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Paper short abstract:

Based on ongoing research in Chile, I ask how to grasp work and healthcare, two fundamental aspects of migration usually treated separately. They offer a methodological challenge in the understanding of their articulation in migrants’ lives being both related to specific and distinct spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper opens methodological questions derived from an interest in how migrant work and healthcare articulate analytically while being de facto methodologically graspable in different spaces. While work scholarship often confines healthcare to occupational health, healthcare research usually includes "employment" as a determinant of service access. Instead, I look at how work and health mutually articulate beyond occupational health and employment as an access factor. The paper is based on a current research project in Temuco (Chile), that hosts a new wave of migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean mainly employed in the service sector and cared for by the public healthcare system. In this context, paid work conditions determine where and under what circumstances migrants live. Affordability and residence, in turn, determine inclusion in public care within the segregated public-private Chilean healthcare system. Thus, there is a tension between the mobile placement of production under high turnover and precarious conditions, and highly place-specific welfare provision such as healthcare. It is necessary to explore migrant labour as both mobile and placed in the city and the work of institutions providing care in a localized manner. This is approached by on the one hand seeking the views of institutional actors and on the other through an ethnographic case study of migrant work. However, the methodological conundrum explored in this paper remains: how to study the intersection between the world of health, institutionally space-bound and distributed in the city, and a dispersed and mobile migrant labour?

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This paper examines the urban life experiences of Hui Muslims in northwest China. It elucidates how the dynamic between the ethnographer and Hui Muslims is situated within a complex and contested space, wherein political agenda, ethno-cultural boundaries, and religious distinctiveness are decisive.

Paper long abstract:

Since mid-2019, the Hui Muslims of the Hui Fang Jamaat in Xi'an city have confronted with a political imperative aimed at "Sinicizing Islam." This initiative not only embodies a political directive but also reflects the collective disposition of the mainstream Han ethnicity toward the Hui Muslims. Specifically, this Muslim enclave, which heavily relies on ethnic tourism, has faced explicit political mandates, including the removal of Arabic language signage from shop signboards and the demolition of mosque domes. This has intensified tensions surrounding the pre-existing ethnic boundaries. However, it is erroneous to presume a clear demarcation between the Hui and mainstream society. Instead, the distinctiveness of Hui ethnicity, as the second largest Muslim group of ten million people whose lineage originates from intermarriages between Han Chinese and Arabic traders three centuries ago, has resulted in a considerable assimilation into mainstream society. This is evident in their physical appearance, language, and socio-economic patterns, largely resembling those of their Han counterparts. Hence, a Han researcher cannot be easily classified as either purely insider or outsider, but rather occupies a perpetual liminal space of "between and betwixt". As a segment of them become indifference to their religious significance, evidencing by enforcing as grassroots governmental officials that political imperative which ensues internal discord. It thus becomes imperative for the researcher to continuously reassess the relational dynamics and navigate this ongoing "tug-of-war which has determined the (self-)reflective nature and substantive content of the fieldwork, and the fluid positions of the researcher within the context.

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Paper short abstract:

How to engage with a vulnerable community rehoused in a dispersed way by local authorities? Following the residents and adopting a methodology of housing biographies we can make sense of the home as a mobile asset shaped by precariousness, (im)mobility, family structures and neighbourhood relations.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper I aim to discuss the possibilities and potentialities of acknowledging emergent spatialities through a methodology of housing biographies. Localized in the outskirts of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal), residents of a depleted neighbourhood consisting of self-build homes are relocated to existing, refurbished houses in relatively close, surrounding urban areas. This rehousing programme is executed by the municipality with the objective to end precarious housing conditions of the afro-descendent, Roma, racialized and migrant residents, that had taken advantage of an abandoned and unfinished concrete structure to build their homes, persisting there for decades. Opposed to former programmes (1990s), where large and centralized compounds were built outside of urban areas, lacking services, transport and quality public space, this one aims to integrate the community into the surrounding urban and social fabric by dispersing them. Following those families on their trajectory from precarious to social housing, one can make sense of the spatialization of this community and percieve which vulnerabilities or inequalities persist, are overcome or are reproduced. Following the residents by getting to know families through other families, ie. snowballing, works here, but was boosted by a great amount of initial trust and intimacy granted by interlocutors to whom the ethnographer was no stranger thanks to former collaborations, mainly social work and political solidarity in the struggle for the relocation. Through the collection of biographies centred on housing trajectories, questions on how home is produced, reproduced, transformed, and located in processes of spatialization, can be posed.

