Ethnography

Temporality is central to how researchers conceptualize their research and to how they produce ethnography. Drawing from research on memory and commemoration in connection with The Body Politic, the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, this article examines the uses and limits of ethnographic writing as a mode of critique in contexts where the boundary between research participants and academic audiences can be unclear. The struggle over audience reveals some of the ethical limits and conventions of ethnography, both as method and genre, as well as the ways in which struggles over historical records inform the content and scope of ethnographic records.

The thousands of petitions sent to the president from Argentina’s cities and far-flung rural areas bear witness to an intense dialogue between the poor and the state. Low levels of schooling do not prevent people from writing down and submitting their grievances, since model letters circulate in family and neighborly networks. More come from women than from men. Far from simple requests for patronage or expressions of submission, they carry a blend of excuses, prayers, proclamations of rights, threats, intimate accounts, and demands. Rather than focusing on a scene of collective mobilization or encounters with state bureaucracies, the article concerns letters that provide accounts of the poor’s legal consciousness and the current systems of legitimacy for claiming that they deserve. Based on a body of 200 letters addressed to President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner between 2007 and 2015, this article analyses such letters as a genuine form of action that aims to change the relationship between the poor, state agencies, and the law.

Although there is a rich tradition for labour studies in anthropology, little attention has so far been paid to the markets that connect prospective employees with places of work. In this article, I show that places of labour mobilization become sites of brokerage that index the complicated politics through which labour is rendered available to industry, particular in the context of non-formalized employment relations. Utilizing a political economic framework, I locate contemporary informal construction labour within the larger histories of employment that have characterized the Nepali state’s integration into the global economy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kathmandu, the article traces processes of dislocation and differentiation for construction labourers as they struggle to secure work and argues for the role precarious workers themselves play as brokers of their labour power as a protection mechanism against experiences of exploitation.

This article traces women’s narratives of the political struggle in Kashmir through the realm of ordinary, scattered, and everyday practices of resistance. It attempts to undo the narrative that overlooks the complexity of women’s lives in the face of ongoing violent political conflict; instead it argues that women in Kashmir escape easy categorization into victimhood. This article is embedded in the idea that there is something spectacular in the everydayness of lives embedded in violence; that the everyday is ruptured and layered like the memory of its people. “In Kashmir, which is a historically and politically complex quagmire of violent protests, morbid silence, and killable lives, it is through the barbed spaces of the everyday we see varied surging affects: of loss, of pain, of anger, of endurance, of fear, and of silence” (Kaur). And in this article, I locate women as the protagonists of these circulating affects, inscribing new meanings to the “political” through the politics of emotion.

This article examines the ‘mobility’ of Mario, a former homeless person who settled in a neighbourhood of public housing in Milan. His mobility can be considered along two space–time dimensions. The first is ‘circular’ and concerns Mario’s daily movements. This space–time dimension can be analysed through a bibliography developed in the field of mobility studies: entangled among limitations and opportunities of movement, it refers to the constraints to which the Milanese indigent people are subject. However, a second dimension can be added. This refers to a ‘longitudinal’ space–time dimension, linked to Mario’s biography, ending with his death. This second dimension, not generally considered by mobility studies focused on homelessness, gives a wider perspective on the former dimension. Mario’s biography also challenges a dominant interpretation of the Italian ethnographic literature on homelessness, i.e. the subcultural approach. Moreover, it allows for a broader reassessment of the (im)mobility of the Milanese urban ‘pariahs’.

Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an associated lack of explanation regarding how evidence and conclusions are drawn from such collective endeavour. This article attempts to address this absence of detail regarding the practice and conduct of team ethnography. In the following account, the authors present details of the design, development and application of ‘team ethnography visual maps’ and the collaborative reflexivity that took place within ‘team ethnography data sessions’ that were each embedded within a mixed methods study of frontline services located in six different National Health Service Trusts throughout England (UK). After a presentation of the ethnographic methods and analyses that occurred as part of team ethnography, they are then discussed in terms of their applied and academic value from a methodological perspective.