infrastructures opens the space to see them pinned down to the place even as their neighbors leave while the hopes for improvements of conditions are bleak.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42067868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Autoethnography of “Making It” in Academia: Writing an ECR “Journey” of Facebook, Assemblage, Affect, and the Outdoors","authors":"Phiona Stanley","doi":"10.1177/08912416221120819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221120819","url":null,"abstract":"While much has been written to guide early career researchers (ECRs) and those charged with socializing them into academic ontologies, much less is known about ECRs’ own experiences of becoming academic. This article presents a narrative, new-materialist account—drawing on Facebook updates and personal diaries—of one ECR’s experience. Interdisciplinary theorizing is proposed, using work-types and zones-of-development models. Individualism is problematized within three contexts: autoethnography as method, the materiality of affect within ECR assemblages, and the limited capacity of any individual ECR to effect systemic change. As ECRs are driven to produce ever more, and thus to “succeed,” they are their own nexus of accountability, making overwork and burnout endemic. So, although ECRs may progress from adaptive to technical work and from proximal to actual zones of development, their workload has no ceiling. Issues of “balance” are therefore retheorized within the assemblage, with extant models critiqued as problematically dependent on neoliberal framings of individual responsibility.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46144976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Memory Politics on a Neighborhood Scale: Uses of the Past in the Historic Center and the Periphery of Valencia (Spain)","authors":"Hernán Fioravanti, Albert Moncusí-Ferré","doi":"10.1177/08912416221121341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221121341","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the production of memory on a neighborhood scale, comparing the different logics that shape narratives about the past in the historic center and a peripheral area of the city of Valencia (Spain). We analyze the uses of the past developed by three kinds of actors: local institutions, social movements, and residents. This line of research shows that administrators boost aestheticized memories oriented towards commodification and tourist promotion in the historic center and towards an unconflicted representation of interculturality in the periphery. These hegemonic narratives are being reproduced, appropriated, and negotiated by social movements and local residents, who replicate some elements of the official narratives while, at the same time, resignifying other parts and claiming neglected and erased memories. Urban memories function, therefore, as a political arena for the imposition and negotiation of different dynamics and transformations experienced at the local level.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45459822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}