Section 144: Fieldwork in a Curfew
Reflecting on the complexities of conducting research in a region gripped by administrative upheaval and political uncertainty, I write to open up this forum to fellow anthropologists and…
Tag: Fieldnotes
Noah, the Slave Pirate: On Manuals and the Indispensability of Anthropologists
The juxtaposition between reliance on Noah’s anthropological skills and the presumed lack of relevance this discipline has to broader society ultimately makes for good comedy. Reading the subtext…
See You Later, Thick Data – Part 2
This blogpost is part of the methodological series “See You Later, Thick Data – How we experimented with doing collaborative fieldwork as part of an interdisciplinary research project”.…
See You Later, Thick Data – Part 3
This blogpost is part of the methodological series “See You Later, Thick Data – How we experimented with doing collaborative fieldwork as part of an interdisciplinary research project”.…
#Fieldnotes: Dreams and Personal Pursuits in Seoul: Part II
The partial biographies presented in this piece are situated as stoppages that mark generational experiences of structural change in South Korea. In Part I, I considered how biographies…
#Fieldnotes: Dreams and Personal Pursuits in Seoul: Part I
In this piece, I document partial biographies of two residents of Seoul that were narrated across the course of fieldwork between 2019 and 2020. These fieldnotes consider what…
Strange Bedfellows: On Trauma and Ethnographic Vulnerability
I never expected that laughter would be part of the solution. I had set out on fieldwork with rather vague notions about the importance of sensitivity and silence…
Inviting disasters
One particularly warm morning in September 2020, I am looking at photographs and videos in the media depicting the aftermath of medicane (Mediterranean hurricane) Ianós that just rampaged…
Jobseekers in Dubai in the time of COVID-19 (IV)
Part Four: “When will this Covid be over?” During the first month of T.’s search for work in Dubai, Covid-19 felt like something that had happened last spring.…
Jobseekers in Dubai in the time of COVID-19 (III)
Part Three: A Travel Agent selling Freedom For the second half of my stay, I lived in a shared accommodation of mostly Egyptian men in Ajman, which is…
Jobseekers in Dubai in the time of COVID-19 (II)
Part Two: New Opportunities, New Stress In the Gulf region, Dubai has been a forerunner in the transformation towards a neoliberal market of skills and hands. Gulf countries…
Jobseekers in Dubai in the time of Covid-19 (I)
Arrivals to uncertainty In mid-December 2020, my friend T. returned to Dubai from Egypt in the hope of getting his old job back or finding new work. His…
Ep #60 Adapting Methods, Human Difference, Virtual Dojos and Foggy Field notes:This Month on TFS
Welcome back to a new season! With Covid-19 restrictions still in place, we bring you another Zoom panel! For this reason, the audio quality will be a little…
Roam If You Want To
You already know how to use Roam Research, the new note taking app taking the internet by storm. You don’t need to follow the #roamcult hashtag on Twitter,…
Larissa’s Story: Behind the Migration Crisis Headlines
In late September, 2019, the current US presidential administration struck several unprecedented deals with the Northern Triangle governments of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to return asylum s…
Notes on a Postcard
The exhibition The World Exists To Be Put on A Postcard has been running at the British Museum throughout the summer. It is an apt location for any…
Glimpses of Life in Indefinite Debt in the Czech Republic
“I can only work cash-in-hand [načerno] for the rest of my life,” Nina[1] told me as we were sitting in her kitchen drinking black coffee while she was…
Katherine Verdery on her book, My Life as a Spy
https://www.dukeupress.edu/my-life-as-a-spy Interview by Tim Gitzen Tim Gitzen: You describe this book—and the process of reading your police file and writing the book—as part memoir. This is evident…
Feelings in the field: reflections on fieldwork in murk-o
Image: Nick Seaver (https://twitter.com/npseaver/) My lower back is sore. There’s a tension that’s rising from the place where my neck meets my scalp, and my eyes feel baggy.…
Musings from the murky middle ground of climate science and action
Image: NASA (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glacial_lakes,_Bhutan.jpg) “There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking …
In praise of the scaffolding
In my experience, when the ethnographic mission collapsed, this scaffolding remained standing, rich and complex, in plain view. There, the net into which I fell. (Rosaldo 2014: 112)…
Land, Labour & Society in Aceh: Chandra Jayawardena’s unpublished fieldnotes
This post is a little outside our usual mandate, but we are intrigued by the idea that Professor Robinson proposes: an interactive online project she is working on…
Notes from a blurry border (Part 1): Can that mountain stop me?
While media attention is focused elsewhere, a new phase of the “European border crisis” is unfolding around the snow-covered mountain passes between Italy and France. What might the…