Search Results (27)

This study explores the governance and implementation of local labor market programs (LLMPs) in Swedish municipalities, analyzing the tension between national mandates and local policy practices. Drawing on institutional ethnography (IE), intersectionality, and emotional labor theories, we examine interviews with politicians and managers from eight municipalities. Politicians frame LLMPs as budget-driven initiatives, depoliticizing local labor market issues to comply with national policies like the January Agreement. This approach prioritizes efficiency, workfare models, and quick labor market entry, often sidelining individualized support. In contrast, managers describe their role as navigating policy constraints while addressing diverse local needs. They emphasize the challenges of aligning “one-size-fits-all” activation strategies with the realities of their participants, advocating for flexibility and adaptation within national frameworks. These contrasting perspectives reveal how LLMPs, although locally implemented, are shaped by textually mediated national policies, which influence local governance practices. Politicians focus on the need to meet national objectives, while managers struggle to reconcile these goals with participant-centered approaches. This study contributes to the understanding of how LLMPs operate within a governance framework that prioritizes efficiency over holistic support, highlighting the limitations of workfare-oriented policies and their implications for labor market integration. Full article

Aiming to better understand the relationship between youth activism and institutional politics, this article analyzes young climate activists’ interactions with political parties and how they shape the dynamics of the School Strike for Climate. Through a multi-sited ethnography in Portugal’s two major cities, we examined the participation experiences of young climate strikers from both chapters of the movement, revealing the contingent and complex development of their relationships with party politics, which ultimately influences the dynamics of Portuguese youth climate activism. The ethnographic data uncovered ambivalent and tensional relationship patterns with political parties in the two local groups. While closeness and collaboration with actors linked to institutional politics aimed at strengthening the climate movement’s broader political representation, it also prompted resistance, leading to internal conflicts within the movement. Our findings highlight differing political strategies and ideological stands among local groups, as well as tensions and ambivalences in the interactions with political parties. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges of sustaining the School Strike for Climate movement over time and the ways in which activist movements negotiate political affiliations and internal cohesion. Full article

The field of youth studies has traditionally promoted participatory methods, assuming that young people prefer creativity over standard methods like traditional ethnography or one-to-one interviews. However, my experience in Medellín, Colombia, reveals complications. While youth with strong ties to civil society and activism found comfort in participatory methods, youth who were out of school or in conflict with the law felt alienated by formalized processes and institutional spaces. Too often, participatory techniques homogenize youth perspectives, taking the views of socially engaged youth as representative of all youth. Researchers should instead acknowledge diverse youth experiences and employ different methods for different youth groups. Full article

Recent research underscores the significance of data-led and collaborative reflection in enhancing teaching practices and professional development of teachers. While video-based reflections have been extensively studied, the potential of corpus-based methods remains underexplored. We address this gap in two ways. Firstly, we describe a research and development project in which we employed a corpus linguistic tool to analyse and reflect on our own lectures, with the ulterior aim of promoting a corpus-based reflective practice (CBRP) model that would help other teachers do the same. Secondly, we introduce collaborative micro auto-ethnography (CMAE) to illustrate how our model can facilitate the noticing of different aspects of teacher talk and lead to, what we call, snowball reflections (i.e., a sequence of reflective talk that extends a topic and spreads from one participant to the next). Our approach shows that corpus analysis, coupled with collaborative reflections, has the potential to not only enhance language use but also stimulate broader and deeper pedagogical discussions on and insights into teaching styles and student engagement, going beyond analyses of single words and lexico-grammatical patterns in teacher talk. We argue that there should be institutional support for developing new corpus-based professional development initiatives and that researchers can benefit from using ethnographic data together with detailed analyses of interactions. Full article

The Inclusive Early Childhood Service System (IECSS) project is a longitudinal institutional ethnography that studies disability services in early childhood, and the interactions between these services and other systems, from the standpoint of families. In this paper, we examine speech-language services as part of a system of services and a site of participation for disabled children. We use longitudinal data from annual interviews with 117 informants to map Speech and Language services over the first six years of children’s lives. We report that speech and language pathology (SLP) as a professional discourse holds cultural significance and influences the organization of disabled children and their families. The analysis of the data illustrates the pervasiveness, organizational structure, and governance of speech and language pathology (SLP) in early childhood, leading to professional discourses of childhood and disability in early intervention, preschool, and school-based services which reinforce individualized pathology as the dominant way of understanding development. We discuss how the professional practices of SLP-related services could help to disrupt disabling constructs of childhood development and colonial practices in early childhood disability services. We emphasize how speech and language development emerges in relationship with individuals and socio-political contexts. We suggest possibilities for SLP to operate within community contexts where speech and language services contribute to reducing family workload, increasing the participation of all children, and disrupting ableism in practice. Full article

