Ethnographic Edge

Introduction to Volume 7(1)

Katey Thom — 2024-06-23

Worlding Sanctuary

Madelena Mañetto Quick — 2024-04-05

Farm animal sanctuaries represent shared life-worlds between the human and nonhuman animal inhabitants. With a focus on the co-creation of sanctuary spaces and practices as acts of worlding and world-building, this paper presents a case study of the challenges and opportunities that arise when combining ethnography and creative practice. Beginning with a cultural analysis of farm sanctuary memoirs, I situate my local project within global narratives. Then, I describe my short-term ethnographic fieldwork experience and its relation to my creative practice. The final section of this article outlines the beginning of my shift from ethnographic inquiry into speculative narrative and provides an example of my creative work. Comparing and contrasting this with the anthropological literature on animal sanctuaries, I argue that a purposeful entanglement of multispecies ethnography and speculative narrative offers a unique way not just to understand multispecies relations but also to imagine new life-worlds.

A Report on the Impact of Immigration Detention on the Health and Well-being of Refugees & Asylum Seekers

Elizabeth Wembri — 2024-04-28

The extended periods that some asylum seekers experience in immigration detention potentially compromise their mental health and physical well-being. This compromise is associated with the prevailing culture and conditions within some immigration detention facilities in Western countries, such as Australia, Canada and Germany. This review aims to synthesise the findings of studies that report on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers while they have been held in immigration detention. A meta-ethnographic approach guided the synthesis following the eMERGe meta-ethnography reporting guidance structure. Three common storyline metaphors were identified from the synthesis of findings of seven qualitative studies: (1) treating like criminals, jail-like, prison-like, and treated like animals; (2) killing your mind and torturing your mind; and (3) feelings of hopelessness, worry, despair and fear. The findings of this review suggest that the culture and the practices of immigration detention that impact refugees and asylum seekers who are detained for sometimes extended periods need to be transformed. The time that people are held in detention and the context for that detention needs urgent review. While immigration detention is legislated and enacted differently in the countries where the included studies were located, Government policies should consider alternative approaches such as community detention. Regular monitoring of immigration detention practices by external bodies should be mandated, and ongoing staff training for workers in detention facilities should be instituted to ensure that refugees and asylum seekers are treated fairly and with dignity when detained.

Environmental Ethnography

Edgar Burns — 2024-05-08

Environmental ethnography is discussed here from involvement with a local government authority in Aotearoa New Zealand focused on soil, water and land management. Climate change and environmental degradation are making such local government work more difficult and expensive. As costs trend upwards and new rules are applied, community challenges to local authorities increase. Environmental ethnography identifies constraints on the organisational ability to meet infrastructural needs to produce environmental solutions locally. Some constraints are internal (organisational), some are local (community beliefs and attitudes), but the most significant constraints are external to local agencies. In ethnographic terms, working with local and national environmental authorities is a process of learning from staff, scientists, and administrators. Māori and Pākehā communities’ efforts to manage their local destinies provide insights into pressures on local government organisations. Landowners’ expectations and politicised discourses of climate denial or deferral also constrain day-to-day local authority work. Three intersections of local authority organisations' actions and local communities’ responses emerge from reflecting on this ethnographic learning, each shaping what local authorities can achieve. First, the social is not another set of insights; rather, the social is in the science. Second, in Aotearoa New Zealand the familiar nature-society binary is usefully disturbed by mātauranga Māori understandings of people and the environment. Third, changing modern productivist attitudes towards the environment is more than local—it is national and global—yet people’s responses are also intensely local. Environmental ethnography helps illuminate such tensions that create organisational and community dilemmas for local government authorities.