The (un)celebrated asylum centre: How Danish media hijacked an ethnographic fieldwork and altered local realities

Ethnography ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146613812110385
Author(s):  
Birgitte Romme Larsen

Denmark’s oldest asylum centre has been in operation in the small town of Jelling since 1993. Here, over time, the institutions of the local community and the asylum centre have merged, spatially and socially. Today, a local daycare centre and the local after-school club operate on the premises of the asylum centre. Based on an ethnographic study of the everyday institutional neighbourliness between ‘asylum centre’ and ‘local community’ in this small Danish town, this tale from the field pertains to the overwhelming national media attention that hit the research case halfway through its term – and unpacks how public media collaboration came to alter the very local state of affairs that I was in the middle of studying. It is argued how, more than simply dissemination partners or collaborators, ‘the media’ instead turned into actual co-creators of the ethnographic field – and so of the concrete empirical findings and analyses.

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin B. Kafai ◽  
Deborah A Fields ◽  
William Q. Burke

Previous efforts in end-user development have focused on facilitating the mechanics of learning programming, leaving aside social and cultural factors equally important in getting youth engaged in programming. As part of a 4-month long ethnographic study, we followed two 12-year-old participants as they learned the programming software Scratch and its associated file-sharing site, scratch.mit.edu, in an after-school club and class. In our discussion, we focus on the role that agency, membership, and status played in their joining and participating in local and online communities of programmers.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Khojastea ◽  
Abdolhosein Kalantarib

Abstract What is the relationship between religion and modern media? Are the media in essence anti-religion and a means to remove religion? Or are they a neutral means that can also be in the service of religion? Such questions fall under the category of the relationship between religion, modernization, and the nature of modernization, about which there can be found a rich literature in Iran. As far as the relationship between religion and modernization is concerned, two related approaches can be followed: 1) an historical-sociological approach and 2) a philosophical approach. Under the influence of either approach one would face a spectrum of opinions which, on the one hand, lead to “technological dogmatism” and, on the other, lead to “instrumentalization”. To decide which of these opinions to accept depends upon our historical situation (our destiny) and our definition of dichotomous sides (religion and media), as well as on our historical-sociological and philosophical reasoning in this matter. This article deals with these points. Since the national media attempts to act upon the implications expected by modern media within the framework of moral criteria and religious recommendation, then we will turn to this fundamental question: How can religious matters be addressed in the public media, so as to be able to involve a passive audience that is supposedly not the addressee of the message, and turn him or her into an active audience? In this regard, taken from the media experiences both in Iran and around the world, first the characteristics of “religious media” will be offered. Then a pattern for media rituals will be introduced and experimentally (as a case study) studied through some examples in Iranian society, and next the need for a more exact planning will be tapped. Finally the necessary conditions to develop such rituals in the national media will be dealt with.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-86
Author(s):  
Mirza Mehmedović

In the process of political transition of the Western Balkan countries, the non-EU countries in particular, the reform of communication systems occupies one of the primary places within the implementation of economic, cultural, political and integration processes of each country. Communication research that seeks to define the dilemmas of the current communication situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a determining framework of the media system, includes many socio-political factors conditioned by structural changes within the society of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last 25 years. The complete cultural and political deconstruction of the Bosnian society at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century destabilized the internal organization of the political, cultural and economic system, especially in the domain of public communication and organization of the media subsystem. Apart from the numerous current challenges, the development of a unified media policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the establishment of a public media system in accordance with the requirements of the European Union and the interests of all citizens, are among the key issues that state institutions are facing at the moment. This paper primarily deals with the analysis of the European Commission’s annual reports on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s progress in the process of implementing reforms in the media policy sector and based on these annual reports it suggests the key factors for future national media policy definition. The goal is to establish a national media policy and reform the communication system in a broader context as a political, cultural and economic issue, i.e., as an institutionally agreed path for political compromise, integration of society and definition of collective identities.


