Working with Veena Das's Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropology after Wittgenstein By Lotte Buch Segal
Repairing the World: Ordinary Ethics and the Shadows of Moralism By Emilija Zabiliūtė
The Text's Texture By Marco Motta
The Residues of Kinship By Resto Cruz
Uncertain Relations with People, Practice, and Ethnographic Knowledge By Andrew M. Jefferson
The Moon Shadows: When Arguments Rest By Veena Das
Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere By Illan rua Wall. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2021. 209pp. E-Book. ISBN: 978-0-429-33042-1.
Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic: Letters from Uganda By Hanne Mogensen. London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2020. 246 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-47522-2. ISBN 978-3-030-47523-9 (e-Book).
We explore how women's narratives of abuse change, including narratives of self as well as narratives of their abusers. We draw on experiences from a photo-ethnography of people living in rural Alabama who use methamphetamine. The use of photographs taken throughout the project aid in both the representation of the women as well as in data collection (through photo-elicitation interviews). While we draw on the overall experiences from the project, we focus specifically on one key participant—Misty—to illustrate the ways that she made sense of and excused intimate partner violence, and how her narrative eventually changes. Our findings illuminate how the narratives people construct of themselves are intertwined with those they construct with others, and how such narratives change together.
Much of the contemporary scholarship reproduces a disembodied approach to (counter)terrorism that fails to account for bodies, experiences, and subjectivities “at the sharp end.” To broaden the empirical focus and the ensuing blind spots, this article analyzes the varied and interdisciplinary approaches that put to the fore the intimacies of terrorism and the responses to it. It asks: What can the conceptual and methodological framework on embodiment and affect tell us about (counter)terrorism and terror threat? The conclusion argues that this framework does not merely extend the apparatus of terror/security to lived experience, but rather seeks to reframe the dominant notions of what terror/security is, how it is practiced, by whom, and with what effects.
An array of methods are used in European cities to respond to terrorism, with counterterrorism infrastructures in the built environment receiving particular academic interest. Yet the significance of imaginations of city spaces are often overlooked in studies of counterterrorism planning. Counterterrorism workshops influence imaginations of urban spaces by encouraging participants to adopt an anticipatory security gaze. This article explores the spatial approach of workshops, which require participants to interpret cities as a series of spaces and locations that could be terror targets. This article proposes that encouraging imaginations of danger in urban spaces can evoke fear, itself an aim of terrorism, or even neurosis, which becomes spatially attached to urban spaces as a means of urban counterterrorism governance.
This article highlights some aspects of doing longitudinal ethnography in criminology. By zooming in and reflecting on some of the key moments and methodological choices made over the course of more than 15 years of fieldwork among members of a Dutch gang, this article illustrates that relations with informants have the potential to strengthen over time, but that building rapport and trust with (active) offenders is not necessarily a linear process. In addition to voicing the emotional and evocative aspects of these methodological deliberations, this “true confession” is meant to spark some more debate on how longitudinal fieldwork in criminology impacts field relations by critically examining not only the performativity of informants, but also of researchers.
While many anthropologists have previously reflected on longitudinal ethnography—for example distinguishing between different categories of longitudinal research, including the ethnographic revisit, either by the same or another researcher, diachronic research projects, involving continuous and sustained engagement over time, or so-called large-scale or multigenerational projects, among others—there has been little reflection on the way particular topics of research might impact on the longitudinal research process. In particular, we argue here that the stakes of longitudinal ethnographic research come to the fore particularly starkly in relation to studies of violence. More specifically, longitudinality potentially both enhances certain risks inherent to carrying out research on violence, while also offering unique opportunities for better understanding the phenomenon more reflexively.
This special section addresses how the spatiality of terrorism and security responses mobilize and impact the realm of experience. The articles presented here expose how terrorism is encountered as a felt experience by urban residents in Europe through an analysis that encompasses several realms including the body, the intimate, the domestic, and the urban public space. These works develop existing scholarship on the European urban geographies of terrorism, by looking beyond established approaches to normative range of actors and infrastructures that underlie terrorism and counter-terror security responses, and by exploring the fine-grained connections between felt experience, urban space, and global politics. Moreover, in focusing on the experiential landscapes of terror, we start exploring geographies where healing, trust, and societal reconnection can be imagined in the wake of terror.
Listening experiences provide valuable insights in understanding the meaning of events and shaping the way we remember them afterwards. Listening builds relationships with places and subjectivities. What kinds of relationships and connections are built through listening during an event of extreme violence, such as a terrorist attack? This article examines the relationships between sound, space, and affect through an acoustemology of Bataclan survivors’ sensory experiences of both the terrorist attack and its aftermath. I draw on the testimonies of nine survivors of the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris, which unfolded on the evening of 13 November 2015 during a rock concert, as well as interviews with three parents of survivors and victims. This article explores how the study of listening experiences and aural memories of survivors contributes to understanding mnemonic dynamics and processes of recovery related to sound following violent events.
Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The article accounts for the lived, sensory and atmospheric in exploring the legacies of conflict on the everyday urban environments. It then reflects on the everyday and experiential effects of counterterrorism in ordinary cities. While this is designed to minimize threat, it also alters urban spatiality in a way reminiscent of urban conflict zones. It then explores the unequal impacts of counterterrorism across urban publics, and their experiential connections with practices of counterinsurgency. The article is structured around two ‘shockwaves’ entwining lived experiences across seemingly unrelatable urban settings.
