Ethnographies in Pan Pacific Research


Book Description

The book is about exciting ethnographic happenings in the vibrant and growing global interface which includes Australia, New Zealand, and some of the Asian geographical regions, as well as - more broadly - the global South. It explores ethnographic writing as culture(s) (re)produced, positionalities of authors, tensions between authors and others, multi-faceted groups, and as co-productions of these works. The contributors describe and discuss a variety of topical areas of interest, from Facebook to memory work, from children's sexuality to urban racism, from meanings of Indigenous knowledge to how communities can come together to retain what is valuable to themselves. The authors also manage to locate themselves and others (positionings) in the research hierarchies (tensions). This is a valuable guide to the effects of 21st-century ethnography on the qualitative research project.




Global South Ethnographies


Book Description

Both an introduction to sensory ethnography and a bold display of the sophisticated use of the sensory for contemporary ethnography, Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses reflects both indigenous and non-mainstream takes on the sensory and the sensual in ethnographic practice. The authors provide a collection of original and timely chapters from both the hegemonic northern and Global Southern hemispheres. As the chapters stem from across a variety of disciplines, the book gives us novel ways of determining and perceiving the sensory.




International Perspectives on Autoethnographic Research and Practice


Book Description

International Perspectives on Autoethnographic Research and Practice is the first volume of international scholarship on autoethnography. This culturally and academically diverse collection combines perspectives on contemporary autoethnographic thinking from scholars working within a variety of disciplines, contexts, and formats. The first section provides an introduction and demonstration of the different types and uses of autoethnography, the second explores the potential issues and questions associated with its practice, and the third offers perspectives on evaluation and assessment. Concluding with a reflective discussion between the editors, this is the premier resource for researchers and students interested in autoethnography, life writing, and qualitative research.




The Anthropology of Postindustrialism


Book Description

This volume explores how mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism affect places and people in peripheral regions and de-industrializing cities. While studies of globalization tend to emphasize localities newly connected to global systems, this collection, in contrast, analyzes the disconnection of communities away from the market, presenting a range of ethnographic case studies that scrutinize the framework of this transformative process, analyzing new social formations that are emerging in the voids left behind by the de-industrialization, and introducing a discussion on the potential impacts of the current economic and ecological crises on the hyper-mobile model that has characterized this recent phase of global capitalism and spatially uneven development.




Islam, Standards, and Technoscience


Book Description

Halal (literally, "permissible" or "lawful") production, trade, and standards have become essential to state-regulated Islam and to companies in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore, giving these two countries a special position in the rapidly expanding global market for halal products: in these nations state bodies certify halal products as well as spaces (shops, factories, and restaurants) and work processes, and so consumers can find state halal-certified products from Malaysia and Singapore in shops around the world. Building on ethnographic material from Malaysia, Singapore, and Europe, this book provides an exploration of the role of halal production, trade, and standards. Fischer explains how the global markets for halal comprise divergent zones in which Islam, markets, regulatory institutions, and technoscience interact and diverge. Focusing on the "bigger institutional picture" that frames everyday halal consumption, Fischer provides a multisited ethnography of the overlapping technologies and techniques of production, trade, and standards that together warrant a product as "halal," and thereby help to format the market. Exploring global halal in networks, training, laboratories, activism, companies, shops and restaurants, this book will be an essential resource to scholars and students of social science interested in the global interface zones between religion, standards, and technoscience.




After the Crisis


Book Description

After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath offers a thought-provoking examination of the state of contemporary anthropology, identifying key issues that have confronted the discipline in recent years and linking them to neoliberalism, and suggesting how we might do things differently in the future. The first part of the volume considers how anthropology has come to resemble, as a result of the rise of postmodern and poststructural approaches in the field, key elements of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics by rejecting the idea of system in favour of individuals. It also investigates the effect of the economic crisis on funding and support for higher education and addresses the sense that anthropology has ‘lost its way’, with uncertainty over the purpose and future of the discipline. The second part of the book explores how the discipline can overcome its difficulties and place itself on a firmer foundation, suggesting ways that we can productively combine the debates of the late twentieth century with a renewed sense that people live their lives not as individuals, but as enmeshed in webs of relationship and obligation.




Teaching Digital Storytelling


Book Description

Everyone has a story to tell, and this book will inspire and guide readers to teach and learn through the production of digital narratives. This book presents the stories of educators who through digital storytelling inspire students from diverse communities to construct their empowering digital narratives. Educators from a wide range of disciplines present innovative case studies of teaching digital storytelling through the lens of personal narratives, metaliteracy, and information literacy. They describe how teaching students to tell their personal digital stories prepares them as learners who are reflective while playing active learner roles such as producer, publisher, and collaborator. As an innovative resource for teaching and learning with digital media, this book: Combines the theory and practice of digital storytelling with metaliteracy and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education Explores how to inspire learners to share their original digital narratives Offers the opportunity to explore and address issues of race, class, and gender to give voice to these issues as part of the storytelling process Investigates the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in writing and producing original digital narratives Examines novel approaches to collaborative digital storytelling and peer review Presents pioneering models for global digital storytelling among international learners online Describes empowering digital narratives constructed by students who found and shared their voices through this creative process Provides inventive models for teaching effective planning through well-written scripts and visual storyboards Offers openly-available resources such as rubrics, assignment descriptions, and digital technologies Showcases the application of metaliteracy OER in digital storytelling learning activities and courses Through this book, faculty, librarians, school library media specialists, and instructional designers will learn how to teach the theory and practice of digital storytelling. This innovative resource will also empower students to reflect on their roles as digital storytellers and metaliterate learners in today’s dynamic and evolving information environment.




Narrative Research in Practice


Book Description

This book directly addresses the multiplicity and complexity of narrative research by illustrating a variety of avenues to pursuing and publishing research that falls under the umbrella of narrative work. The chapters are drawn from a wide range of disciplines including education, literary studies, cultural studies, music and clinical studies. Each chapter considers a particular methodological issue or approach, illustrating how it was addressed in the course of the research. Each of the chapters concludes with a set of discussion exercises and a further reading list. The book offers a valuable resource for established researchers seeking to expand their methodological and theoretical repertoire, and for graduate students and researchers new to narrative methods.




At Home and in the Field


Book Description

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, At Home and in the Field is an anthology of twenty-first century ethnographic research and writing about the global worlds of home and disjuncture in Asia and the Pacific Islands. These stories reveal novel insights into the serendipitous nature of fieldwork. Unique in its inclusion of "homework"—ethnography that directly engages with issues and identities in which the ethnographer finds political solidarity and belonging in fields at home—the anthology contributes to growing trends that complicate the distinction between "insiders" and "outsiders." The obligations that fieldwork engenders among researchers and local communities are exemplified by contributors who are often socially engaged with the peoples and places they work. In its focus on Asia and the Pacific Islands, the collection offers ethnographic updates on topics that range from ritual money burning in China to the militarization of Hawai'i to the social role of text messages in identifying marriage partners in Vanuatu to the cultural power of robots in Japan. Thought provoking, sometimes humorous, these cultural encounters will resonate with readers and provide valuable talking points for exploring the human diversity that makes the study of ourselves and each other simultaneously rewarding and challenging.




The Ethnographic Experiment


Book Description

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart's work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.