“Tomorrow belongs to us”: Pathways to Activism in Italian Far-Right Youth Communities

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Pasieka
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Personal Accounts

Abstract Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on far-right social movements by presenting an in-depth account of the Italian far-right scene. In presenting personal accounts of three activists and situating them within the milieus in which they are active, it sheds light on a variety of factors that push youth to engage in far-right militancy. Many researchers of far-right extremism have asserted the need to provide more in-depth knowledge on far-right militants, yet there remain important gaps that this article strives to address. First, it demonstrates the value of the ethnographic approach in the study of far right, which offers unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs, and practices. Second, it shows the importance of situating present-day activism in a historical context, not only by looking for long-term patterns but also by paying attention to the ways studied actors engage with historical comparisons. Third, in engaging critically with some commonsensical approaches to far-right activists, the paper suggests that ethnographic studies of far-right activism can give us fresh perspectives on broader social phenomena beyond the far right per se.

The Faddish Breakouts of Ethnography

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-9 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Market Researcher

Ethnographic research has been described as a fad that promised to look beneath the rationalisations of consumers, but did not in fact deliver the cut-through promised by agencies. This perhaps provides a clue to the emergence and relative disappearance of ethnography over the past 20 years, and to its recent re-emergence. To the generalist market researcher, ethnography appears to come and go in terms of its popularity and appeal. To avoid being disappointed about what an ethnographic approach can bring to an understanding of consumers, clients should reportedly involve a qualified anthropologist at the commissioning stage of a project to make sure that such an expensive and time-consuming exercise is really warranted. Similarly, clients should engage research companies with a long history of undertaking ethnographic studies and with expertise in the area.

The Faddish Breakouts of Ethnography

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Clive Boddy
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Market Researcher

Ethnographic research has been described as a fad that promised to look beneath the rationalisations of consumers, but did not in fact deliver the cut-through promised by agencies. This perhaps provides a clue to the emergence and relative disappearance of ethnography over the past 20 years, and to its recent re-emergence. To the generalist market researcher, ethnography appears to come and go in terms of its popularity and appeal. To avoid being disappointed about what an ethnographic approach can bring to an understanding of consumers, clients should reportedly involve a qualified anthropologist at the commissioning stage of a project to make sure that such an expensive and time-consuming exercise is really warranted. Similarly, clients should engage research companies with a long history of undertaking ethnographic studies and with expertise in the area.

Questions of Changing Access

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-305
Author(s):  
Kara L. Lycke ◽  
Ellis Hurd
Keyword(s):  
Sense Making ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
School Communities ◽  
The Public ◽  
School Settings ◽  
School Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
K 12

This paper explores the increasingly complex dynamic for conducting long-term critical ethnographic research in school settings. With ever-increasing neoliberal forms of knowledge prescribing school practice and policy, school leaders may not value the focus and duration of ethnographic studies. In a results-oriented climate of K–12 education, conducting school ethnographies may depend on administrators’ beliefs regarding the direct connection of the research to student achievement, the district's reputation, or a willingness to share in the stakes of the “public face” of research (Shulman, 1999). As researchers of culture and literacy, it is our contention that ethnographers have a valuable, sustaining role in school communities and that critical school ethnographies can be a tool for social justice as participants (researchers and school participants alike) can come together to engage in joint sense-making, problem solving, and social analysis of school practice and policy.

Liberating Afghan Women

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
The Media ◽  
Policy Priority

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.

What is Ethnography? Teaching ethnographic sensibilities without fieldwork

Journal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole McGranahan
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Cultural Group ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Learn By Doing ◽  
Do So

How do we teach undergraduate students to think ethnographically, to recognize something as ethnographic and not just as qualitative? Importantly, how do we do so not in the field, where students might learn by doing their own research, but in the static classroom? One approach is to have students cultivate a concept, awareness, and practice of an ethnographic sensibility, that is, of a sense of the ethnographic as the lived expectations, complexities, contradictions, possibilities, and ground of any given cultural group. Such a view opens up an understanding of ethnography and ethnographic research as more than available qualitative methods. Instead, it takes an ethnographic approach to be an epistemological one. Yet, how might we do this? In this article, I discuss my pedagogical strategies for teaching students an ethnographic sensibility without having them conduct fieldwork. I argue that it is both possible and valuable to generate an ethnographic sensibility in the classroom. 

Gaining access to the field in medical ethnography: Reflections on ethical, methodological, and structural challenges in the study of long-term care facilities

2021 ◽  
pp. 136345932098887
Author(s):  
Neta Roitenberg
Keyword(s):  
Long Term Care ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Term Care ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Access To The Field ◽  
Medical Ethnography

The article extends the discussion on the challenges in gaining access to the field in medical ethnographic research, focusing on long-term care (LTC) facilities. Medical institutions have been documented to be difficult sites to access. The reference, however, is to the recruitment of patients as informants. The challenges of recruiting practitioners as informants have not been investigated at all. The article presents the key issues that emerged in the process of gaining social access at the sites of two LTC facilities as part of a study on care workers’ identities. The main obstacles encountered during the fieldwork were organizational constraints and negotiating control over the process of recruiting the lower occupational tier of care workers with gatekeepers. The article presents the coping strategies implemented to overcome the ethical and methodological obstacles: continually reassessing the consent and cooperation of participants and developing a rapport with nurse’s aides during interviews.

