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Urban scholars have long engaged with the role of culture in cities. Tracing this debate, this article outlines the evolutions of culture as an object of study in inquiries on the urban and wishes to trouble two persisting trends in this literature. The first is a geographical and theoretical Eurocentric vision of culture, often framing cities beyond the West as exceptions or needing validation through a comparison with a Western case or theoretical model; the second is an economistic vision of culture under neoliberalism, neglecting the political and ideological dimensions of culture. As a step in overcoming these limitations, this article builds around the notion of 're-learning', to re-insert memory, informality and conflicting heritage into the debate on culture in cities. Drawing on an ethnography of the street 'Avenida 26' in Bogotá, Colombia, the article shows that informal cultural practices in the middle of segregation and urban violence can hardly be grasped through the current framing of culture in cities. Yet, they invite an opening up of such a framing to include different ways to cohabit and navigate space through everyday minor engagements. These multifaceted cultural realities urge us to 're-learn' culture in cities anywhere and advance theorisation on culture that takes non-Western urban spaces seriously.

AbstractWe use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open‐ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep hanging out and a mixed methods toolkit, with the former remaining central to the practice and teaching of all forms of contemporary cultural anthropology. Further, many anthropologists are committed to advancing research methods that account for power imbalances in fieldwork, such as through community‐based and participatory approaches. And a substantial number also teach a wider array of methods and techniques that open new career pathways for anthropologists. Overall, our study reveals a core set of ethnographic practices—loosely, participant‐observation, informal interviews, and the experiential immersion of the ethnographer—while also highlighting the great breadth of cultural anthropological research practice and pedagogy. The findings presented here can help inform how current and future anthropological practitioners and educators position themselves to meet the ever‐changing demands of community members, funders, clients, collaborators, and students.

Abstract
Despite the growing body of literature on how migrancy transforms family relations, surprisingly little research exists on how 'migrant family' takes shape in institutional encounters. In this article, we analyse the negotiations on when and how family relations become addressed in encounters between social workers and migrant service users. Drawing from institutional ethnography, we understand the local service encounters as actively regulated by extra-local relations of ruling, represented here mainly by texts such as legislative acts, service descriptions and professional guidelines. The results show that the ways in which family is present and addressed in the institutional encounters often became an act of balancing between a broader understanding of family relations building on the service user's self-definition as well as psychosocial and holistic professional ideals, and a narrower administrative understanding rooted in the Finnish legislation on social security and immigration. The legislative texts thus become a strong relation of ruling that coordinates the actual encounters and what happens in them. Nevertheless, family is essential to human subjectivity, and if the institutional encounters focus only on those family relations recognised by the legislation, important aspects of human relations remain unseen.

Prior studies that examine how new expertise becomes integrated into organizations have shown that different occupations work to legitimate their new expertise to develop credibility and deference from other organizational groups. In this study, we similarly examine the work that an expert occupation did to legitimate their expertise; however, in this case, they were legitimating practices that they actually considered illegitimate. We report findings from our 20-month ethnography of data analysts at a financial technology company to explain this process. We show that the company had structured data analytics in ways similar to Bechky's idea of a captive occupation: They were dependent on their collaborators' cooperation to demonstrate the value of data analytics and accomplish their work. The data analysts constantly encountered or were asked to provide what they deemed to be illegitimate data analysis practices such as hacking, peeking, and poor experimental design. In response, they sometimes resisted but more often reconciled themselves to the requests. Notably, they also explicitly lowered their stated standards and then worked to legitimate those now illegitimate versions of their expert practices through standardization, technology platforms, and evangelizing. Our findings articulate the relationship between captive occupations and conditions wherein experts work to legitimate what they consider illegitimate practices.

Immigration became an especially thorny and publicly discussed issue with the so-called Refugee Crisis beginning in 2015. The stance of the Czech and Polish governments was dominated by strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric. Still, both countries have witnessed a steady increase in mainly short-term immigration from various Asian countries such as Bangladesh or Pakistan ever since. This paper analyses Czech and Polish migration policies against the backdrop of a historically constructed notion of anti-illegal immigration policy, and category of temporary migration, coupled with the problematic nature of debt-financed migration in Asia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Czechia and Poland (2018-2021), in-depth and semi-structured interviews with migration experts, academic and grey literature, official documents, and the method of Accidental ethnography, this paper argues that silencing of actual labor immigration in political communication while employing anti-migration rhetoric represents a discursive gap typical for liberal democracies. It further concludes that rendering migrant labor as a temporary commodity and turning a blind eye on recruitment of international migrants represents a continuity practice of migrant labor subordination within the nation-state, originating during colonialism and the advent of capitalism in the nineteenth century.

