scholarly journals Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen E. Wohlwend ◽  
Sarah Vander Zanden ◽  
Nicholas E. Husbye ◽  
Candace R. Kuby
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Collaborative Management ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
School Aged Children ◽  
Visual Semiotics ◽  
Computer Club ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
Us Midwest ◽  
Middle Class Families

Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children’s social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children’s web play as discourses in place: fluidly converging and diverging interactions among four factors: (1) social actors, (2) interaction order, (3) visual semiotics, and (4) place semiotics. The video data are excerpted from an ethnographic study of a computer club for primary school-aged children in an afterschool program serving working-class and middle-class families in a US Midwest university community. Discourses of schooling in the computer room and Webkinz complicated children’s goal of coordinated game play and mutual participation in online games. Barriers to online connection produced ruptures that foregrounded childrens’ collaborative management of time and space. This foregrounding makes typically backgrounded practices, modes, and discourses visible and available for deconstruction and critique.

scholarly journals Concepts in multimodal discourse analysis with examples from video conferencing

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Norris
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Multimodal Discourse ◽  
Modal Density ◽  
Action Analysis ◽  
Micro Analysis

Abstract This article presents theoretical concepts and methodological tools from multimodal (inter)action analysis that allow the reader to gain new insight into the study of discourse and interaction. The data for this article comes from a video ethnographic study (with emphasis on the video data) of 17 New Zealand families (inter)acting with family members via skype or facetime across the globe. In all, 84 social actors participated in the study, ranging in age from infant to 84 years old. The analysis part of the project, with data collected between December 2014 and December 2015, is ongoing. The data presented here was collected in December 2014 and has gone through various stages of analysis, ranging from general, intermediate to micro analysis. Using the various methodological tools and emphasising the notion of mediation, the article demonstrates how a New Zealand participant first pays focused attention to his engagement in the research project. He then performs a semantic/pragmatic means, indicating a shift in his focused attention. Here, it is demonstrated that a new focus builds up incrementally: As the participant begins to focus on the skype (inter)action with his sister and nieces, modal density increases and he establishes an emotive closeness. At this point, the technology that mediates the interaction is only a mundane aspect, taken for granted by the participants.

scholarly journals TACTICS OF BORDER CROSSING MOVEMENT: EXPLORING THE MOBILITY OF BRAZILIANS THROUGH THE SCHENGEN AND UK AIRSPACE

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo Dias
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Research Orientation ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Embodied Practice

This paper addresses the relations between migrants, mobility, tactics, negotiation, and the contemporary definition of borders in the aftermath of 9/11.The empirical focus of this paper is how Brazilians from Alto Paranaiba journey through airports located in the Schengen area and in the British territory to London. As a main research orientation, I use the notion of journey as approached by mobility studies, where actions and skills remain an important link between the wayfarer and the social space in which s/he moves through, the embodied practice to how we grasp the world. Migrants deal and struggle against border regime, but they are not powerless social actors. They rather produce creative resistance to reinvent their journey through the surveillance apparatus, which manage and delimit places with targets and threats. In this process, I explore the notion of border crossing movement as a tactical mobility developed by migrants to overcome the border control imposed by governments in airports. The article was drawn through fieldwork conducted initially in London, between 2009 and 2013, and afterwards in Alto Paranaiba, during 2013. The ethnographic study consisted in semi-structured interviews, participant observation through snowball technique, which enabled me to access a considerable number of participants in these two regions explored. The argument that I develop is that migrants as social actors are part important in the dialogue produced between border crossing and border reinforcement.

scholarly journals Commoning beyond ‘commons’: The case of the Russian ‘obshcheye’

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-340
Author(s):  
Liubov Chernysheva ◽  
Olga Sezneva
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Network ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Commons

How do the semantic logics that different words accommodate in different languages map onto studies of social realities internationally and interdisciplinarily? This article is an ethnographic study of obshcheye – a corpus of phenomena pertaining to communal life in Russia. Similar to the English term ‘commons’, it marks the zone of the public – that which is shared and collective. In contrast to the commons, it displays greater semantic polyphony, bringing together social, discursive and affective qualities. Our analysis demonstrates that various semantic subsets of obshcheye sensitize research differently from the commons by indexing different societal concerns. They tune us into a wide set of concerns – with time (not wanting to be ‘Soviet’), ownership (worrying about what is ‘no one’s’), affective connectivity (one sits and waits for a conversation), and the act of caring for people and for spaces. Each word and each relationship in the semantic network reflects what is important to social actors as they go about ordering their lives together. The article concludes that obshcheye is so definitively a semantic network that expunging its conceptual heterogeneity and narrowing the multiple logics to encompass one in particular would amount to analytical reductionism and the impoverishment of social analysis.

