ethnographic research Archives

Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan

Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan offers an innovative perspective on social sustainability by examining men’s well-being through their involvement in caring for older family members. Focusing on super-aged Japan, the book provides a valuable way to understand key social challenges relevant to countries on the cusp of an ageing society. In contrast to the predominant focus on men in the workplace, this study shifts attention to men in the family – such as men as sons, sons-in-law, husbands and grandsons – whose roles in care remain understudied.

The first part explores men’s care relations in the context of their extended family relations, including the emergence of sons-in-law in care. The second part widens the perspective to include the domain of work and related policies to understand how men reconcile care and work. The third part situates men’s caregiving in the broader societal context, including attention to the author’s novel notion of ‘care literacy’. The structure provides specialists across relevant fields – such as well-being, masculinity, gender relations and care systems – greater flexibility in accessing relevant sections. Further, the design of parts and chapters supports the book’s use as teaching material in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Playing the Archive

Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground reflects on a major study inspired by the work of citizen scholar folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Opies built a vast collection of children’s street and playground games, stories, sayings, rhymes, beliefs and habits as told to them by children all over Britain. These accounts are now held in the Bodleian Libraries and were the focus and inspiration for the new study. New stories and games were gathered from today’s children, and comparisons drawn between play experiences at these two different points in time.

The book explores how the Opie Archive was made publicly available online by the project through digital images, innovative cataloguing and playful digital media interfaces, such as a red telephone kiosk at the Young V&A. Chapters analyse the ethnographic strands of the project, collecting evidence of new and old forms of play on today’s playgrounds using state-of-the-art digital methods. The book proposes new ways of thinking about changes and adaptations to play and games, theorising on the workings of interfaces, repertoires and archives. It also considers the Opies’ ways of working, landscapes of play over time, and intergenerational dialogue about play. The collection presents research evidence and theory which speak back to the often reductive public discourse around children’s play and digital media. It positions children as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.

Social Media in Trinidad

Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed regions in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for its residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban town is a place in-between: somewhere city dwellers look down on and villagers look up to. The complex identity of the town is expressed through uses of social media, with significant results for understanding social media more generally.

Not elevating oneself above others is one of the core values of the town, and social media becomes a tool for social visibility; that is, the process of how social norms come to be and how they are negotiated. Carnival logic and high-impact visuality is pervasive in uses of social media, even if Carnival is not embraced by all Trinidadians in the town and results in presenting oneself and association with different groups in varying ways. The study also has surprising results in how residents are explicitly non-activist and align themselves with everyday values of maintaining good relationships in a small town, rather than espousing more worldly or cosmopolitan values.

Coderspeak

Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their own practice? How does that shape the ways in which they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day?

Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community – Ruby – based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas and Japan. This book shows that the place people write code, the language they write it in and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a ‘coder’. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.