sness and in negotiating and contesting transnational identities. The article develops a dialectic of diasporic leisure as a framework for understanding how leisure practices and activities reconnect the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain, enabling them to construct transnational identities in a country that construes them as “other.” The paper’s central argument is that diasporic consciousness and identities are activated, materialised and mobilised in and through leisure practices.

28:T43b,

Anthropologists increasingly turn to design research for inspiration. Yet work in design anthropology is frequently cut off from ethnographic research. To some extent this is intentional, given concerns that ethnographic methods have failed to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. But anthropologists should not have to choose between ethnography and design research. This article examines the author’s participation in an industrial think tank in which anthropologists and engineers collaborated to address the environmental impacts of mining. This included discussion of unrecognized sources of pollution at mining sites and rising penalties for environmental damage. The members of the think tank also developed designs for new technology intended to reduce the exposure of artisanal gold miners to mercury and its release into the atmosphere, facilitate the recycling of electronic waste in developing countries, and reduce the catastrophic risks posed by tailings dams. Our collaborations point to the value of combining ethnography and design research in new ways.

29:T4d0,

Backed by 3 years of apprenticeship in a boxing gym of Chicago’s hyperghetto and in-depth life-story interviews with fifty professional boxers, this article reconstructs the social biography and ring career of a professional “opponent” as a living analyzer of the social, economic, mental, and emotional wheels and cogs of prizefighting careers. An “opponent” like Jake “The Snake” Valliance is a boxer determined and skilled enough to give a good account of himself in the ring, but willing to travel for quick money and be overmatched to serve as a stepping stone in the careers of rising fighters. He fights often, loses nearly as often, but maintains enough occupational pride that he keeps going, always hoping to turn his ship around, thus playing a key role in the pugilistic market. The article dissects the genesis, feeding, and fading of the libido pugilistica that explains the opponent’s continued investment in the economy of pain, love, and deceit that is professional boxing. It throws light on the material and symbolic logics of a skilled bodily craft and, beyond it, on the workings of habitus as cognitive cog, trained capacity and socialized desire driving social action.

2a:T455,

How can we live well together? The question is critical for cities, where “wicked problems” like failing infrastructure, natural and industrial disaster, and epidemic disease pose threats to diverse forms of life. Because such problems are by definition world-shattering, it is notoriously difficult for city-dwellers to agree on how to think about them, much less overcome them. This essay sketches a collaborative ethnographic approach for co-conceptualizing wicked problems. Proyecto Buen Vivir (The Living Well Project) features a series of multisector experimental workshops conducted over four years in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua. This workshop model draws on collaborative research design and active learning strategies from both Nicaraguan and North American pedagogical traditions. Collaborative methods have historically identified and addressed the discrete problems. Given that common understanding can be rather more elusive when grappling with wicked problems, this essay argues for collaborative methods oriented to speculation and play might also be more generative.

2b:T1272,