Academic literature on the topic 'Ethnographically-informed studies'

This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, disjunctures and tensions in their situated and abstract dimensions. The articles consider the possibilities and challenges of anthropology’s queer sensibilities that anthropologize queer theory whilst queering anthropology in ethnographically informed analyses. Contributors focus on anthropologizing queer theory in research on same-sex desire in Congo; LGBT migrant and asylum experience in the UK and France; same-sex intimacies within opposite gender oriented sexualities in Kenya and Ghana; secret and ambiguous intimacies and sensibilities beyond an identifiable ‘queer subject’ of rights and recognition in India; migrant imaginings of home in Indonesian lesbian relationships in Hong Kong; and cross-generational perspectives on ‘coming out’ in Taiwan, and their implications for theories of kinship and relatedness. An extensive interview with Esther Newton, the prominent figure in gay and lesbian and queer anthropology concludes the collection.

The paper proposes a study of broadcasting in one of the most tightly isolated regimes of the communist Eastern Bloc, beyond the paradigms of radio as a pure propaganda medium and of radio history as pure institutional history. Instead of a macro-history from above, this contribution proposes an ethnographically grounded micro-perspective alongside the lines of ?audience studies?, informed by ?oral history? methods. It proposes focusing on the social effects of radio listening and, in a broader perspective, on how radio broadcasting was embedded into larger modernization agendas of the regime of Enver Hoxha.

Abigail Stewart Sherif Award Citation. For your exceptional contributions to feminist psychology, the Society for the Psychology of Women presents to you the Carolyn Wood Sherif Award. Your entire career has been marked by distinction; you have been as prolific in publishing as you have been in mentoring. You have illuminated women's lives, their personalities, their development, and their adaptation to change. You have advanced feminist theory, and your academic leadership has created the opportunity for students to do graduate work in feminist psychology. We honor you and your work with gratitude. In this essay I make two arguments. First, I argue for the value of ethnographically informed methods in psychology in general and particularly for the psychology of women. Second, I argue for the importance of the role of generation in psychology, perhaps particularly in the study of values and social identities. In advancing these arguments, I draw on evidence from an ongoing, ethnographically informed study of the graduates of a Midwestern high school in the mid-1950s and late 1960s. The two generations of graduates have distinctive accounts of their experiences, with the older generation's accounts consistent across gender and race, and the younger generation's accounts inflected by both race and gender. Differences in the form of generational identity in the two cohorts are discussed.

Previous quantitative studies have established a link between precarious work and occupational health and safety (OHS). Using an ethnographically informed qualitative approach, this article investigates the workplace experiences of different types of precarious workers, in particular those who are directly-employed temporary workers and those who are engaged through an agency. Drawing on the work of Andrew Hopkins, the article finds cultural practices that lead to worsened OHS experiences for those who are engaged through an agency. These experiences include inadequate safety training, poor quality personal protective equipment and a lack of clarity of supervisory roles.

In this article, I analyze the processual aesthetic production of girl subjectivity in/with Hayao Miyazaki’s films through a feminist materialist perspective informed by the writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, and Affrica Taylor. I elaborate on feminist materialist concepts such as those of relational ontology, aesthetics of existence, worldmaking, mythopoesis, queer kin, and gender/sexual difference. With these concepts, I philosophically and ethnographically inquire in/with girl spectators who are interested in the experimentation with new modalities of existence that do not limit to those of success and alienation, but allow for creative possibilities of rupture, recomposition, and transversalization of girl subjectivities.

In this study, I apply the perspective of gendered organizations to nursing and use ethnographically informed career biographies of nurse practitioners, a subset of highly credentialed nurses, to investigate the reproduction of gender by inclusionary institutional practices. My findings illustrate how nursing’s historically subordinate position as a female profession has led to institutional arrangements and aspirational resources for contemporary careers. Features such as flexible educational institutions and an extended credentials ladder allow women to recast structural constraints into individual possibilities. This recasting allows individuals to make careers but also recirculates notions of “flexible women” whose careers are institutionalized as secondary to family concerns.

