Search results for "ethnography."

Turning experience into expertise : technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy

2017

This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects’ emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants’ way of ‘knowing themselves’. They require the service users to reframe thei…

‘The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy

2018

Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between domi…

Institutional ethnography as a feminist approach for social work research

2019

The aim of this chapter is to introduce Institutional Ethnography (IE) as a valuable feminist approach for social work research. It first describes how IE found its way through the women’s studies to the academic arenas in Finland, and how it has influenced author’s own research. The second part focusses on social work research, where IE has been used to investigate how the welfare service system transforms the experiences and everyday world of its service users into generalised categorisations and definitions. However, in its focus on institutions and social relations of ruling instead of individuals, IE allows seeing the professionals embedded in the same institutional relations and pract…

Escultores del sonido: prácticas musicales creativas como elemento de transformación social

2020

El principal objetivo de esta investigación es mostrar de qué manera los usos de la tecnología planteados por músicos sin formación académica (“no músicos”), ofrecen un nuevo marco para la transformación social a través de sus prácticas musicales creativas. Como metodología de trabajo se utilizó la investigación etnográfica y la muestra se conformó a través de trece participantes con perfiles profesionales y trayectorias vitales de gran diversidad, con un patrón de coincidencia común: no tener formación musical académica (conservatorio). Como instrumentos y técnicas se emplearon las propias de esta metodología: las entrevistas individuales y grupales, el análisis documental de plataformas d…

Hierarchies of knowledge, incommensurabilities and silences in South African ECD policy: Whose knowledge counts?

2017

AbstractPolicy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC’s renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating ‘a better life for all’ as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family and society in National Curriculum Framework (NCF) as it relates to children’s everyday contexts. I throw light on how the curriculum’s discourses relate to the diverse South African settings, child rearing practices and world-views, and how they interact with normative discourses of South African policy and global early childhood frameworks. The NCF…

Revealing colonial power relations in early childhood policy making: An autoethnographic story on selective evidence

2021

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes uncertainty, instability and glaring inequality that requires urgent global policy decisions. Historically, bureaucrats regard uncertainty as the enemy and look for tested solutions (Stevens, 2011). In contrast, Fielding & Moss (2010) acknowledge an uncertain future and encourage shifting policy making towards the search for possibilities instead of replicating singular solutions. Escobar (2020) advocates for pluriversal politics, with many possibilities created through collective decision-making by autonomous interlinked networks. In this paper, I combine autoethnography with policy analysis drawing on my own experience in South African early childhood pol…

Language ideologies about learning historical minority languages : Hungarian in Romania and Swedish in Finland

2015

Sosiaalisen elämän kehykset : kampus-ohjelman opiskelijoiden sosiaalinen asema tuetussa aikuisopiskelussa ja vapaa-ajalla

2012

Mourning Missing Migrants: Ambiguous Loss and the Grief of Strangers

2019

While the term missing refers to various instances and practices, we focus on the bodies of deceased migrants that remain unidentified, and on the inability of families to mourn someone when there is no body to grieve for. We deploy some ethnographic fragments of how Italian communities sometimes mourn those who are buried without a name and we describe the many problems of mourning someone whose fate is unknown through a discussion of the notion of ‘ambiguous loss’. Our contribution articulates some of the politics around deaths in migration by considering how missing migrants and their bodies are mourned in multiplicity. peerReviewed

Negotiating female judoka identities in Greece : A Foucauldian discourse analysis

2015

Abstract Objectives The objectives of this paper are to trace the discourses through which female Greek judokas articulate their sporting experiences and to explore how they construct their identities through the negotiation of sociocultural beliefs and gender stereotypes. Design This article is based on interview data from a larger ethnographic research with women judo athletes, grounded in a cultural praxis framework. Method Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted during fieldwork in Greece. Interview data were analyzed drawing on a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis. Results We identified four concepts—biology, gender, femininity, and judo/sport—that were central to unearth…