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Purpose – Occasionally, we find our social roles transitioning from friend to researcher. This chapter is a reflexive account of one such transition. The author examines the emotions, the concerns and the rewards and stresses of this shift in her relationship with individuals and community.

Methodology/Approach – The author moved to Arviat, Nunavut, in 2004 and gradually found her inner sociologist could not be contained. Through a process of consultation with the Inuit community in which she was residing, she transitioned from the role of friend to that of researcher. This was complicated by her social location as a Western outsider who had been accepted as a community member.

Findings – Reflexivity is a key component of mitigating the challenges which arose and pursuing ethical research, as well as managing the dynamic range of experiences and feelings which emerged during this process.

Rational time accompanies the onslaught of hyper-globalization. The Inuit of Arviat, Nunavut, paradoxically use rational time to resist rational time, setting aside temporal zones to protect Western cultural paradigms from impinging on their lives all of the time. Additionally, because temporal norms indicate membership in a group, doing time differently is one of the most effective ways in which to say “I’m not a part of your group!” While resisting rational clock-time, for example by walking off the job each day promptly at 4:59 pm, the Inuit of Arviat nevertheless have a myriad of clocks in their homes. This chapter explores their temporal resistance and the riddle of “why so many clocks in Arviat?”

History as leisure allows for the creation of identity and identification among those who care about the past and treasure the memories that knowledge provides. Through a multiyear ethnography of American Civil War enthusiasts, I propose the concept of “Wispy Selves.” These selves are embedded in awareness of an historical past but are wispy in that their presentation is limited to particular times and places where they are described and enacted with the support of a like-minded community. Through lectures, tours, and other gatherings, leisure participants imagine themselves linked to consequential figures in the American past through their voluntary commitments. A sense of “selves in time” extends Kathy Charmaz’s illness identities by recognizing that meaningful personas are not only linked to trauma, but to communal pleasure as well.

Open access publishing is an increasingly popular trend in the dissemination of academic work, allowing journals to print articles electronically and without the burden of subscription paywalls, enabling much wider access for audiences. Yet subscription-based journals remain the most dominant in the social sciences and humanities, and it is often a struggle for newer open access publications to compete, in terms of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 2004). Our study explores the meanings of resistance held by the editors of open access journals in the social sciences and humanities in Canada, as well as the views of university librarians. To make sense of these meanings, we draw on Lonnie Athens’ (2015) radical interactionist account of power, and expand on this by incorporating George Herbert Mead’s (1932, 1938) theory of emergence, arguing that open access is characteristic of an “extended rationality” (Chang, 2004) for those involved. Drawing on our open-ended interview data, we find that open access is experienced as a form of resistance in at least four ways. These include resistance to (1) profit motives in academic publishing; (2) access barriers for audiences; (3) access barriers for contributors; and (4) traditional publishing conventions.

This study aims to explore how graduate students in the social sciences develop reading and note-taking routines.

Using a professional socialization framework drawing on grounded theory, this study draws on a snowball sample of 36 graduate students in the social sciences at US universities. Qualitative interviews were conducted to learn about graduate students’ reading and note-taking techniques.

This study uncovered how doctoral students experienced the shift from undergraduate to graduate training. Graduate school requires students to adopt new modes of reading and note-taking. However, students lacked explicit mentorship in these skills. Once they realized that the goal was to enter an academic conversation to produce knowledge, they developed new reading and note-taking routines by soliciting and implementing suggestions from advanced doctoral students and faculty mentors.

The specific requirements of the individual graduate program shape students’ goals for reading and note-taking. Further examination of the relationship between graduate students’ reading and note-taking and institutional requirements is warranted with a larger sample of universities, including non-American institutions.

Graduate students benefit from explicit mentoring in reading and note-taking skills from doctoral faculty and advanced graduate students.

This study uncovers the perspectives of graduate students in the social sciences as they transition from undergraduate coursework in a doctoral program of study. This empirical, interview-based research highlights the centrality of reading and note-taking in doctoral studies.