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PurposeThis article offers practical advice to ethnographers venturing into doing participant observations through, but not about, videoconferencing applications such as Zoom, for which the methods literature offers little guidance.Design/methodology/approachThe article stems from a research project about a BioMedical Design Fellowship. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Fellowship converted all teaching activities to online learning via Zoom, and the participant observations followed along. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors present and discuss concrete examples of encountered obstacles produced by the video-mediated format, such as limited access and interactions, technical glitches and changing experiences of embodiment.FindingsChanging embodiment in particular initially led the authors to believe that the “messiness” of ethnography (i.e. misunderstandings, emotions, politics, self-doubts etc.) was lost online. However, over time the authors realized that the mess was still there, albeit in new manifestations, because Zoom shaped the interactions of the people the authors observed, the observations the authors could make and how the authors related to research participants and vice versa.Practical implicationsThe article succinctly summarizes the key advice offered by the researchers (see Section 5) based on their experiences of converting on-site ethnographic observations into video-mediated observations enabling easy use by other researchers in relation to other projects and contexts.Originality/valueThe article positions video-mediated observations, via e.g. Zoom, which are distinctly characterised by happening in real time and having an object of study other than the online sphere itself, vis-à-vis other “online ethnography” methods. The article further aims to enable researchers to more rapidly rediscover and re-incite the new manifestations of the messiness of ethnography online, which is key to ensuring high-quality research.

In recent years, Dutch universities have increasingly adopted the concept of “social safety” as a distinct policy domain, alongside Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Triggered in part by high-profile reports on harassment and misconduct in academia, social safety has emerged as a widely endorsed yet ambiguously defined framework. This study investigates the meanings associated with social safety policy work across eleven Dutch higher education institutions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with fifteen university employees engaged in social safety tasks, we explore how the concept is understood and operationalised. Our findings reveal a strong conceptual overlap with “inclusion” and ”psychological safety”. However, we also identify critical tensions: the meanings attributed to social safety tends to emphasise individual responsibility detached from power relations anchored in social identities and marginalisation. We argue that social safety, as an evolving and contested policy term, functions as a “floating signifier” shaped by institutional needs and actors, and we call for more intersectional and systemic approaches to ensure its effectiveness. In den letzten Jahren haben niederländische Universitäten zunehmend das Konzept der „sozialen Sicherheit“ („social safety“) als eigenständiges Politikfeld neben Diversity, Equity und Inclusion eingeführt. Ausgelöst unter anderem durch vielbeachtete Berichte über Belästigung und Fehlverhalten in der Wissenschaft hat sich „soziale Sicherheit“ als ein weithin befürwortetes, jedoch unklar definiertes Konzept etabliert. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Bedeutungen, die dem Konzept in der praktischen Arbeit zu „social safety“ Policies an elf niederländischen Universitäten zugeschrieben werden. Auf der Grundlage halbstrukturierter Interviews mit fünfzehn Universitätsmitarbeitenden mit Zuständigkeiten im Bereich der sozialen Sicherheit untersuchen wir, wie das Konzept verstanden und operationalisiert wird. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen eine starke konzeptuelle Überschneidung mit „Inklusion” und „psychologischer Sicherheit”. Zugleich treten auch Spannungen auf: Soziale Sicherheit wird eher als eine Angelegenheit von individueller Verantwortung und losgelöst von Machtverhältnissen gesehen, die in sozialen Identitäten und Marginalisierung verankert sind. Wir argumentieren, dass soziale Sicherheit als ein sich entwickelnder und umstrittener Politikbegriff, als „floating signifier” fungiert, dessen genaue Bedeutung von institutionellen Bedürfnissen und Akteuren geprägt wird, und fordern intersektionalere und systemischere Ansätze zur Sicherung seiner Wirksamkeit.

Calling for a New Research Agenda This essay will argue for the need to incorporate feminist and anti-racist activist writing into singlehood research; what it offers, and what we are missing out on without it. [...]far, much singlehood studies research has focused on unveiling the ‘singlism’ (DePaulo, 2007) that singles experience given the continued dominance of the (heterosexual) couple-norm in most contexts (Roseneil et al., 2020). To foreground singles’ resistances, I propose that singlehood scholars draw on Black-feminist writer bell hooks’ idea of ‘talking back’ (1989a), which entails how oppressed people talk to those in power as equals. Because silencing is central to subjugation, talking back is an act of courageous ‘conscious rebellion’ (Ibid., p. xi) through which the marginalized may reclaim their subjectivity and, as such, ‘it represents a threat’ to those ‘who wield oppressive power’ (Ibid., p. 8). Non-Reciprocal Gift-giving In their article, Kravel-Tovi and Lahad (2022) study how gift-giving practices linked with marriage and family-related occasions are experienced by singles whose lives hold no comparable ‘rites of passage for recognising and celebrating auspicious occasions in their adulthood trajectory’ (Ibid., p. 56). Stepping out of social gift-giving conventions in this manner, or killjoying, implies refusing to be properly attuned to the requirements of social systems, here gender and couple norms, and there may be a price. [...]the women engage in what Kravel-Tovi and Lahad (2022) term ‘careful complaints’ which imply a tempering of social critique, for instance, by actualising the emotional rule of ‘being happy for others’ (p. 254).

