Experiments in Worldly Ethnography

by Rachael Stryker (editor), Sevasti-Melissa Nolas (Editor), Christos Varvantakis (Editor)

This volume experiments with ‘worldliness’ as found in theory, method, and fieldwork practice. It provides readers with ten unique case studies that grapple with worldliness as an affective, relational, sensory, and multimodal experience. Attending to globalisation’s undulations and futures, the collection features research projects from around the world, as well as writing in a reflective register about ‘global’ topics - including human trafficking, international adoption and migration, popular pedagogies, financial crises, datafication and AI, and terrorism and civil war. The book is an invitation to use ethnographic practice in a way that recognizes the value of ‘present conjunctures’ to interrupt and disrupt disciplinary ways of thinking. It is a provocation to collapse boundaries and scales between material and symbolic worlds, to explore connections between the human and the non-human, to work with entanglements of matter and that matter, and to feel or sense – rather than know or explain – one’s way through ethnographic encounters. The volume will be of interest to upper-level students and researchers in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, especially those interested in global ethnography and the possibilities of qualitative research.

250 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2024