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Paper short abstract:

Visual anthropology branch has been built at the universities in Northern Cameroon. Many students have been trained in Europe to return to exchange experiences. Most of them conducted research on their families, their ethnic groups, or their religions.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, a new scientific discipline, visual anthropology, has been built at the universities in Northern Cameroon due to the efforts and research work of certain teachers – researchers and doctoral students in this branch. Many students have been trained in visual anthropology schools in Europe. The description and analysis of the careers of these scientists is important in more ways than one and instructive. The observation and listening of these “scientists of today” in relation to the research they carry out, to the issues and challenges of development they faced, make it possible to retrace the intellectual adventures of these students trained in Europe and returned to their localities to exchange their experiences and improve the living conditions of the populations. Does this momentum, which catches the eye, constitute a questioning of what is akin to the baptism of the field with the help of the camera as a tool for data collection and analysis? Do the themes addressed make it possible to solve a problem, to defend a point of view? The observation made on the first visual anthropologists in northern Cameroon shows that most of them conducted research on their families, their ethnic groups, or their religions.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper provides fieldwork reflections of the author as a native researcher in rural Manipur, India. It discusses challenges and strategies employed to obtain relevant information. It contributes to doing ethnography at home debate.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is about the author's reflections on doing anthropological research on a familiar site and culture to study the livelihood of Liangmai in Manipur. As a native and tribal anthropologist, doing fieldwork at home has undeniable perks like effortless rapport building, shared mental images in communication and no requirement to learn a language or need for a research assistant from the field. However, gaining access to locals’ interpretation of reality is much like an outsider fieldworker. Extracting relevant information and nuances of practices/views from the people whom you know comes with its own share of difficulty. A phrase like “you already know it” can be a real problem for gathering in-depth empirical data. At times, the native researcher’s queries are not considered worthy of explanation. In dealing with a familiar space, a researcher must be sensitive to their context and complex situations so as not to hurt community feelings in the fieldwork process and to maintain a long-term friendly relationship. This piece on ethnographic reflections contributes to contemporary debates on doing at-home ethnography. It discusses strategies deployed to overcome challenges.

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Paper short abstract:

New agricultural plots have recently mushroomed in the surroundings of southeastern Moroccan oases. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Drâa River Basin, this contribution thinks volumetrically and visually about the complex spatial experience of cultivating the desert.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, dwellers of drought-stricken Moroccan oases have witnessed, resisted, or contributed to, the mushrooming of agricultural plots beyond their palm groves’ edges. Endorsed by a representational rhetoric framing deserts as utopian sites of unexploited potential, these parcels are situated at the crossroads of tribal land usage regimes, neoliberal agrarian reforms, and new irrigation infrastructures for groundwater extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Drâa River Basin, this contribution thinks volumetrically and visually about the complex spatial experience of cultivating the desert. It attempts to tune into such experience through an engagement with water and the subterranean, based on experimental ethnographic writing and photography.

First, the contrapuntal reading of an oasis origin myth and of the geological account of the basin formation illuminates a long-gone waterscape – and its sedimented remains – as the material condition for the unfolding of desert agriculture. This contribution then builds on the emic distinction between l-fuq – the world above ground, where drought strikes –, and l-tht, the world below, where aquifer water lies in wait: for my interlocutors, the underground functions as an infrastructural frontier (Ballestero, 2019), the subterranean place where hope can be found against its above-ground fragility. Such distinction is elaborated upon through a photographic essay composed of dynamograms, that is, visual assemblages in which opposites remain co-present, in attunement with a context where scarcity and excess – just as modernity and its undoings – coexist and shape each other.

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Paper short abstract:

Using examples from the borderlands of western and southern Poland I show how mobile ethnography contributes to an explanation of the perception and multisensory experience of space and spatial identity and their influence on the rationalisation of life situations and social statuses.