Author(s):  
Yasmin B. Kafai ◽  
Deborah Fields ◽  
William Q. Burke

Previous efforts in end-user development have focused on facilitating the mechanics of learning programming, leaving aside social and cultural factors equally important in getting youth engaged in programming. As part of a 4-month long ethnographic study, we followed two 12-year-old participants as they learned the programming software Scratch and its associated file-sharing site, scratch.mit.edu, in an after-school club and class. In our discussion, we focus on the role that agency, membership, and status played in their joining and participating in local and online communities of programmers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT SAMET

AbstractDespite recent attention to the relationship between the media and populist mobilisation in Latin America, there is a misfit between the everyday practices of journalists and the theoretical tools that we have for making sense of these practices. The objective of this article is to help reorient research on populism and the press in Latin America so that it better reflects the grounded practices and autochthonous norms of the region. To that end, I turn to the case of Venezuela, and a practice that has been largely escaped attention from scholars – the use of denuncias.


Author(s):  
Damian Guzek ◽  
Agnieszka Grzesiok-Horosz

A significant element of Central and Eastern Europe’s democracies backsliding process turns out to be changes in the media law. These changes are now leading to a decline in media freedom. The article attempts to understand this phenomenon by analyzing the process of legal and policy changes in Poland. In the course of the analysis, the reader’s attention is drawn to three elements that form the mainline of events related to the weakening of media freedom. These are, in turn, (a) the takeover of public media by influencing the staffing of media companies, (b) introducing a new, completely politicized body into the legal order, which duplicates the already existing and partially politicized media authority, and (c) exerting economic and legal pressure on the media independent of the authorities, so that they can be taken over by state-owned companies or businessmen favoring the authorities. As a whole, this decline in media freedom can be viewed as a strategy that antagonizes society.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-39
Author(s):  
Petar VODENICHAROV

The paper is provoked by the rejection and falsification of the messages of the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria and other post-communist countries which caused a wave of homophobia. The author tries to prove that neither in the communist period nor in the post-communist period a real emancipation of women was achieved, the theme of homosexuality was a taboo (in the communist period), over-presented in the first decade of the transition and later stigmatize by the rise of the populist nationalistic discourse. During the communist period, the so called “Unions of the fighters against fascism” turned into the male clientelistic networks granted with many privileges and marginalizing female antifascists. The critical discourse analysis of the press (1976) reveals male dominance and silencing of women playing mostly a decorative role. After the democratic changes the same male actors (nomenclature and former state security officers) benefited from the privatization, but the so called “mugs” (wrestlers) presented the new masculinity in the media: women were extremely sexualized and the new femininity was presented by the prostitutes and the girls in the entertaining industry, the professional women were rarely mentioned. The second part of the paper is a gender analysis of the lexical and grammatical system of the Bulgarian language. The analysis of the dominating metaphors reveals the means of male dominance in the everyday speech. Although the Slav languages have morphemes to denote women’s professions the media discourse prefers the male forms as more prestigious. The definite article and the plural forms serve to emphasise the male forms and to provide their euphony.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Mann ◽  
David Dallimore ◽  
Howard Davis ◽  
Graham Day ◽  
Maria Eichsteller

Epdf and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Drawing on place-based field investigations and new empirical analysis, this original book investigates civil society at local level. The concept of civil society is contested and multifaceted, and this text offers assessment and clarification of debates concerning the intertwining of civil society, the state and local community relations. Analysing two Welsh villages, the authors examine the importance of identity, connection with place and the impact of social and spatial boundaries on the everyday production of civil society. Bringing into focus questions of biography and temporality, the book provides an innovative account of continuities and changes within local civil society during social and economic transformation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 233339361879295
Author(s):  
Oona St-Amant ◽  
Catherine Ward-Griffin ◽  
Helene Berman ◽  
Arja Vainio-Mattila

As international volunteer health work increases globally, research pertaining to the social organizations that coordinate the volunteer experience in the Global South has severely lagged. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to critically examine the social organizations within Canadian NGOs in the provision of health work in Tanzania. Multiple, concurrent data collection methods, including text analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews were utilized. Data collection occurred in Tanzania and Canada. Neoliberalism and neocolonialism were pervasive in international volunteer health work. In this study, the social relations—“volunteer as client,” “experience as commodity,” and “free market evaluation”—coordinated the volunteer experience, whereby the volunteers became “the client” over the local community and resulting in an asymmetrical relationship. These findings illuminate the need to generate additional awareness and response related to social inequities embedded in international volunteer health work.


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