Commoning Ethnography

Book review

Andreja Phillips — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On Power and Obligation in Publishing

Eli Elinoff, Lorena Gibson, Catherine Trundle — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Volume 5 of Commoning Ethnography.

We’ll start with the obvious: this issue was a challenge to produce. It arrives nearly three calendar years after our last issue. This was not our plan. There are myriad reasons for the issue’s untimeliness. Chiefly, these have to do with a quite volatile period in the life of our institution in the long wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as it played out in its own untimely way in Aotearoa. They also have to do with changes in our personal circumstances and shifting personnel on the editorial collective.

Rather than unpack these circumstances, the experience of trying desperately to publish the journal while also keeping up with all the other things in life has raised a different set of questions: What is the nature of the relationship between author and editor? What kinds of obligations, responsibilities, and power relationships are enfolded into that relationship? What happens when those asymmetries shift around?

Call for papers

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to open submissions for Volume 6. We welcome submissions that explore the boundaries of ethnographic knowledge, experiment with forms of ethnographic writing, disturb the authority of single authorship, consider how property norms shape ethnographic research, and rethink communities of ethnographic research in a variety of yet unanticipated ways. We also welcome ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the commoning projects that exist within contemporary life, be they within academia, social movements, political spaces, emergent economies, environmental debates, creative practices or in intimate and quotidian arenas of social life.

'Opening the Blind Box'

Han Tao, Hailing Zhao, Rachel Douglas-Jones — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic returned the politics of ‘access’ to the forefront of anthropological discussion. This article offers a multimodal, autoethnographic account of ‘access’ across axes, foregrounding the biomedical, digital, bureaucratic and citizenship contingencies of arriving in China, a process which was for two of the authors, a process also of returning ‘home’. We employ the metaphor of the ‘blind box’, colloquially and commercially meaning a box containing mysterious toys, to unfold questions of power and uncertainty over one’s fate during pandemic travel. The article’s co-created comics, read alongside written narratives, convey affective environments, and aid our analysis of the changed and charged conditions of access. We therefore frame access through shifts in technological affordances, the affects they produce, and the risks and responsibilities that fieldworkers carry. We argue that in these stories, access becomes an experience to be lived through, saturated with the contingencies of technology as researchers find themselves subject to the fluid landscape of policy, shifting perceptions of ‘home’ and newly resonant parallels with earlier eras of ethnographic research in China.

We All Got A Story

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper introduces the stories of individuals impacted by the criminal legal system, revealing a pattern amongst diverse voices. Our findings are based on research aimed to document the experiences of an urban midwestern community with over-prosecution and to identify potential prosecutorial reforms. Relying on a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework, community researchers worked together to collect data first-hand among system-impacted individuals while respecting existing community relations. Although PAR allowed us to avoid some of the pitfalls of traditional research, we experienced much of our work as a balancing act between engaging the community on the one hand and respecting their boundaries and vulnerabilities on the other. As we reflect on these chal-lenges of our work, we offer a story-poem that combines different narratives into a cohesive statement about systemic oppression and societal neglect, thus both humanizing and empowering marginalized voices.

Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorder in Times of COVID

Veronica Miranda — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Between 15-20% of pregnant and birthing people in the United States experience symptoms of Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMAD). This percentage is higher for individuals who are low income, racially minoritized, and/or marginalized. Social systems of care and support have been shown to reduce symptoms of PMAD and help optimize the health of pregnant and postpartum people. For many people, COVID-19 further exacerbated the negative impacts of PMAD, largely because of disruptions of social support networks and health care resources. This article uses testimonio and autoethnography to discuss the stress, abandonment, and feeling of loss associated with the disruption of access to postpartum mental health care and support. While such feelings of loss and abandonment may feel personal, this article argues that it is critical to recognize the structural dimensions of perinatal mental health and postpartum care. The author concludes that misrecognition of the structural dimensions of PMAD contributes to structural violence.

Migration, Anthropology, and Voice

Knut Graw — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most striking features of contemporary migration to Europe and elsewhere is the almost complete anonymity of its pro-tagonists. The most immediate effect of this anonymity has been the emergence of the figure of the ‘migrant’ in public consciousness with little attention for national and personal backgrounds. A related effect of this anonymization of migration has been that, without personal identity, the individuals concerned also seem to have no history, leading to a rather de-historicized view of migration in the public debate. The present text attempts to counter these tendencies by focusing on an individual narrative of migration between West Africa and Europe, dating back to the late 1980s. On a more theoretical plane, by reflecting on an individual account the article reflects on the question of voice as one of the most central problems of ethnographic representation, both in migration studies and more generally.

‘We want bread, education and freedom’

Letizia Bonanno — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘We want bread, education and freedom’ is an ethnographic experiment that traces and weaves together the unfolding of multiple crises in Greece in the mid-2010s. An ethnographically informed snapshot of a visit to the squatted hotel City Plaza in Athens, the piece unfolds by exploring the polysemy and versatility of the 1973 slogan ‘Bread, education, freedom’ and how it has been reappropriated and re-signified over time to make sense of the 2010 economic crisis and later, of the so-called refugee crisis. While the text pulls together historical events, political discourses and personal reflections, the graphics capture the Hotel City Plaza’s dense affects and lay bare those tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences that are often hard to verbalise and make sense of. Altogether this piece configures an unfished, raw and sensorial journey through the struggles of reconciling political belonging, positionality and intellectual commitment to anthropology.