On Being a Punk and a Scholar: A Reflexive Account of Researching a Punk Scene in Russia

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 135-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Gololobov
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Research Paradigms ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
The University

Ethnographic studies of youth subcultures, scenes and urban tribes often rely on insiders’ accounts, where researchers investigate a social environment of which they are presently or formerly members. This approach raises important questions about the positionality of the researcher, and the reflexivity, epistemology and ethics of an ethnographic investigation, as different roles and engagement with the field, as well as the very identity of the ‘field’ itself, no longer fit into the methodological framework of traditional ethnography. This article explores the difficulties that arise during ethnographic research on one's own social world. I was actively involved in the Russian punk scene before pursuing my academic career in England, and in the framework of a research project on post-socialist punk at the University of Warwick, I went back to study this milieu as a ‘field’ in two different sites in 2009 and in 2010. The article shows the complexity of researching one's own subculture and demonstrates that active discentring of the ‘knowing authority’ in studying one's own ‘tribe’ necessarily involves a transformation of its main research paradigms, where epistemological and ethical issues appear to be rearranged in a new way which radically affects the methodological foundations of such an investigation.

Erratum

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-612
Keyword(s):  
Ultraviolet Light ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Social Norm ◽  
Sun Exposure ◽  
Sun Protection ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Increased Risk ◽  
Ineffective Efforts ◽  
Per Se

In the commentary, "Sunburns, Melanoma, and the Pediatrician," by Williams and Sagebiel (Pediatrics 1989;84:381-382), three lines were omitted from the bottom of p 381. The whole paragraph is reprinted here. It is clear that a change is required in social perceptions in which a suntan is equated with health and beauty—not because suntans per se are unhealthy (the deleterious effects of ultraviolet light at suberythemogenic levels are not wellestablished), but because the persistent and often futile efforts of those who constitutionally have less pigment to achieve a tan have serious long-term health consequences. Ideally, there should be a social norm of beauty in which the natural differences in skin color are appreciated and black, tan, pink, and all shades in between are celebrated. Similarly, we need to change our thinking about freckles and solar lentigines. These are not "cute" but represent the ineffective efforts of melanocytes in genetically underpigmented skin to provide protective pigmentation in response to solar stress. Although pediatricians alone cannot change social concepts of beauty, we can instruct our patients and their families about sun protection and we can monitor them for early signs of excessive sun exposure. Weinstock et al demonstrated an increased risk of melanoma for those who had blistering sunburns in adolescence. Although they did not address the risk associated with sunburning prior to ages 15 years, it seems likely that these data can be applied to children of all ages. Therefore, instruction and sun protection should begin in infancy. Moreover, teenagers are known to be both highly conditioned by peer concepts of beauty and relatively impervious to the counsel of their elders. It is essential, therefore, that they enter these years with skin that has been well protected and with minds well indoctrinated.

Obstetric Violence in Their Own Words: How Women in Mexico and South Africa Expect, Experience, and Respond to Violence

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780122110373
Author(s):  
Vania Smith-Oka ◽  
Sarah E. Rubin ◽  
Lydia Z. Dixon
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Powerful Method ◽  
Obstetric Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
Core Feature ◽  
Temporal Model ◽  
Women's Stories ◽  
Structural Inequalities

This article, based on ethnographic research in Mexico and South Africa, presents two central arguments about obstetric violence: (a) structural inequalities across diverse global sites are primarily linked to gender and lead to similar patterns of obstetric violence, and (b) ethnography is a powerful method to give voice to women's stories. Connecting these two arguments is a temporal model to understand how women across the world come to expect, experience, and respond to obstetric violence—that is, before, during, and after the encounter. This temporal approach is a core feature of ethnography, which requires long-term immersion and attention to context.

Guest Editors’ Note

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
Sotiris Mitralexis ◽  
Georgios Steiris
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Maximus The Confessor

We are most thankful to Forum Philosophicum, and its Editor-in-Chief Marcin Podbielski, for the invitation to act as guest editors in a special issue dedicated to looking at Maximus the Confessor from a philosophical perspective—by which we mean both the philosophical efflorescence of Maximus’ thought per se, approached within its historical context, and the attempt to find Maximian solutions to contemporary philosophical problems or to engage Maximus’ thought in dialogue with modern philosophy. In many ways, this special issue is a sister volume to the book Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher (Eugene: Cascade / Wipf & Stock, forthcoming later in 2016). Both form parts of a sustained attempt at highlighting Maximus the Confessor’s relevance for philosophical inquiry, without denying the explicitly theological nature of his thought in doing so. Believing that there is much philosophical fecundity in this approach, we remain with the hope that it will be continued.

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