AbstractHow can we remain attentive to the scale of the environmental damage caused in traditional Maroon territories by the effects of the Plantationocene and the material vestiges of colonial and racial violence left by capitalism? Dwelling on conversations held with Maroon Cottica Ndyuka women living in Moengo, a small town established on the Cottica River in Eastern Suriname to support a bauxite industrial plant in the early twentieth century, this text seeks to illuminate what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2021) calls "elemental affinities," relationships in which humans and more-than-humans interact in composing body and earth through refractive and diffractive effects. The paper observes how the women mixed and modeled clay, turning it into sculpted balls known as pemba or pemba doti, frequently used as a therapeutical and spiritual substance, and as food. In so doing, the text deals with processes such as creating, composing, undoing, decomposing, and perishing once the earth—as soil—takes part in and renders possible the existence of diverse creatures. This is a contribution toward an ethnography of (de)compositions of the earth that sets out from the affinities between earth and bodies, attentive to certain metamorphic possibilities, the multiplicities of relations in which soils act.

Theoretically grounded in positioning theory, this study aimed to unpack three stories of Vietnamese teachers of English' transformation of teaching theory and practice due to their international and intercultural overseas experiences. Our ethnography study was centered on those teachers' varying perceptions of what and how to teach. Our examination of the teacher candidates' written critical reflection and interview was conducted over one year after they returned to teach in Vietnam. Particularly, these teachers' perceived teaching and learning changes were a possible consequence of their experiences of intercultural engagement in many local settings in their host countries where they had previously stayed before returning. Using positioning and transformative learning as a theoretical lens, the researchers explored how teachers' transformation was revealed after their return, suggesting that there were themes of positioning, including their modified cognition, awareness, attitudes, and behavior. More specifically, the findings implied that educational nation-level and school-level policy should pay more attention to the local English teachers' privileges and threats that drive how they navigate their professional careers, considering academic qualifications and personal attributes. While the former was related to implications for teacher education programs (that help them identify teaching philosophy, methodology, and teaching environments), the latter involved teacher characteristics, aspirations, and accumulated capital.

Abstract
Palestinian Authority (PA) land titling began in 2005 as a means of creating property and sovereignty. Titling projects are extending government control over Palestinians, but they cannot secure their lands from Israeli state and private power. This article is an ethnography of Palestinian land titling, focusing on the specific problems that fraudulent land transfers to Israeli settlers create for such property-making efforts. It argues that for Palestinian administrators and surveyors, the certainty of Israeli colonization reduces progress to a challenge of speed and gives rise to short-term fixes that defer insoluble legal and political problems. The result is a form of nonsovereign property that encourages land markets now and offers the possibility of securing land rights later. The disjuncture between the future that land titling promises and the present it creates is entrenching private ownership in the West Bank and, as land speculation threatens to erode Palestinian control over territory, inciting debate about its limits. Land titling is creating a new political temporality in the ruins of state-building, one that illuminates how legacies of colonial law and contemporary practices of land speculation shape loss, hope, and contestation in Palestine and across the global South.

In a well-known narrative, a body of water intertwined with a suburban landscape in a town near Bogotá, Colombia's capital, is menaced by an expansive real estate industry. This paper offers a historical view on how the marshlands in and around Bogotá were dried. It examines how certain technologies captured, governed, and instrumentalised water. However, water manages to slip through these technologies, defying colonial relations but also falling into certain technoscientific classifications. Consequently, this work aims to go beyond colonial taxonomies of water and nature by focusing on the entanglements of both human and non-human actors through a multispecies ethnography. This allows us to delve deeper into the ways in which water, as a life force, provides the conditions for a rich and biodiverse assembling, letting us be part and witnesses of narratives that challenge the traditional views of Earth and the relationships between humans and the environment, also known as Gaia stories ( Haraway 2019 ). To conclude, we propose an exercise of political imagination through a situated story that helps us imagine a multispecies flourishing future that provides us clues for knitting a more just future for all of us.

Cochlear implants are considered the gold standard in intervening on deafness and hearing loss. However, "success" is predicated upon routine and consistent use, which in turn is predicated on the ability to maintain devices. This essay considers what happens when use is partial and precarious and asks what happens when external implant processors become obsolete. Contributing to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on obsolescence and the binary between use and nonuse, I analyzes the ongoing aftermath of a central government program in India that provides children living below the poverty line with cochlear implants. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, the article analyzes how families struggle financially and logistically to maintain devices, resulting in cycles of partial use and precarious use. Ultimately, devices become obsolete, and families cannot afford compulsory upgrades. The state and corporations claim these families abandon the devices. In contrast to this claim, the article stresses that we must examine abandonment differently, by attending to how families are abandoned by the state and corporations. Arguing that obsolescence as a concept obscures relationality and functions apolitically, the concept of abandonment is instead put forward to analyze ruptures that occur when consistent and reliable biotechnology use is no longer possible.

