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Global Health for All trains a critical lens on global health to share the stories that global health’s practices and logics tell about 20th and 21st century configurations of science and power. An ethnography on multiple scales, the book focuses on global health’s key epistemic and therapeutic practices like localization, measurement, triage, markets, technology, care, and regulation. Its roving approach traverses policy centers, sites of intervention, and innumerable spaces in between to consider what happens when globalized logics, circulations, and actors work to imagine, modify, and manage health. By resting in these in-between places, Global Health for All simultaneously examines global health as a coherent system and as a dynamic, unpredictable collection of modular parts.

In ethnographic research, data collected through surveys, interviews, or questionnaires in the fields of sociology and anthropology often appear in diverse forms and languages. Building a powerful database system to store and process such data, as well as making good and efficient queries, is very challenging. This paper extensively investigates modern database technology to find out what the best technologies to store these varied and heterogeneous datasets are. The study examines several database categories: traditional relational databases, the NoSQL family of key-value databases, graph databases, document databases, object-oriented databases and vector databases, crucial for the latest artificial intelligence solutions. The research proves that when it comes to field data, the NoSQL lineup is the most appropriate, especially document and graph databases. Simplicity and flexibility found in document databases and advanced ability to deal with complex queries and rich data relationships attainable with graph databases make these two types of NoSQL databases the ideal choice if a large amount of data has to be processed. Advancements in vector databases that embed custom metadata offer new possibilities for detailed analysis and retrieval. However, converting contents into vector data remains challenging, especially in regions with unique oral traditions and languages. Constructing such databases is labor-intensive and requires domain experts to define metadata and relationships, posing a significant burden for research teams with extensive data collections. To this end, this paper proposes using Generative AI (GenAI) to help in the data-transformation process, a recommendation that is supported by testing where GenAI has proven itself a strong supplement to document and graph databases. It also discusses two methods of vector database support that are currently viable, although each has drawbacks and benefits.

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty alongside the work of independistas and traditional social movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local child protection aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.  

A common theme in social science studies of algorithms is that they are profoundly opaque and function as “black boxes.” Scholars have developed several methodological approaches in order to address algorithmic opacity. Here I argue that we can explicitly enroll algorithms in ethnographic research, which can shed light on unexpected aspects of algorithmic systems—including their opacity. I delineate three meso-level strategies for algorithmic ethnography. The first, algorithmic refraction , examines the reconfigurations that take place when computational software, people, and institutions interact. The second strategy, algorithmic comparison , relies on a similarity-and-difference approach to identify the instruments’ unique features. The third strategy, algorithmic triangulation , enrolls algorithms to help gather rich qualitative data. I conclude by discussing the implications of this toolkit for the study of algorithms and future of ethnographic fieldwork.

This critical commentary confronts and explores the – so far under-recognised and under-researched – emergent global crisis of urban housing affordability and affordable housing provision. This crisis results from the fact that housing-related household expenses are rising faster than salary and wage increases in many urban centres around the world; a situation triggered by at least three global post-Global Financial Crisis megatrends of accelerated (re)urbanisation of capital and people, the provision of cheap credit and the rise of intra-society inequality. Reflecting on the recent findings of extensive comparative ethnographic research across Western countries, and analytically approaching housing affordability and affordable housing issues from a broadly understood intersection of political and economic spheres (e.g. issues of state and market, governance and regulation, policy and investment), the paper pursues four key objectives: raising awareness of the crisis, showing its extent and context-specificity but also the severe social as well as problematic spatial implications, linking current developments to key academic debates in housing studies and urban studies, and importantly, developing a research agenda that can help to redress the currently detectable ‘policy–outcome’ gap in policy making by asking fresh and urgent questions from empirical, theoretical and political viewpoints. This intervention ultimately calls for more dedicated and politicised knowledge production towards achieving affordable urban futures for all. 本文为批判性评论，探讨了目前为止未得到充分重视和研宄的一个问题—城市住房承受力和可承受住房供应方面出现的全球危机。这一危机源于全球许多城市中心与住 房相关的开支攀升速度比薪资增长快；全球金融危机之后至少三大全球趋势汇合造成的局面： 资本和人力加速（再度）城市化、低息贷款的发放和社会内部不平等的上升。本文反思了西方 国家广泛开展的比较民族志研宄的近期发现，并从宽泛理解的政治和经济领域交叉意义上分析 了住房承受力和可承受住房问题（例如国家和市场、治理和监管、政策和投资等问题）。文章 希望达到以下四个关键目的：提高对危机的认识；展示危机的程度及其语境特殊性，同时也展 示严重的、成问题的社会空间意义；将当前的发展与住房研宄和城市研宄领域的关键学术争论 联系起来；以及很重要的一点—制定研宄日程表，以求通过从实证、理论和政治视角提出新颖而急迫的问题，帮助重新应对政 策制定中当前可探知的“政策- 结果”缺口。本文最终呼吁为实现所有人可承受的未来城市生活而开展更专注、更具政治意识 的知识生产。