Paper long abstract:

Emotional attachment to landscapes is a topic I dealt with during mobile ethnographic research among Poles settling in Germany and Ireland and among Jamaicans in Kingston, as well as among the Polish population living in Lower Silesia, which after 1945 replaced the displaced, mainly German population. I believe that the process of "growing into the space" is an indispensable phenomenon that determines the adaptation of newcomers (positively or negatively). This phenomenon also accompanies our growing up, recognizing the surroundings, landscape, and space as familiar. I have often wondered how to effectively research why we are attracted to certain spaces and why others make us anxious or even averse, and I reckon that mobile and multi-sited ethnography may bring an answer. For this paper, I discuss examples from research in Polish borderlands that were settled by Polish people after 1945 (replacing displaced Germans), and only in the 21st century did they begin to settle in greater numbers outside Poland. I review the process of rationalising the imaginaries of the right to live there in the context of nationalist historicism and the process of younger generations abandoning historicism in favor of non-nationalistic, personal emotional attachment to places. In the case of people crossing the border (e.g. on the way from work to home in a neighboring country), I will discuss the process of losing the "sense of border" and entering a foreign territory, which may evoke a sense of belonging to space and locality, rather than nationality.

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Paper short abstract:

In order to carry out qualitative research in diverse situations, researchers undergo numerous challenges. The challenges are manifold, especially in terms of language, culture, economy and a prevailing political situation which is in a sense more sensitive as well.

Paper long abstract:

In order to carry qualitative research in diverse situations, especially in relation to socio-economic context, researcher undergoes numerous challenges. The challenges are manifold and especially in terms of language, culture, economy and prevailing political situation which is in a sense more sensitive as well.

Since, researcher does not face a language barrier, as majority of respondents do speak and converse in Telugu, which is my mother tongue as well, during my fieldwork period, though they also speak their own language, Lambani or Goar Boli and which is also known as Banjari, belongs to Indo-Aryan group of language family, which researcher was not aware during the fieldwork and later came to know that there are large number of speakers of the language. As viewed by Malinowski and other anthropologists, knowing native language makes researcher job easy during the field. Thus, researchers can understand the intricacies of the setting, locality, community and their everyday interactions lucidly. Researcher do agree that because of modernization and technological advancement, people have become conversant in multiple languages because of their day-to-day engagement and interaction with neighbouring social groups, so to say, dominant castes (MN Srinivas proposition). Our paper tries to engage different propositions of methodology especially in relation to the categories of emic/etic or insider/outsider debates vs field view and book view contestations in anthropological realms in the different spatiality's of rural and tribal spectrum.

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Paper short abstract:

Longings are connective forces between here, there and elsewhere. Methods of working with longing can reach from analytical, to self-reflexive, to activist. In this paper I propose a series of methodological exercises that engage longing as a method of enquiry of emerging and fading spatialities.

Paper long abstract:

Part of being human is living on the threshold of unfolding life worlds. Our longings and the longings of others are connective forces between here and there and elsewhere. If we understand ethnographic spaces through the prism of longings, we obtain new ideas about our research partners’ vulnerabilities, movements, value-configurations and imaginaries. Spaces and places of longing are both material and immaterial, and transcend the paradigm of analog/digital. In many fields of anthropological research, from protest movements, to mobilities, to alternative from of living, to radicalisation - there has been an increased attentiveness to longings and desires. It helps us to engage differently and deepen our understanding of interlocutors, field sites, field work communities and of our own positions in the field.

There are many ways of making longings visible and heard in our fieldsites. Methods of working with longings can have different trajectories from analytical, self- reflexive to activist. In this paper I will draw on selection of ethnographies, theoretical writings, and creative practices and propose a series of methodological exercises that engage longing as a method of enquiry of emerging and fading spatialities. These exercises are developed for individuals, pairs, larger groups and include techniques of mapping, dialogue, and movement. The goal of this paper is encourage towards including longing actively and creatively in (ethnographic) participatory research practice, and to initiating a process of thinking about methodological possibilities that is suited one’s own field site and personal researcher skills.