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1. Reversed Ethnography in the Reception of the Korean Wave

Author:
Hyeri Jung
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:
International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:
This paper unravels dynamic interactions between Korean popular culture and its fans in the United States, focusing on how cultural hybridity of the Korean Wave un/consciously facilitates soft power, and what sociocultural implications it might yield in global/international contexts. Employing various theoretical frameworks of globalization, critical/cultural media studies, hybridity, soft power, and fan studies, I take a qualitative methodological approach of what I call a reversed media ethnography: Examining the contraflow of Korean media culture on U.S. fans. I employ various qualitative and interpretive techniques including grounded theory to analyze the rich corpus of data I collected over a period of two years to examine the nature of transcultural media and fans of the Korean Wave in the United States. Overall, the findings of this paper suggest that the complex layers of hybridity embedded in Korean popular culture creates complicated webs of transculturality. The Korean Wave exemplifies strategically well-balanced cultural hybridity that arouses a certain feeling of affinity: Emotional proximity. Korean popular culture evokes continuous negotiations of identities and generates nonthreatening wholesome content that comfortably appeals to American fans with various ethnic, racial, social, and cultural backgrounds. The notion of uriness (we-ness in English), collective unity and solidarity, embedded in Korean popular culture and its fandom culture works as one of the multifaceted soft power in the eyes of American fans that leads to an alternative post-Western soft power. This study contends that it is not the so-called hybridized Korean popular culture per se that makes it transcultural, and global to some extent, but the often under-recognized vital agents in the global sphere: Legions of fans.
Topic:
Culture, Soft Power, Ethnography, and Music
Political Geography:
Asia, South Korea, North America, and United States of America

2. Ethnography of Sanitation in Small Towns: A Study of Angul and Dhenkanal, Odisha

Author:
Ranjita Mohanty and Anju Dwivedi
Publication Date:
09-2018
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
In the current sanitation policy discourse, cultural norms of purity and pollution are considered as major obstacles to toilet behaviour leading emphasis on behavioural change to orient people to use toilets. This study conducted in 21 slums in Angul and Dhenkanal, two small towns in Odisha, explores the sociocultural norms, behaviour and practices that influence sanitation in small towns. The study shows that culture doesn’t operate in isolation. Cultural interacts with multiple factors such as physical space in urban areas, resources people have to invest in toilet, essential infrastructure such as water, and cost effective technology that people can access. Culture influences these aspects of sanitation as well as gets influenced by them. The study highlights that people adapt in various degrees to their physical environment, thus compromising on cultural norms and beliefs but there are certain non-negotiable norms that are not compromised. This calls for decoding the cultural determinants of sanitation. The study suggest that for effective governance of sanitation, policies need to take the above mentioned factors into consideration, and create scope for understanding how culture works in a particular context and influences sanitation behaviour, choices, and practices of the poor. The study was conducted by the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, under the Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI) Project on Urban Sanitation, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Topic:
Social Policy, Ethnography, Urban, Sanitation, and Pollution
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

3. A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools, by Nicole Nguyen​

Author:
Harry Oppenheimer and Nicole Nguyen
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
Nicole Nguyen’s A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools presents an ethnography of Milton High School (a pseudonym), which, when presented with dwindling resources, a reputation for disciplinary issues, and poor marks, made a Faustian bargain with the national security apparatus. The book was meticulously researched, with rich detail on social and environmental forces at play in its educational context. However, the author’s own political and normative biases will leave many readers frustrated that the book’s presentation does not live up to its content.
Topic:
Security, Education, Homeland Security, Book Review, and Ethnography
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

4. The Urban Night as a “Potential Space”? Hypotheses from Dakar | La nuit urbaine, un « espace potentiel » ? Hypothèses dakaroises

Author:
Tomas Fouquet
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Cultures & Conflits
Institution:
Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:
Drawing on a long ethnographic study in Dakar among young women who regularly frequent bars and nightclubs, this article argues for the need to consider the urban night as a time-space that can give rise to a feeling that “anything is possible”. The city at night can then be seen primarily as a place for social reconfigurations and cultural experiments. On this empirical basis, a more theoretical issue is addressed: what could be the heuristic nature of the concept of “potential space” (D. W. Winnicott) for the study of urban night? To advance these hypotheses, the question of creativity is regarded as a key issue both in Winnicott’s conceptualization of the “potential space” and concerning the way the young women I met engage with “Dakar by night”.
Topic:
Women, Space, Anthropology, and Ethnography
Political Geography:
Africa, Senegal, and Dakar