As mass incarceration and supervision decline in the U.S., subtler forms of "invisible punishment" continue to affect individuals with a history of legal system involvement. Increasingly, the state recedes from direct involvement in invisible punishment, instead devolving responsibility—and potentially controlling at a distance—community-based organizations. In the process, punishment in the community is shaped by both the state and various segments of civil society. The present ethnography examines how staffers at a community-based reentry organization are subject to and resistant to state influence, and how this resistance generates new forms of invisible punishment. While state influence directs staffers to provide services focused on altering clients' internal dispositions, staffers resist state influence by encouraging members to be their own advocates against the penal system. This agonistic process of resistance generates a hybridized form of invisible punishment, commingling the organizational goals and routines of penal state authorities with those of reentry staffers who see advocating against structures of punishment as a core mission. The final, hybridized form of this mode of penalty requires the client not only to look inward to effect dispositional changes, but also to look outward to be an active agent advocating against the exclusionary penal structures affecting them.

Based on an ethnography developed with social movements derived from the eviction process of an old popular district in the city of São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil, we analyze how an idea of neighborship is applied to the processes of struggle and their outcomes. In 2004, a land of over 1,000,000 m2, owned by a bankrupt industry, was occupied by an entire district of over 5,000 people. This "illegal" occupation had been going on for almost 8 years when a court decision ordered the land to be vacated. The case of the Pinheirinho dos Palmares neighborhood, as it was known, became an emblematic example of Brazilian housing policies, with its violent eviction drawing the entire country's attention. This article deals with the struggles that the evicted residents started and that resulted, at the end of almost 5 years, in the construction of a new district by the state, based on a new housing program. We are going to analyze how concerns about organizing the new neighborship from the old neighborhood relations were fundamental in the geographical and architectural production of the new district. The article seeks to intertwine the notions of resistance and neighborship, responsible for the new configuration of the district.

AbstractThis article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars studying global governance in two ways: (1) by demonstrating how dynamic relationships between states and international organisations (IOs) unfolding within the social space of international treaty negotiations contribute to regime-complex formation; and (2) how social network analysis (SNA) can help us to detect patterns in these relationships. Combining participant observation and collaborative event ethnography (CEE) with social network analysis, we present new empirical material illustrating how we delimited a regime complex and how IOs interact throughout the negotiation process. We applied our methodology to the case of marine-biodiversity governance and use observational data collected during three intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) (2018–19) on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) for our analysis. We discuss the results in relation to our approach's strengths and weaknesses and implications for future research on regime complexity.

Abstract
The Chicago Police Department's community policing program partners with several LGBTQ service providers in and around Chicago's white middle class "gayborhood." These organizations make strange bedfellows for law enforcement, given that many of their clients are queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) and, indeed, targets of policing and gentrification projects. This study draws on eighteen months of ethnography and in-depth interviews to examine motivations and consequences of these inter-agency unions. The study finds that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are incorporated into racialized policing strategies through mechanisms ranging from contractual agreement to implicit expectation. While NGOs resist directly criminalizing their QTPOC clients, some discourage them from lingering around service centers, effectively making them invisible in the white gayborhood. Findings demonstrate that in a post-welfare police state, sexual health governance is racially and economically circumscribed, as well as mediated, by institutional intimacies between governmental and non-governmental agencies. I argue that LGBTQ service provision is situated within a multilevel monitoring system, a structure I term "serv/eillance." Providing services to LGBTQ+POC becomes conditioned on state surveillance, while receiving services is conditioned on being surveilled, by police or by proxy.

Women in Vietnam, historically and today, have participated in the labor force at a high rate. Since Vietnam opened its markets in 1986, their participation has noticeably declined. Given this change, what does economic transformation mean for how men understand the place of women in society, and relatedly, what does it mean for how they understand masculinity? Through ethnography and interviews with 53 men in Ho Chi Minh City, I find that Vietnamese men in this urban center aspire for projects of masculinity that rely on the reimagination of Vietnamese women as non-workers in history. My findings show that men from different economic positions and occupations evidence divergent views of the family and women's role in it. Men who are employed in waged occupations with a high school degree or less seek to realize "tradition" through the single-income family and the homemaker wife, yet this family is not necessarily an echo of the past. By contrast, men in salary paying occupations with some or complete college education view the dual-income family and the female worker as progressive despite the long history of women's labor in Vietnam. This finding presents an opportunity to understand how masculinity as an ideal, a process, and a lived experience occurs during moments of economic transformation.