This article explores how time interacts forcefully with the experience of living within toxic spaces. Through ethnographic research and interviews with residents of a contaminated town in Louisiana, the article unpacks the uncertain temporalities of industrial pollution and potential means of resistance. Putting Mbembe's (2003) postcolonial treatise on necropolitics in conversation with Nixon's (2011) work on slow violence, the article examines the racialized, uneven, and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution in a former plantation landscape. By exploring the necropolitics of place, the article reveals how unjust exposure to toxic chemicals creates contemporary \"death-worlds\" that are experienced in temporally uncertain and constricting ways. The oppressive nature of uncertain temporality makes the material assemblages of petrochemical infrastructure daily environmental concerns. Yet by focusing on the lived experience of communities inhabiting this toxic geography, the article notes how witnessing gradual changes to the local environment has become a barometer for perceiving chronic pollution. The idea of \"slow observation\" is posited as a useful counterpoint to slow violence and the permanent wounding of toxic pollution. Slow observation is an important aspect of living with sustained environmental brutality and offers a potential means of political resistance and doing undone environmental justice.

The randomized control trial and pre/post research designs are commonly used in applied research and provide common standards for mediation evaluation research. These approaches have many benefits, particularly for evaluating whether mediation as an experimental intervention works or not. Scholars and practitioners, however, want to know not only whether mediation can work as expected but also how it works in a range of real-world contexts over time. In these contexts, ideal experimental conditions are less likely to occur. Challenges include such circumstances as the following: the number of cases suitable for statistical comparison is insufficient; researchers lack control over how mediation is implemented; researchers lack clear, objective variables to measure; and the variability of mediation outcomes when studied over time makes it difficult to draw conclusions about them. My research has involved each of these challenges, and I have used ethnographic research as a way to evaluate mediation in these contexts. In this article, I explain ethnographic methods and present two studies as examples of mediation evaluation research that began with a standard program evaluation design, and then incorporated ethnography to allow more complete data collection and analysis. My purpose here is not to argue that experimental methods in mediation evaluation research should be displaced but rather to demonstrate how ethnographic methods can be used when the conditions necessary for standard evaluation cannot be met. The two studies used as examples are from an elder mediation study in Ghana and a family court mediation study in the United States.

Stadt-Land-Bezüge haben in der Jugendforschung eine lange Tradition. Ein Themenfeld ist in diesem Zusammenhang in der jüngeren Vergangenheit aber kaum untersucht worden: die Tradierung und Modifizierung von Brauchformen der ländlichen Jugend. Durch ein Schlüsselerlebnis sind wir in unserer Forschungsgruppe eher zufällig auf ein Ereignis aufmerksam geworden, das im Nachhinein als ‚Geburtsstunde‘ unserer gezielten soziologisch-ethnographischen Suche nach Handlungsmustern und Veranstaltungsformen angesehen werden kann, denen in ländlichen Regionen lebende Jugendliche Brauchcharakter zuschreiben. An zwei Fallbeispielen soll gezeigt werden, in welchen konzeptionellen Schritten und mit welchen Zugangs-, Erhebungs- und Interpretationsverfahren tradierte und neue Brauchformen als Ressource und Aktionsfeld jugendlicher Expressivität und Gruppenbildung erkundet und erklärt werden können. Die Beispiele sind so gewählt, dass sie einerseits die Bandbreite und das Spannungsverhältnis jugendkultureller Praxisfelder und Vergesellung sichtbar werden lassen und andererseits die Fruchtbarkeit ethnographischer Forschung in höchst divergenten ruralen und brauchkulturellen Handlungsfeldern verdeutlichen. Den Abschluss bildet der Versuch einer kategorialen Klassifikation von jugendlichen Brauchkulturen, auf die wir in unseren Studien im Zeitraum von etwa zwei Jahrzehnten gestoßen sind.

With evidence comprising three years of ethnographic research in child support courts and 125 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers, the author shows how criminal justice and child support provisions work in tandem to create complicated entanglements for fathers. She develops the concept of incarcerated fatherhood—a matrix of laws, policies, and institutional practices that shape formerly incarcerated men’s relationship to parenting. On the one hand, she analyzes the debt of imprisonment, or the material costs of paternal incarceration; on the other, she examines the imprisonment of debt, or the punitive costs of child support debt. She then brings these two entanglements together to analyze their effects on men’s lives as fathers. Instead of “piling up” in men’s lives, these entanglements work in circular ways to form feedback loops of disadvantage that create serious obstacles for men as parents and complicate precisely those relationships proven essential for reintegration after prison: familial relations of care, reciprocity, and interdependence.