5. Cultural Policing: Police and Minorities in Berlin | Le policier et le culturel. Police et minorités à Berlin

Author:
Jérémie Gauthier
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Cultures & Conflits
Institution:
Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin police precincts, this article focuses on the so-called “intercultural prevention” policy implemented in Berlin since the early 2000s. The author analyzes how police work is informed by a culturalist framework, particularly regarding Muslim communities. The article shows how the link between prevention strategies and the culturalist approach to the treatment of minorities has broadened the police mandate, making police work closer to social work. Yet, this culturalist framework has ambivalent effects: on the one hand, it limits the effects of individual stereotyping during police interventions; on the other hand, it produces forms of reification of groups labeled as “cultural minorities.”
Topic:
Sociology, Minorities, Ethnography, and Police
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Germany

6. Ethnographying State Violence: Narratives and Experiences of Victims of the “War on Drugs” in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico | Ethnographier la violence d’État : récits et expériences des victimes de la lutte contre le narcotrafic à Ciudad Juárez, Mexique

Author:
Chiara Calzolaio
Publication Date:
09-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Cultures & Conflits
Institution:
Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:
With over ten thousand victims, the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez was one of the most violent theatres of the war against drug trafficking, which was initiated by the former Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, during his 2006-2012 mandate. This article draws parallels between, on the one hand, the manner through which the government problematized the rise in homicides and, on the other hand, the experiences of some of the victims of violence inflicted by law enforcement agencies. Drawing from ethnographic material collected between 2008 and 2011, the practices of state violence implemented during the last military operation are approached here through the experiences and narratives of victims.
Topic:
War on Drugs, State Violence, Ethnography, and Violence
Political Geography:
Central America, Mexico, and Ciudad Juarez

7. Exposition industrielle, production de réseaux et construction d’imaginaires : la Foire internationale du Müsiad et les représentations de l’Etat turc (Industrial Exhibition, Network Production and Construction of Imaginaries : the International Müsiad Fair and Representations of the Turkish State )

Author:
Dilek Yankaya
Publication Date:
11-2015
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Müsiad International Fair held in Istanbul in 2014 aroused great public interest due to the strong presence of political elites as well as to the mobilization of a large network of institutions, firms and media partners. International exhibitions are relevant fields to explore the formation of trade circuits and the creation of sociabilities, as well as to question the political and international issues central to the construction of trade networks and markets. This event appears as the representation of the Turkish state as it is formed under the AKP power. We witness a double trend of reconfiguration and of internationalization of the state constituting processes through the phenomena of increased interactions between private enterprise and public action on one side and the shrinkage of patronage networks on the other. Participating to this event therefore becomes a question of legitimization and delegitimization for private actors regarding these networks of power, the production of which is based on the presentation of economic and industrial productions and goes together with the creation of Imaginaries. The ethnographic study of the fair shows how industrial, cultural and symbolic representations bring about the production of two types of Imaginary, one related to the reinvention of the idea of the ummah across merchant networks and the other referring to the supremacy of Turkey as the carrier of this project.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Sociology, Political Science, Networks, State, and Ethnography
Political Geography:
Europe, Turkey, Asia, and Istanbul

8. When the ‘desperates’ become ‘enraged’: an ethnographic study of Syrian Mudjahidin (2012-2014) | Quand les « malheureux » deviennent des « enragés » : ethnographie de moudjahidines syriens (2012-2014)

Author:
Romain Huët
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Cultures & Conflits
Institution:
Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:
This article presents the findings of a sixty-days ethnographic research in a group of Free Syrian Army’s fighters in Aleppo and its region (July 2012, January 2013) and in a group of Mujahedeen affiliated with the Islamic Front in the Hama region (May 2014, September 2014). Literally embedded in these brigades, our research allowed us to describe "the ordinary life" of these combatants who were engaged into the battle for more than three years. Adopting ethnographical tools (interviews, observations), this article discusses how fighters explain the legitimacy of their engagement and the processes of radicalization.
Topic:
Sociology, Arab Spring, Ethnography, Armed Conflict, and Free Syrian Army
Political Geography:
Middle East and Syria