scholarly journals Being There

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Francesca Cancelliere ◽  
Ursula Probst
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Writing Culture ◽  
Being There

Conrad W. Watson describes fieldwork as ‘a period of particular heightened intensity’ (1999a: 2) in the introduction of Being There (1999b). The authors of this volume were by far not the first, nor the last, anthropologists questioning and critically reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing when being there in their respective fields. For Watson and others (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009; Geertz 2004; Hollan 2008), this was primarily an epistemological question, following ruptures in the discipline’s identity after the Writing Culture Debates of the late 1980s. Forced to rethink their fieldwork practices, anthropologists saw their understandings of theory-building and knowledge production follow suit. However, the complexities and challenges of ethnographic fieldwork also confronted and still confront many anthropologists with intricate questions of inequalities, power structures and violence that not only need to be theorised but also navigated in the everyday practice of fieldwork.

scholarly journals The gendered politics of researching military policy in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Sergio Catignani ◽  
Victoria M. Basham
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Knowledge Economy ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Gendered Politics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Gendered Power ◽  
Army Reserves ◽  
Multiple Challenges

Abstract This article explores our experiences of conducting feminist interpretive research on the British Army Reserves. The project, which examined the everyday work-Army-life balance challenges that reservists face, and the roles of their partners/spouses in enabling them to fulfil their military commitments, is an example of a potential contribution to the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, where publicly funded research has come to be seen as ‘functional’ for political, military, economic, and social advancement. As feminist interpretive researchers examining an institution that prizes masculinist and functionalist methodologies, instrumentalised knowledge production, and highly formalised ethics approval processes, we faced multiple challenges to how we were able to conduct our research, who we were able to access, and what we were able to say. We show how military assumptions about what constitutes proper ‘research’, bolstered by knowledge economy logics, reinforces gendered power relationships that keep hidden the significant roles women (in our case, the partners/spouses of reservists) play in state security. Accordingly, we argue that the functionalist and masculinist logics interpretive researchers face in the age of the knowledge economy help more in sustaining orthodox modes of knowledge production about militaries and security, and in reinforcing gendered power relations, than they do in advancing knowledge.

scholarly journals Personalisation, customisation and bricolage: how people with dementia and their families make assistive technology work for them

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (11) ◽  
pp. 2502-2519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Gibson ◽  
Claire Dickinson ◽  
Katie Brittain ◽  
Louise Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Technology Use ◽  
Dementia Care ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Manage Care ◽  
Age In Place ◽  
Care Services ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
The Everyday

AbstractAssistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people with dementia and their carers within everyday practice. This paper explores how people with dementia and carers use technologies in order to manage care. Findings are reported from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 13 people with dementia and 26 family carers. Readily available household technologies were used in conjunction with and instead of AT to address diverse needs, replicating AT functions when doing so. Successful technology use was characterised by ‘bricolage’ or the non-conventional use of tools or methods to address local needs. Carers drove AT use by engaging creatively with both assistive and everyday technologies, however, carers were not routinely supported in their creative engagements with technology by statutory health or social care services, making bricolage a potentially frustrating and wasteful process. Bricolage provides a useful framework to understand how technologies are used in the everyday practice of dementia care, and how technology use can be supported within care. Rather than implementing standardised AT solutions, AT services and AT design in future should focus on how technologies can support more personalised, adaptive forms of care.

scholarly journals Naked in the Face of Contamination

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Fiske
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Normal Forms ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Risk Assessments ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Chemical Exposures ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Ecuadorian Amazon ◽  
The Face ◽  
Material Process

While chemicals are often described and acted upon in technoscientific forums as isolated, discrete entities, vernacular experience points to possibilities of experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures that have otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this article invokes accounts of daily life in order to argue that vernacular experience is necessary for understanding what it means to live in a place of environmental hazard, and for building a more inclusive politics of knowledge production in models and assessments of toxicity. Descriptions such as “naked in the face of contamination,” “swimming in oil,” “smoke thick like marmalade,” or exclamations of pain re-lived “tsaac!” refuse hegemonic assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. To take these descriptions of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations often far exceed the ‘normal’ forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments of standard oil operations. The chemically saturated present demands a reconfiguration of toxicity – as a socio-material process, epistemic concept, and embodied experience – in order to work towards political and environmental, as well as epistemological, justice.

