Researcher Safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve. Here, we advance this question in a contemporary research environment where the regulatory logics of occupational safety and health (OSH) encroach increasingly on anthropological practice through institutional research governance. We draw on our research into workplace OSH in the construction, health care, and logistics sectors—a research field dominated by behavioral theories that support the preventative logics of OSH regulation. Taking an autoethnographic approach, we explore how researching in potentially dangerous environments requires ethnographers to learn how to be safe through others’ situated safety logics and through those of researcher safety. It is, we argue, through these engagements with the improvisatory ways that workers generally, and researchers specifically, engage with safety, that another set of inconsistencies between OSH preventative logics and our anthropological understanding of how ethnographic knowing emerges become visible

Researcher safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve. Here, we advance this question in a contemporary research environment where the regulatory logics of occupational safety and health (OSH) encroach increasingly on anthropological practice through institutional research governance. We draw on our research into workplace OSH in the construction, healthcare, and logistics sectors – a research field dominated by behavioural theories that support the preventative logics of OSH regulation. Taking an autoethnographic approach, we explore how researching in potentially dangerous environments requires ethnographers to learn how to be safe through others’ situated safety logics and through those of researcher safety. It is, we argue, through these engagements with the improvisory ways that workers generally, and researchers specifically, engage with safety, that another set of inconsistencies between OSH preventative logics and our anthropological understanding of how ethnographic knowing emerges become visible

Other people’s homes as sites of uncertainty: ways of knowing and being safe

The home visit—when professionals work in service users' homes—is a growing phenomenon. It changes the configuration of home—both for home living and for those who go to work in other people's homes. In this paper we advance recent discussions of the emotional and political geographies of home through a focus on the home visit worker and her or his experience of other people's homes as sites of uncertainty. For such workers the home visit is played out as an interface between the private and intimate and the regulatory occupational safety and health frameworks of policy and corporate interests. It disrupts existing academic definitions of home and defines the regulatory interests of institutions. An examination of the home visit, we propose, has implications for theories of home and the search for certainties that is embedded in regulatory guidelines

Interdiszciplináris programok a vizuális kutatásban: A vizuális antropológia újragondolása

Ebben a cikkben a vizuális kutatási módszerek legújabb szakirodalmát tekintem át, mégpedig két kérdés tisztázása céljából. Először is megvizsgálom, hogy a legújabb interdiszciplináris kölcsönhatások milyen képet alakítottak ki a vizuális kutatás alapító tudományáról és a reprezentációról a vizuális kutatásban, elsősorban a vizuális antropológiára (és kisebb mértékben a vizuális szociológiára) koncentrálva. Másodszor pedig kritikus szemmel a szaktudományaikból vizuális módszereket átemelő, illetve azok számára ilyen módszereket bevezető elméleti tudományok közös céljait és érdeklődési területeit. Ha elmélyedünk a vizuális kutatás „új keletű” szakirodalmában, világossá válik, hogy a különböző szaktudományokban dolgozó mai vizuális kutatóknak vannak közös érdeklődési területeik: ilyen a reflexivitás (reflexivity), az együttműködés, az etika, valamint a tartalom, a társadalmi kontextus és a képmások (images) anyagszerűsége közötti kapcsolat. Érvelni szeretnék a vizuális kutatómunka intenzívebben együttműködő interdiszciplináris megközelítése mellett, amelyben az egyes szaktudományok anélkül tanulhatnak egymástól, hogy narratív sallangokkal kellene bizonygatniuk saját tudományáguknak a többiekkel szembeni felsőbbségét

Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life

Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, non-representational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the 'media-saturated' household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life. © The Author(s) 2013

Being at home with privacy : privacy and mundane intimacy through same-sex locative media practices

Smartphones have ushered in new forms of locative media through the overlay of global positioning system digital media onto physical places. Whereas mobile communication research has focused on corporate, hierarchical, or government surveillance, emerging studies examine the ways locative media practices relate to privacy and surveillance in everyday, intimate contexts. Studies of same-sex forms of intimacy in and through locative media practices have largely attended to the growth and use of male hook-up apps, but have overlooked same-sex female relationships. Beyond hook-up apps, mundane forms of intimacy in same-sex relationships have also received scant attention. This article draws from a broader ethnographic study in Australia over three years exploring the use (and non-use) of locative media in households as part of their management of privacy, connection, and intimacy with family and friends. By moving the discussion about intimacy beyond hook-up apps, this article focuses on locative media practices of use and non-use by female same-sex couples

Experiencing the Future Car: Anticipatory UX as a Social and Digital Phenomenon

In order to be innovative and competitive, the automotive industry seeks to understand how to attract new customers, even before they have experienced the product. User Experience (UX) research often provides insights into situated uses of products, and reflections after their use, however tells us little about how products and services are experienced before use. We propose anticipation theory as a way to understand how shared experiences between people in an online discussion forum relate to UX of cars before they are actually experienced in real-life. We took an ethnographic approach to analyse the activities of members of a self-organised web-based discussion forum for Tesla car enthusiasts, to understand how product anticipation emerges in a digital-material setting. Our study identifies how anticipatory experiences create UX of car ownership which evolves through members’ engagement in a self-organised online community enabled through the digitalisation and connectivity of the car, and how such car experiences generate new forms of digital anticipation of the car. We conclude that the shift towards digitalisation of cars and subscription services creates a need for more interdisciplinary research into spatial and temporal aspects, where socially shared anticipatory experiences are increasingly important for the overall UX

Everyday mundane repair : banknotes and the material entanglements of improvisation and innovation

This article seeks to contribute to the conceptualization of everyday repair with a focus on banknotes, a ubiquitous and mundane technology in constant need of maintenance and repair. Through a design anthropology approach, we examine how practices of repairing banknotes are entangled with discourses of innovation that manifest in everyday life. This is complemented with a short ethnographic account of how damage, care and repair of banknotes in Chile are articulated through mundane everyday life activities

EVERYDAY AUTOMATION : Setting a research agenda

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, Deborah Lupton, Minna Ruckenstein.This chapter discusses the Sarah Pink discusses how ethics and trust in AI and ADM have become bound up in industry and government frameworks which treat them as commodities which can be extracted from faceless publics and invested in machines. The second reason that automated technologies receive high levels of publicity or promotion is when they have saved, or are predicted to save, lives: for instance, through accident prevention, medical and pharmaceutical interventions or in humanitarian domains. In contrast, experiences and processes of automation as part of quotidian routines in our everyday lives in our homes, transport, at work and in education have slipped under the radar of much popular and academic attention. The messiness of the ADM and AI fields might be seen as a problem, and one way forward involves engaging in a cross-disciplinary mapping of ADM and AI definitions to produce taxonomies and classifications for a shared vocabulary.Peer reviewe

Mundane data: The routines, contingencies and accomplishments of digital living

This article develops and mobilises the concept of ‘mundane data’ as an analytical entry point for understanding Big Data. We call for in-depth investigation of the human experiences, routines, improvisations and accomplishments which implicate digital data in the flow of the everyday. We demonstrate the value of this approach through a discussion of our ethnographic research with self-tracking cycling commuters. We argue that such investigations are crucial in informing our understandings of how digital data become meaningful in mundane contexts of everyday life for two reasons: first because there is a gap in our understanding of the contingencies and specificities through which big digital data sets are produced, and second because designers and policy makers often seek to make interventions for change in everyday contexts through the presentation of mundane data to consumers but with little understanding of how people produce, experience and engage with these data