Objects, Frozen Actions, and Identity: A Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Norris ◽  
Boonyalakha Makboon
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Action Analysis ◽  
Identity Production

AbstractIn this article, we take a multimodal (inter)action analytical approach, showing how objects in everyday life are identity telling. As social actors surround themselves with objects, multiple actions from producing the objects to acquiring and placing them in the environment are embedded within. Here, we investigate examples from two different ethnographic studies, using the notion of frozen actions. One of our examples comes from a 5-month-long ethnographic study on identity production of three vegetarians in Thailand (

Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-317
Author(s):  
Max Papadantonakis
Keyword(s):  
Social Distance ◽  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
Stigma And Discrimination ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Of Greece

In this article, I show how groups and individuals maintain racialized symbolic boundaries at the micro-level of personal interactions. Using data collected during an ethnographic study in Athens, Greece, where I worked as a fruit vendor in a street market, I detail how local Greek vendors and immigrant workers use language, gesture, olfaction, along with their interpretations of faith and sexuality to reproduce patterns of social distance that allow for racialized stigma and discrimination. I apply the framework of symbolic interactionism and draw from literature on symbolic boundaries to explore how immigrant street market workers experience and resist racialization throughout the interaction order. I show that racialization underlies perceptions of the immigrant “other,” especially in the case of Greece where race is often ignored as a crucial factor.

Exploring the Everyday Lives of Children in Winnipeg, Canada

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-561
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Huynh ◽  
Ashley Stewart-Tufescu
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
School Aged Children ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
And Control

Over the past decade there has been a call to action for researchers to explore children’s subjectivities in the context of well-being. How children understand and experience well-being in a Canadian context was examined in this study. Twenty-one children between 8 and 12 years of age participated in semi-structured interviews facilitated by the Life Story Board™. Three main themes emerged: (1) freedom and control, (2) child rights and social supports, and (3) children’s participation as social actors. Results from this study highlighted the importance of children needing to feel heard by parents and teachers; children being recognised as rights-holders with opportunities to actualise their rights; and children having meaningful opportunities to participate in matters which concerns them in everyday life as important components of subjective well-being. Results may serve to inform child-serving professionals, policymakers, and parents and guardians about how school-aged children from this Canadian context conceptualize and experience well-being.

scholarly journals Social Construction of Cyanobacteria Blooms in Quebec

SAGE Open ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401769736 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geneviève Brisson ◽  
Karine Dubé ◽  
Sabrina Doyon ◽  
Benoît Lévesque
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
Cyanobacteria Blooms ◽  
Public Health Officials

Using a political ecology perspective, this research examines the social issues of cyanobacteria. In Québec (Canada), public health officials issue warnings concerning water-related activities and water consumption. An ethnographic study was undertaken with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the attitudes of citizens toward cyanobacteria and public health measures. It enabled us to identify both the meanings attached to this phenomenon and the other driving forces behind the attitudes and, in particular, toward compliance with measures prescribed by the authorities. Focus groups and semidirected individual interviews involving several groups of social actors were conducted in 2009 and 2010 on three communities. This study points to the importance of considering natural phenomena such as the proliferation of cyanobacteria as sociocultural constructs, because this approach can be applied to address the impacts of such phenomena from a different perspective and therefore improve management practices to reduce these impacts.

Collecting Ethnographic Video Data for Policy Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne W. Golann ◽  
Zitsi Mirakhur ◽  
Thomas J. Espenshade
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Home Video ◽  
Parent Child Interactions ◽  
Role Of Parents

Despite growing recognition of the critical role of parents in children’s early development, parenting education programs and interventions typically have had limited impacts on children’s outcomes. To design programs and policies that are more responsive to families’ needs and constraints, policymakers need a better understanding of the lived experiences of families. In this article, we argue that qualitative video-ethnographic approaches offer an innovative and useful supplement to policy researchers’ usual tool kit. Taking a holistic approach to parent–child interactions and filming families in their natural environments over an extended period provides policy researchers with new data to inform future parenting initiatives. To assist researchers interested in undertaking a video-ethnographic study, we discuss our experiences with the New Jersey Families Study, a 2-week, in-home video study of 21 families with a 2- to 4-year-old child. This is the first time anyone has attempted an in-home naturalistic observation of this breadth, intensity, or duration. We highlight the potential of this method for policy relevance along with its associated challenges.

scholarly journals Early adopters: Playing new literacies and pretending new technologies in print-centric classrooms

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen E. Wohlwend
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
New Literacies ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Early Adopters

In this article, semiotic analysis of children's practices and designs with video game conventions considers how children use play and drawing as spatializing literacies that make room to import imagined technologies and user identities. Microanalysis of video data of classroom interactions collected during a three year ethnographic study of children's literacy play in kindergarten and primary classrooms reveals how the leading edge of technology use in print-centric classrooms is pretended into being by five-, six-, and seven-year-old `early adopters' — a marketing term for first wave consumers who avidly buy and explore newly-released technology products.`Early adopters' signals two simultaneous identities for young technology users: (1) as developing learners of new literacies and technologies; and, (2) as curious explorers who willingly play with new media. Children transformed paper and pencil resources into artifacts for enacting cell phone conversations and animating video games, using new technologies and the collaborative nature of new literacies to perform literate identities and to strengthen the cohesiveness of play groups.

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