Search results

This is an experimental text with a performative cast, the aim of which is to enact, excavate, chronicle, and interrogate the racialized experiences and spectacles endured, consumed, and performed by the author in the course of a two-week stay at a Native American themed catholic summer camp during his youth. Following Philip J. Deloria, it is argued that the camp's history and appropriation of Native American culture eventuate in the formation of a highly racialized space where relatively well-off white children come to “play Indian,” a space that furthermore conspires in the construction and maintenance of “whiteness” as a cultural identity. The text is characterized by its multiple and rotating speaking parts and thus lends itself to both impromptu seminar readings as well as more elaborate forms of theatrical performance.

Underpinning clean language interviewing is a set of skills that allow the interviewer great facility in tracking what has been presented. These skills include minimising personal inference and making an informed choice of what question to ask. They are grounded in the logic of the interviewee's data and the purpose of the interview.

This chapter makes visible four hidden skills I identified through reflection on a doctoral study I conducted using clean language interviewing. These are, how I: ‘parcel out’ sentences in order to build visual-spatial schema; apply content-free codes during the interview; decide what is salient in the interviewee's words and gestures; and use adjacency to navigate my way around the data. Since these skills are applied moment-by-moment during the interview, I refer to them as ‘coding in-the-moment’. I conclude with a comparison between grounded theory methodology and clean language interviewing.

In this chapter the author discusses some insights lost in a lost ethnomethodological study of parkour. The author introduces parkour, before critically engaging with some of the existing theoretical treatments of the practice. The author then considers some of the materials drawn on by those existing studies in reconsidering what is getting done in ‘parkour talk’. In further outlining what was lost, the author considers some of the aspects of the study that would have positioned parkour in terms of its engaging ordinariness. The chapter concludes with a summary of these avenues of inquiry and closes with a plea for the continued recognition of basic social inquiry and ethnography.

This chapter examines trans and gender non-conforming persons' experiences of recreational sport and physical activity (PA). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with trans and gender non-conforming people, which were then analyzed using critical discourse analysis (CDA). Participants highlighted that while they did derive enjoyment from sport and physical activity, most mainstream spaces they had experienced, such as organized sport and gyms, were still unsafe and unwelcoming. These experiences were largely due to the continued influence of binary notions of gender on the organization of sport and physical activity as well as assumptions about bodily performance and presentation. Participants discussed how gendered bodily norms influenced the way they experienced their own bodies, both a result of others' perceptions and through self-surveillance. They also reflected on creating their own physical activity communities as a way to derive the benefits of physical activity while avoiding discriminatory experiences in mainstream spaces.

Purpose – This chapter examines the risk of a hostile incursion as perceived by Fremont farmers living in the Range Creek area of Utah, 700–1700 years ago.

Methodology/approach – We build two simple financial portfolio models where agents (Fremont farmers) choose optimal locations to store grain based on a trade-off between ease of access during normal times and difficulty of confiscation during a hostile incursion. We calibrate our model using the observed distances and difficulty of access to granaries measured in caloric costs.

Findings – We find that even low or moderate probabilities of an incursion rationalize the use of cliff granaries. Risk on the order of a 5–25% chance per year makes building, maintaining, and transporting grain to a cliff granary worthwhile.

Social implications – Our research does not rule out other motives for granary construction. However, it does show that a small threat of hostilities can explain the observed location of granaries in Range Creek and other areas of Fremont habitation.

Originality/value of chapter – This research is unique in its application of standard financial portfolio theory (normally dealing with optimal holdings of risky financial assets) to the problem of deducing perceived risk. To our knowledge, this is the first use of these rational financial models in the context of a human population that has left no explicit economic evidence such as prices or transaction records.

Baudelaire (1863) and Benjamin (1983) used the term flaneur to denote a modern man who could evocatively describe social life in urban areas. A flaneur was poetically to describe the ephemeral nature of modern urban life, but without acting as a consumer. Here I approach Las Vegas from the perspective of a flaneur, and discuss the possibilities in that city for flanerie today. I introduce the concept pseudo-flanerie, and apply it to postmodern tourism. In Las Vegas, pseudo-flaneurs wander from one impersonation of a city/culture/era to another, stroll from one game to another, and move from one presentation of self to another. However, surveillance, social control, and the organizing principles of capitalism structure each. I also discuss pseudo-flanerie in Las Vegas in terms of temporality, morality, and consumption practices. I find that the flaneur’s traditionally anti-consumer stance has been endangered in tourist cities like Las Vegas, where mock cities have commodified city-like experiences to tourists who ultimately pay to engage in practices traditionally associated with flaneurs. A postmodern tourist environment like Las Vegas, therefore, creates the conditions for the pseudo-flaneur to emerge.

The urban environment is perceived through multiple senses in parallel, which means that visual understanding of space is aided and complemented by auditory, basic-orienting, and haptic stimuli – although mainly unconsciously. Sensory conditions are inherent attributes of urban places, but are often overlooked in research. To include these aspects in any way in analysis of the urban landscape, they need to be understood as properties of urban space, to be translated from attributes of the perceiver to attributes of the perceived. Using the relation between a designed garden and its suburban context in Bad Oeynhausen (DE) as an example, I will explore an alternative analytical methodology that takes the first-hand perspective view of the subject moving through the city as the starting point. The human body explores space by moving through it; walking is the most direct way to access, study, and research the physical qualities of the (urban) landscape, involving not only visual experience but also sound, rhythm, kinaesthesia, balance, and so forth. A notation technique that discloses the interrelation between visual qualities and their perception over time is the technique of ‘scoring’. Scores are symbolisations of processes, which extend over time. They can objectively represent non-visual qualities of space, communicating the relation between such processes and their spatial context to others in other places and other moments. These representations of movement expose the qualities of the surroundings that change as one moves through them, thus communicating the experiential aspects of urban landscape.