{"title":"(De)constructing Refugee Vulnerability: Overcoming Institutional Barriers to Ethnographic Research With Refugee Communities.","authors":"Bronwyn Bragg","doi":"10.1177/08912416211031645","DOIUrl":"10.1177/08912416211031645","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawn from 18-months of ethnographic research with resettled refugees living in a mini-enclave in one Canadian city, this article explores what ethnography offers research with resettled refugees. By interrogating the process of securing ethics approval from the Research Ethics Board (REB), I examine the figure of the refugee at the heart of liberal projects aimed at \"saving\" refugees. I demonstrate that the REB's reluctance to approve this project stemmed not only from conventional bureaucratic overreach related to ethnographic research but also from an unexamined and problematic idea of what it means to be a refugee. I discuss the gaps between institutionally perceived forms of vulnerability and the actual vulnerabilities that shape life for refugee women. I argue that vulnerability and risk must be understood as contextual and contingent, rather than inherent. Second, I explore the implications of positioning refugees as always already vulnerable on research practice and the value that ethnography offers for overcoming these blind spots.</p>","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8866751/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46775379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Weed Central: Cannabis Specialists and Polydrug Vendors in Mexico City","authors":"Piotr A. Chomczyński, R. Guy, R. Cortés","doi":"10.1177/08912416221085560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221085560","url":null,"abstract":"Findings discussed in this article addressed a gap in the literature on cannabis markets in Mexico. This article primarily draws on interviews with (N = 64) street drug dealers including 24 incarcerated ones, and ethnographic work in 3 impoverished neighborhoods in Mexico City. We find that cannabis sellers enter the profession through early biographical experiences that are reinforced throughout adolescence. Dealing in the context of this cannabis culture is not only acceptable in the present but also viewed as inherently part of their future. Further analysis reveals a typology of dealers that tends to be marked by the transition from cannabis specialists to polydrug vendors. As dealers progress to more profitable sales of hard drugs, they tend to lose the trust and support of neighborhood residents who view their suppliers, clients, and associates as dangerous. We conclude with policy interventions uniquely derived from ethnographic research that are intended to minimize the risk of escalating to more serious drug distribution while preserving community stability and cohesion.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45567056","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":"Miles and Bars Between: The Tertiary Prisonization and Layered Liminality of Prison Visitation Transportation Services","authors":"Dylan Addison","doi":"10.1177/08912416221085604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221085604","url":null,"abstract":"Prison visitation transportation services perform an important yet understudied role in the process of prison visitation for many people with incarcerated loved ones. This article draws on the findings of an ethnographic study of the experiences of loved ones of incarcerated people using a small, Black-owned prison visitation transportation service. Prison visitation transportation services help to mitigate the carceral state’s inherent function to separate people from their incarcerated loved ones, but in turn these services are also subjected to intensive forms of carceral control themselves. As a result, prison visitation transportation services and their staff experience a form of tertiary prisonization. This ultimately results in the drivers of these services experiencing a heightened and enduring state of layered liminality, which becomes attached to them as individuals.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41370928","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 Price of Consent: Identity Wages in the Games Industry","authors":"A. Buck","doi":"10.1177/08912416221085558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221085558","url":null,"abstract":"Sociologists have long known that wages are not all that attract highly skilled workers to jobs. Identity rewards in organizations of work are opportunities for workers to affirm valued identities. Past research has found that workers who value these rewards will protect them when they are threatened. Other scholars have shown that managers can use identity rewards to control and elicit cooperation from workers. Another body of scholarship has explored how gendered assumptions and expectations are built into organizations of work. Based on 2 years of field research and 18 interviews with games industry professionals, my research unites these lines of inquiry, by examining how gendered identity rewards entice game developers for game developers to forgo higher wages and more stable conditions in other areas of software development, reinforcing both exploitive class relations and a culture hostile to marginalized workers.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45645274","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":"From Nativeness to Strangeness and Back: Ascribed Ethnicity, Body Work, and Contextual Insiderness","authors":"Patrycja Trzeszczyńska","doi":"10.1177/08912416221077676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221077676","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a reflection on a certain variant of broadening the position of “being inside” with some “buts,” or through “within but.” Drawing on my field experience in the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, I discuss the context-dependent, fluid and labile insiderness and the case of using a researcher’s embodied distinctions (senses, ethnicity, class) in the research site created by the fieldwork participants, and not the researcher him/herself. My considerations are embedded with the dialectics (not opposition) of the insider–outsider and point to the contextual “nativeness” and “strangeness” of the researcher. I also discuss the fluidity and contextuality of a researcher’s field familiarity, as well as when s/he conducts research in cooperation with “their own people,” as well as circumstances and factors that transform this familiarity into strangeness. I argue that the latter, instead of being an obstacle or barrier in the research, is a beneficial and mind-opening ethnographic tool.