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Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa /Ethnography & Qualitative Research Special Issue: Comparing What? Conceptualising Comparison in Ethnographic Research Guest Editors: Andrea Mubi Brighenti, University of Trento [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Nicholas DeMaria Harney, The University of Windsor [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> (Please submit send your abstracts and papers to both guest editors) For this special issue, we invite contributors to address the myriad forms of comparison that are explicit and implicit in ethnographic work. We particularly focus on the intersection of migration and urban contexts. Ethnography’s strength is its intimate, on-the-ground observation, interpretation and analysis of complex social realities and the improvisational, contingent aspects of people agency in the everyday. How do we negotiate our search for a place-based unit of study when our object of study combines migration’s different spatio-temporal worlds and the city’s juxtaposition of differences? Relations across space and time conspire to explode our sites, destabilize our categories and challenge our assumptions. What is comparison when we study migration in and through cities? How do we avoid essentialism in our distinctions? In the swirl of cities and movements do we compare for example sites, neighborhoods, practices, narratives, cultural idioms, across places? With the complex interconnectedness of the globe is it diffusion or different origins that structure the similarities and differences we observe? Do we search for shared processes and social relations across different sites? Do we search for tendencies or recurrences that reflect global processes constituted through local forms, relations and dynamics? In a relational world, is not the process of comparison a fundamental means by which we build our community of knowing, apprehend our uncertainties and confront our differences? How do process of negation and inversion of relationships between and within sites inform the way we build knowledge about migration and the spectacle of city life. As Appadurai noted, there is a tendency for places to become connected to specific research questions and representative of particular issues. This can lead to analysis in those sites that is restricted to a predefined set of questions and a guided interpretive process, which can lead to distortions. How do certain keywords or conceptual terms that emerge out of migration, urban studies or more amply placed-based situated ethnography become metonyms for the studied sites themselves and erase or discourage other forms of inquiry? While the reflexive turn in ethnography displaced explicit reference to an evolutionist comparative method, that ranked people and cultural units on a putative hierarchy of value, embedded in our practices of ethnographic representation, limiting the scope of field sites and the construction of ‘cultural units’ lingers questions of temporality, inequality, moral distinctions and hierarchies of value. Comparison remains central to the reflexivity involved in fieldwork. However, although the comparative attitude is an intrinsic part of ethnographic research, it is problematic to define it as a rigid sequence of steps. In a way, comparison needs at each time to be reinvented by ethnographers with a lot of methodological inventiveness. Such inventiveness is at the center of our interest in this call. We thus invite contributions from a variety of ethnographic endeavors where researchers had to deal with comparative procedures, analytically constructing the units to be compared, while at the same time being challenged by the on-going transformation of those same units. We would like to learn more about the ways and the choices ethnographers have to face whenever a comparative attitude and the reflections that are spurred by it become central in their inquiries. Deadline for abstracts: December 15th, 2018 Abstract selection: January 15th, 2019 Final paper submission: February 28th , 2019 For submission style guidelines, please see https://www.mulino.it/riviste/issn/1973-3194 <https://www.mulino.it/riviste/issn/1973-3194> (“Information” Tab) ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1