We argue that neoliberal universities implement student evaluations of teaching (SETs) as governing technologies to impose control on lecturers, resulting in their dehumanisation and objectification. Through ‘story work’ we weave together empirical quotes in existing literature, tweets, and our own experiences, to reveal that SETs employ animalistic and mechanistic dehumanisation, enhancing existing systemic inequalities such as gender and race. As a result, biased SETs induce negative affect that causes undue distress, especially among marginalised lecturers who are expected to act constructively on discriminatory or abusive ‘feedback’. By ignoring lecturers’ calls to revise or abolish the use of SETs, we uncover that universities effectively gaslight and neglect lecturers – further denying our humanity. We end by highlighting acts of solidarity and resistance that show how alternatives to SETs, rooted in feminist pedagogies and care ethics, can be grassroots mo(ve)ments towards structural change.

[...]there is extensive literature on single women’s experiences from feminist perspectives (e.g., Budgeon, 2016; Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003) and an emerging literature on singlehood and race (e.g., Council & Marsh, 2023; Moorman, 2020). [...]feminist epistemologies are also employed in singlehood research across fields of study, including work and organizations (e.g., Utoft, Vertelyte & Gao, 2024), marketing (e.g., Lai, Lim & Higgins, 2015), and culture and media (e.g., Taylor, 2011). Following this analogy, we – through crystallisation – aim to open up space for new perspectives and to shine the crystal’s rainbow light on unanswered questions and lingering critiques, which may inform alternative lines of thinking in the study of singlehood. The suffix ‘-hood’ rather concerns a state or condition, the particular circumstances ‘at a specific time that the person or thing is in, e.g. state of health, state of mind’, or ‘a degree of reference to the circumstances surrounding or affecting that state, e.g. poor living conditions’.3 Therefore, below, we use the term singlehood. Being coupled and ascending this relationship escalator ‘is widely seen and felt to be an achievement, a stabilizing status characteristic of adulthood’ and bestowing moral social recognition as a ‘good citizen’ (Roseneil et al., 2020 p. 4).

[...]teaching a course for the Gender & Diversity Studies department is very different from being ‘the gender person’ (Henderson, 2019) in a mainstream environment or practicing feminist pedagogy in a male-dominated and masculine-coded field. If social justice is what we teach, be it feminist theory or colonial legacies, we must practice it in our classrooms too. [...]fire has, for example, led to the ban on gender studies programmes by the Hungarian government in 2018 and the subsequent relocation of the Central European University from Budapest to Vienna (e.g. Pető, 2021), an attempted, but failed, ban on gender studies in Romania in 2020 (e.g. Brodeală & Epure, 2021), elected parliamentarians discrediting the work of named gender scholars as ‘pseudo-science’ in 2021 in Denmark (Danish Parliament, 2021; Ringgaard, 2021), and the growing ‘book ban’ movement in the United States, through which public and school library shelves are stripped of literature around race, sexual, and gender diversity, and other believed ‘obscene’ content (Jaeger et al., 2023; Kelly, 2023). An array of newspaper columnists, politicians (including the minister for Justice and Security), and academics (including the rector magnificus of Utrecht University) have been fanning the flames by painting ‘wokeness’ as a major threat to academic freedom (Kummeling, 2021; Yesilgöz-Zegerius, 2022).

Danmark betragtes ofte som et foregangsland, når det handler om kønsligestilling. Men dette billede kan og bør nuanceres. Overordnet set er den danske kontekst kendetegnet ved, at komplekse og ofte selvmodsigende antagelser om køn og ligestilling lever side om side. Der er i Danmark indført lovgivning, der forpligter de største offentlige og private virksomheder til at adressere kønsbalancen i de øverste ledelseslag (Erhvervsstyrelsen, 2018). Derudover accepterer danskere generelt det argument, at ligestilling og mangfoldighed er godt for bundlinjen (Eurobarometer, 2012, 2017; Rennison, 2014). Alligevel har danske virksomheder og universiteter over tid vist sig yderst både tilbageholdende og rådvilde, hvad angår konkrete initiativer med henblik på f.eks. at forbedre kønsbalancen blandt ledere eller professorer eller at skabe en mere inkluderende kultur for kvinder. Derfor undersøger afhandlingen, hvad der kan motivere organisationer til at implementere ligestillings- og diversitetstiltag.