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44399147","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":"Researching While Trans: Being Clocked and Cooling Cistress","authors":"D. Schiffer","doi":"10.1177/08912416221081870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221081870","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I investigate how predominantly cisgender and straight participants of a university LGBT Ally Training program perceived transgender topics. As a trans woman, my positionality and gendered embodiment shaped my research process—depending on whether or not I was perceived as trans. Drawing on 21 interviews with 12 training participants and the training instructor, plus 12 hours of ethnographic observations of 4 Ally Trainings, I show the interactive nature of the research process and how I navigated what I call participant distress. Participant distress manifested due to participant anxiety regarding how I, a trans researcher, perceived their responses. I analyze distress through the lens of Goffman, and offer cistress as a more specific interactive process of disrupting cisnormative statements that results in guilt or anger.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47970341","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":"On Refrigerators and Rage: Secrecy and Pacification in the Florida Restaurant Industry","authors":"S. Mandel","doi":"10.1177/08912416221079808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221079808","url":null,"abstract":"Designed based on careful specifications and regulations, commercial refrigerators can be found in almost all restaurants across the United States. In this article I explore the multifaceted role of the commercial walk-in refrigerator as a space of mediation, secrecy, and pacification among restaurant industry workers in central Florida. I analyze two years of ethnographic research conducted from 2015 to 2017, and argue that the refrigerator acts as a liminal zone within the restaurant, which is used by management to subdue, pacify, and placate employees. To do so I draw on literature by design justice scholars on discriminatory design, to consider the ways in which the physical structure of American restaurant establishments perpetuate physical and emotional abuse of workers.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46704375","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":"Claiming and Reclaiming Settings, Objects, and Situations: A Microethnographic Study of the Sociomaterial Practices of Everyday Life at Swedish Youth Homes","authors":"Kajsa Nolbeck, H. Wijk, G. Lindahl, S. Olausson","doi":"10.1177/08912416221082701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221082701","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this study is to explore social interactions in the spatial and material environment within everyday life at special youth homes in Sweden, where youths with psychosocial problems, or criminal behavior are cared for involuntary. A microethnographic approach was chosen, and data was collected through participant observation. A theory integrating analysis, using Burke’s (1969) dramatistic pentad as a tool for structuring the data and Goffman’s (1956; 1961) dramaturgical perspective was undertaken. The findings demonstrate that the staff’s control over settings and objects also means control over the definition of what kind of place the special youth home is, and what takes place there. This is shown through a decorous behavior of sociomaterial control practices, rather than care practices, by the staff. This study contributes to knowledge on spaces and objects as crucial parts of care practices highlighting the intentions inscribed in institutional design and objects.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48755434","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":"Multifaceted Intergroup Relations in an American Town—Immigrant Intrusion, Symbiosis, and Invisibility","authors":"Halyna Lemekh","doi":"10.1177/08912416221077141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221077141","url":null,"abstract":"Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the intricate relationships between three major ethno-racial groups residing in a suburban town in the New York metropolitan area. At the present time, the prosperous Korean ethnoburb is gentrified by Korean immigrants, triggering the displacement of the old-timers, referred to as the “White exodus” in this research. Granted that the cheap labor is in high demand in the rejuvenating neighborhood, the town has become a magnet for Guatemalan immigrants who have established their own ethnic islet in the vicinity. While the relationships between the Asian immigrants and the White old-timers generated by invasion-succession trends are full of resentment, the work-related interactions between the Asian and Hispanic (mostly Guatemalan) immigrants can be described as immigrant symbiosis. Both groups are aware of explicit exploitation, but they need and rely on each other to attain their own “American dream.”","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47905501","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":"Autoethnography of Holy Death: Belief, Dividuality, and Family in the Study of Santa Muerte","authors":"Karen S. Kingsbury","doi":"10.1177/08912416221075374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416221075374","url":null,"abstract":"Through an autoethnographic account that interweaves academic observations, my story of how I came to study Santa Muerte in Mexico and the entangled, emotive tale of Abby, a Santa Muerte devotee whom I grew very close to, I discuss the topic of belief in the ethnography of the occult and the “politics of integration”, derisively referred to “as going native”. I reveal how being an ethnographer of the Mexican female folk saint of death has taught me the necessity of dividuality and embracing belief in both the epistemological worlds of academia and the occult. I argue that slipping fluidly between the realm of science and the cosmos of magic has given me access not only to arcane knowledge and networks of practitioners but also through shared experiences of participatory consciousness with devotees of death during our rituals, proffered unique experiences, and new insights through intersubjectivity and interexperience, allowing me to understand the mystical power of Death Herself.","PeriodicalId":47675,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Ethnography","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47928507","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}