This paper draws on a five-component, large-scale, longitudinal and cross-phase mathematics curriculum implementation study in England from the vantage point of an insider to overlapping school, policy and edu-business actor communities. It probed those actors’ emergent co-interpretation of, and response to, a new mathematics curriculum in England, analysing the ways in which edu-businesses, teachers and learners mediate mathematics curriculum policy documents through their own interpretations and schema. The combination of common ‘classroom-close’ research tools supported synergies of cross-phase and longitudinal lenses. The paper contributes an enhanced conceptualisation of inter-actor influence, a theorisation of learner as policy actor, and an understanding of constraints on mathematics policy-driven change at teacher and learner levels, including challenges to communication of intended curriculum policy, across phases of schooling. The approach appears fruitful for analysis of the experience and mediation of mathematics curriculum policy by key policy actors. Full article

Against the gloomy forecast of “The Vanishing Diaspora”, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These “Jewish Revival” and “Jewish Renewal” projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations, the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed “lifestyle Judaism”. This range between institutionalized revival movements and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space of creative agency. Indeed, the trope of a “Jewish Renaissance” has become both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for social action. This article explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post-secular world in two different sociopolitical contexts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, we interrogate the relations between “diaspora” and “homeland” by analyzing two case studies: the Jewish revival movement in Budapest, Hungary, and the Jewish renewal initiatives in Israel. While the first instantiates a diasporic movement anchored in a post-denominational and post-secular attempt to reclaim Jewish tradition for a new generation of Jew-llennials (Millennial Jews), the second group operates against the Orthodox hegemony of the institutional Rabbinate by revisiting religious ritual and textual study. By proposing new cultural repertoires, these movements highlight the dialectic exchange between center and periphery. The ethnography of religious revival decenters the Israeli Orthodoxy as “the homeland” and positions the diaspora at the core of a network of cultural creativity and renewal, while remaining in constant dialog with Israel and other diasporic communities. Full article

Teacher educators struggle to balance heavy teaching loads, research, writing, and institutional service. This qualitative study uses institutional ethnography to question how college leadership understand the significance of academic scholarship in the professional lives of college-based teacher educators in Israel. Data from interviews with eight college position holders shed light on the working lives of college-based teacher educators and how they are positioned as researcher-writers in an institution where scholarship expectations are blurry. Findings reveal three themes: the importance of academic activity for institutional prosperity, the difficulties in academic scholarship experienced by teacher educators, and the support the institution provides to encourage and maintain academic activity. The discussion contemplates the tensions between institutional and individual teacher educator advancement. The complexity of the institutional structure deserves attention to achieve institutional aims and attend to individual faculty’s professional needs and desires. The implications of this study are significant for leadership in teacher education and higher education around the world, prompting leaders to rethink ways of supporting faculty involved in research and writing alongside teaching and additional roles. Balancing conflicting roles, providing clear expectations, and maintaining an ongoing dialogue between teacher educators and leadership regarding professional development needs can lead to institutional prosperity alongside individual professional advancement. Full article

We used social network analysis (SNA) to identify the types of water-related conflicts between the users and members of the institutional arena of the Rio Mayo Irrigation District (RMID) within the ancestral territory of the Yoreme Mayo indigenous group in Sonora, northeastern Mexico. We combined ethnography with an analysis and visualization of bimodal networks that consisted of 118 users and their connections to the institutional arena’s 30 identified social actors who influence water management. Using a clustering algorithm, we identified four types of conflicts: (1) disputes between small- and large-scale farmers over (i) irrigation water and (ii) payments for water rights and land rental; (2) the struggle by large-scale farmers against the upper level of the water hierarchy, to obtain more water; (3) struggles by rural indigenous women against water providers, to conserve indigenous vernacular systems of managing water for domestic use; and (4) a “conflict” that turned out to be merely a structural remnant of the algorithm. We conclude that land- and water-grabbing in the RMID mainly affect indigenous small-scale farmers and that the combination of SNA and a clustering algorithm can identify the types of natural resource-related conflicts that might go undetected by other methodologies. However, SNA should in some cases be accompanied by a qualitative methodology. Full article

Community restaurants linked to government food and nutritional security programs are establishments created to offer meals to the population in socially vulnerable situations. The objective was to identify the methods, approaches, criteria, and indicators used to evaluate restaurants linked to government food and nutrition security programs. A scoping review based on the Joanna Briggs Institute’s methodology and the international guide’s recommendations of preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses extension for scoping reviews was conducted. Medline databases via PubMed, Lilacs, Scopus, Cochrane, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect were used. Primary observational studies, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, ethnographies, documentary studies, and case studies were included, with a quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed approach. A total of 2498 studies were identified. After taking out 180 duplicated articles, another 2202 articles were excluded by the title. Among the 71 studies selected for complete reading, 10 did not correlate with the research objective, and 12 were included after analyzing the references, totaling 73 included studies. In this review, evaluative approaches were mapped and systematized on the menu, food consumption, food health, food security and/or insecurity, nutritional education, and human right to adequate food; users’ profile and health, implantation, history, perceptions, senses, and meanings; handlers/workers; hygienic–sanitary quality; evaluation and monitoring; physical–functional planning, and rest–intake. The presented data provide elements that can be adapted in future evaluations and describe the panorama of academic production in this area. Full article