There have been fewer studies performed to understand real-world software-testing practice than for other areas of software engineering, such as software requirements, design and development. In particular, surprisingly little is known about global software-testing practices---the practice of outsourcing testing activities to a company offshore---which is currently a large industry and is continuing to grow rapidly. Hence, it is important to study this practice. Moreover, research and anecdotal records provide evidence suggesting that cultural factors greatly impact aspects of the global software-engineering practice (e.g., quality and productivity). The evidence indicates that culture appears to have a greater influence on global software-engineering practice than originally envisioned. Thus, it is important to understand culture's influence particularly on the global-software testing practice. Most of the global software practice studies have used the cultural-dimensions (e.g., Hofstede's dimensions) approach to understand culture’s influence on this practice. However, such dimensional perspectives of culture significantly limit the meaning of culture. Hence, it is important to study culture's influence on global software-testing practice by adopting a non-dimensional perspective of culture so that hidden cultural facets can be identified and uncovered. In this dissertation research, I conducted three ethnographically-informed studies at different Indian vendor organizations, who provided software-testing services to their respective clients in a global setting, to better understand what and how cultural factors influence the global software-testing practice. I used the “culture as models” perspective, adapted from the cultural anthropologist Bradd Shore, to analyze the data from these studies. The dissertation provides a detailed description of the study design, the data analysis, and the insights that emerged from the study. The study provided insights into four embedded cultural models that have emerged from this practice---Agreement, Trust, Flexibility, and Global Software Delivery Cultural Models -- which are described and discussed in detail. This dissertation makes the following contributions. First, it describes a framework that facilitates conducting culture-based studies in the global software- engineering domain. Second, it exposes significant cultural models that are embodied in the specific global software-testing practices investigated to better understand the affordances and clashes of cultural facets of such practices more widely. Third, it presents a ``thick description'' of the role and interplay of these cultural facets in the global software-testing practices investigated. Finally, based on the study insights, the dissertation provides implications for practice and future research.

Food plays a central role in the production of culture and is likewise a powerful resource for the representation and organization of social order. Status is thus asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (i.e. its substance, its raw economics, and its manufacture or preparation) and through its discursivity (i.e. its marketing, staging, and the way it is depicted and discussed). This intersection of materiality and discursivity makes food an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations, and for engaging cutting-edge debates in sociolinguistics and elsewhere on “language materiality.” In Elite Authenticity, Gwynne Mapes integrates theories of mediatization, materiality, and authenticity in order to explore the discursive production of elite status and class inequality in food discourse. Relying on a range of methodological approaches, Mapes examines restaurant reviews and articles published in the New York Times food section; a collection of Instagram posts from ©nytfood; ethnographically informed fieldwork in four renowned Brooklyn, New York, restaurants; and a recorded dinner conversation with six food enthusiasts. Across these varied genres of data, she demonstrates how a discourse of “elite authenticity” represents a particular surfacing of rhetorical maneuvers in which distinction is orchestrated, avowed/disavowed, and circulated. Elite Authenticity takes a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, drawing on theories from linguistics, food and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Its presentation and analysis of aural, visual, spatial, material, and embodied discourse will be of interest to scholars and students of communication studies, critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural geography.

The musical rhythm of Agbadza is analyzed as dynamic and multideterminant, that is, as emerging from the interaction of many different musical factors including dance, metric structure, and the accentuation and grouping of the parts in the drum ensemble (bell, handclap, rattle, and support drum). Response drum and lead drum parts are analyzed for accentuation and rhythmic motion; the singing of Agbadza is studied in terms of melodic motion, design of phrases, and call-and-response form. The temporal relationship of songs to instrumental music is examined. By integrating the performance modalities of dance, song, and drumming within a holistic, ethnographically informed analysis of musical rhythm, the chapter models a method for documenting and understanding traditions of African performance art.