From crisis to the everyday: Shouldn't we all be writing economies?

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110680
Author(s):  
Priti Narayan ◽  
Emily Rosenman
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Economic Geography ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Public Economic ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This commentary explores the politics of writing about the economy in a culture, society, and discipline that tends to prioritize masculinist (and white) theories and definitions of economy over embodied experiences of people living their everyday lives. Inspired by Timothy Mitchell's problematization of the economy as an object of analysis, we press further on the seemingly singular unit of “the” economy and who is allowed to define it as such. We are animated by questions of who is considered an expert on the economy and how, or by whom, crises in the economy are recognized. Drawing from our own writing experiences during the pandemic and from social movements we research, we argue for alternate ways of thinking about experiences of and expertise on the economy. In reckoning with how social movements speak to power in a bid to transform economies, we consider the role of economic geography in the economy of writing and knowledge production surrounding “the economy” itself. We make the case for a more public economic geography grounded in the social and economic embeddedness of knowledge production, the material consequences of who gets to define what is economically “important,” and the potential for this expertise to be located anywhere.

Disidentification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Elizabeth Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Social

Deriving from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational 1999 text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, disidentification is a theoretical heuristic and performative practice that is an essential framework for thinking through, and living in, intersecting sites of marginality and oppression. In particular, disidentification is a heuristic that provides critical scholars with a framework for theorizing the relationships between subject formation, ideology, politics, and power while also offering people from marginalized communities a way to navigate intersecting forms of oppression and enact agency. Scholars use disidentification to refer to performances that minoritarian subjects engage in to survive within inhospitable spaces, while nevertheless working to subvert them. Thus, as both a theoretical framework and a performative practice, disidentification is an antiracist tool that can be utilized to theorize and respond to normative power structures including Communication Studies’ modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Indeed, the discipline of Communication Studies is diverse, but in spite of this, what coheres this expansive body of scholarship is an investment in understanding how communication produces, scaffolds, organizes, and potentially revises our world. Disidentification, by foregrounding identities and experiences of difference, offers Communication Studies researchers a way to consider how one’s life can be understood in relation to others, within the social structures that govern daily life, and within the ideological commitments that organize our experiences.

‘Do I Even Exist?’ Kurdish Diaspora Artists Reflect on Imaginary Exhibits in a Kurdistan Museum

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-267
Author(s):  
Vera Eccarius-Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
National Museums

In the MENA region state-sponsored cultural institutions such as museums often advanced a unified story of nationhood rather than to account for diverse ethno-linguistic and religious communities such as the Kurds. Visiting museums, Kurds have encountered deep silences, distortions and complete omissions of their lives. During the Baathist regime in Iraq, which controlled the country after 1968, national museums served to enhance the state’s legitimacy. Modern Turkish museums perpetuate a nationalistic narrative that discriminates against ethnic Kurds. To counter colonial and repressive narratives, diaspora Kurdish artists now articulate the need for alternative knowledge production. In this chapter, ethnographic interviews focused on curating Kurdish museum exhibits offer insights into how diaspora Kurdish participants frame their identities. The planned Kurdistan Museum in Erbil is at the center of Kurdish diasporic critique. Cultural activism among Kurdish diaspora artists, not unlike political consciousness-raising, represents a form of resistance to the way in which Kurdish experiences have been manipulated by hostile power structures.

Object relations, attachment theory, self-psychology, and interpersonal psychoanalysis

2012 ◽  
pp. 306-312
Author(s):  
Jeremy Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Self Psychology ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

Despite many splits and schisms, dating back to Adler and Jung's early break with Freud, there has been an enduring attempt within psychoanalysis to hold to a central psychodynamic vision and to find common ground between differing theoretical and clinical approaches. The aim of this chapter is to describe the work of some of the major figures who have extended and developed Freud's ideas, pointing to areas of both conflict and convergence, and, wherever possible, to relate their concepts to the everyday practice of psychiatry.

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