Foreign students in China may have difficulty adjusting to Chinese culture and may experience mental health problems related to acculturation, interpersonal issues, and social communication within the context of campus life. Therefore, this study attempts to apply a collaborative ethnography approach to explore the adjustment to Chinese culture and mental health issues among foreign students on Chinese campuses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We spent 16 months exploring the feelings and perceptions of 82 foreign international undergraduate students at six Chinese higher education institutions regarding their adjustment to Chinese culture and gathered their suggestions about how to address the mental health issues experienced by foreign learners in China. The results show that international students tend to have a limited understanding of Chinese culture and rely on very few channels for information—in particular, the Internet, teachers’ lectures, and daily life—which can easily result in mental health problems and thoughts of marginalization. In addition, the results showed that international students’ mental health problems are subjectively positively correlated with their own personality, cultural intelligence, and cultural identification ability and objectively related to their cultural distance and all aspects of the educational work of international students. It is suggested that Chinese higher education institutions should strengthen their attention to the mental health of international students in China and promote international students’ cross-cultural adaptation abilities and understanding of Chinese culture. Full article

Swiss health and social care system is complex and is based on universal coverage. However, discontinuity in health and social path and repeated access to emergency units are symptoms of inequity. The aim of this paper is to highlight the interactions between vulnerable patients with socio-sanitary actors to propose some innovative solutions to promote social justice. A six-month ethnography of 15 vulnerable patients’ health and social transitions in the region of Ticino Canton in Switzerland gives new insight into conflict situations in assistance relationships, where reciprocal stereotyping between professionals and patients undermines continuity of care. The cultural dimension of health and social institutions is identified in the problem-solving approach which is legitimized as the only one for dealing with complex situations. The analysis shows how clinical vulnerability relates strongly to an unmanaged so-called liminality phase. Culture is an invisible dimension in care, but its effects on equity are major. Two possible interventions are discussed, which are culturally informed reorganization of the care network and collaboration with a sociosanitary cultural mediator. Full article

Despite the volume and breadth of health literacy research related to children, children’s involvement in that research is rare. Research with children is challenging, but the principles of involvement and engagement underpin all health promotion work, including health literacy. This commentary reflects on the process of setting up a Children’s Advisory Group to consult on an institutional ethnography study of health literacy work from children’s standpoint. The Children’s Advisory Group contributed feedback on the study ethics and design and piloted methods for rapport-building and data collection, including livestreamed draw-and-describe and modified Interview to the Double. Consulting with the Children’s Advisory Group highlighted the importance of listening to children and recognizing and valuing children’s imaginative contributions to methods for involving children in health literacy research. Insights from this commentary can be used to foreground equity-focused approaches to future research and practice with children in the field of health literacy. Full article

This article explores arts, cultural and community engagement (ACCE) in the context of enduring austerity in England. Working with a methodically crafted synthesis of theoretical perspectives drawn from (1) the critical political economy (CPE) tradition, (2) the sociology of cultural production, (3) cultural studies and critical strands of community development scholarship, and (4) pertinent discourses on the creative economy and place-based development, the article reviews the political, economic and institutional ecosystem within which a bottom-up approach to ACCE operates. Making use of ethnography for data-gathering, the article explores how three carefully selected case studies respond to the demands and pressures generated by, and associated with, corporate interest and top-down, policy-driven subsidy—including how such responses shape and position the work of the case studies in the contemporary creative economy and local place-based development. The article argues that ACCE contributes meaningfully to the development of self-governance and organic growth through egalitarian cross-sectoral alliances and cultural and social entrepreneurship. However, this happens only if the said ecosystem genuinely supports equality and social justice. Where such support is non-existent, established hierarchies perpetuate domination and exploitation. This stifles wider creative and cultural engagement on the terms of communities. Full article

Critical health literacy enables individuals to use cognitive and social resources for informed action on the wider determinants of health. Promoting critical health literacy early in the life-course may contribute to improved health outcomes in the long term, but children’s opportunities to develop critical health literacy are limited and tend to be school-based. This study applies a settings-based approach to analyse the potential of public libraries in England to be supportive environments for children’s development of critical health literacy. The study adopted institutional ethnography as a framework to explore the public library as an everyday setting for children. A children’s advisory group informed the study design. Thirteen children and 19 public library staff and community stakeholders were interviewed. The study results indicated that the public library was not seen by children, staff, or community stakeholders as a setting for health. Its policies and structure purport to develop health literacy, but the political nature of critical health literacy was seen as outside its remit. A supersetting approach in which children’s everyday settings work together is proposed and a conceptual model of the public library role is presented. Full article