Dorte Jagetic Andersen

Martin Klatt

Marie Sandberg

Addressing and conceptualizing the changing character of borders in contemporary Europe, this book examines developments occurring in the light of European integration processes and an on-going tightening of Europe's external borders. Moreover, the book suggests new ways of investigating the nature of European borders by looking at border practices in the light of the mobility turn. It provides border scholars and researchers as well as policymakers with new empirical and theoretical evidence on the de- and re-bordering processes going on in diverse border regions in Europe, both within and outside of the EU.

The Practicing of Borders Between Public Policy and Everyday Life in a Re-Scaling Europe

The Border Multiple

Luca Rossi

Vasilis Galis

Martin Bak Jørgensen

This Open Access book investigates the methodological and ethical dilemmas involved when working with digital technologies and large-scale datasets in relation to ethnographic studies of digital migration practices and trajectories. Digital technologies reshape not only every phase of the migration process itself (by providing new ways to access, to share and preserve relevant information) but also the activities of other actors, from solidarity networks to border control agencies. In doing so, digital technologies create a whole new set of ethical and methodological challenges for migration studies: from data access to data interpretation, privacy protection, and research ethics more generally. Of specific concern are the aspects of digital migration researchers accessing digital platforms used by migrants, who are subject to precarious and insecure life circumstances, lack recognised papers and are in danger of being rejected and deported. Thus, the authors call for new modes of caring for (big) data when researching migrants’ digital practices in the configuration of migration and borders. Besides taking proper care of research participants’ privacy, autonomy, and security, this also spans carefully establishing analytically sustainable environments for the respective data sets. In doing so, the book argues that it is essential to carefully reflect on researchers’ own positioning as being part of the challenge they seek to address.

Caring For (Big) Data?

Research Methodologies and Ethical Challenges in Digital Migration Studies

Regina F. Bendix

Disorder and order are among the principles through which the articles in this issue are connected. Peter Jan Margry grasps the exuberant excesses surrounding the Dutch monarch’s birthday with the term “mobocracy” and sees in the suspension of rules a means to reconcile Dutch republicanism with the anachronism of a monarchical system. Ongoing disorder of a rather different nature is experienced by migrant workers from Poland in Denmark. Niels Jul Nielsen and Marie Sandberg accompany them at work and in their different home settings and analyse the divergent interplay of the Polish labour niche and family dynamics on different constructions of “orderly work conditions”. Stefan Groth uncovers the structuring power of new tools and events to measure performance in recreational cycling; competitive norms are shown to permeate a leisure activity. Old age, too, is not free from the structuring arm of social and health regimes. Through his analysis of billiards – a game favoured by the older men he studies – Aske Juul Lassen critiques aging policies striving to “activate” the elderly and overlooking the rhythms inherent to a traditional game – and activity. The issue concludes with Tuuli Lähdesmäki’s comparison of how local heritage actors choose to narrate the transnationally launched European Heritage Label. Within an initiative to foster Europeanization, she finds actors formulating European identities in different moulds.

Journal of European Ethnology

Ethnologia Europaea

The leitmotif of this special issue is "revisiting": Swedish and Danish scholars pay a visit to concepts and approaches of the field of European ethnology. In re-examining, revising, reawakening and relaunching concepts and approaches that might have otherwise been overlooked, worn out or rejected, they explore and explicate new dimensions of research that have remained tacit knowledge. In engaging with past knowledge claims, concepts and research endeavours, the volume offers original reworkings of the role of everyday life in user-driven innovation projects (Tine Damsholt and Astrid P. Jespersen), on the possible links between the historic-geographic atlas works and controversy mapping (Anders K. Munk and Torben Elgaard Jensen), understanding the meaning and creation of archival knowledge (Karin Gustavsson), and of fieldwork engagements (Frida Hastrup). Discussing the role of continuity and rupture in past and present analyses (Signe Mellemgaard) and rethinking borders (Fredrik Nilsson) are further avenues explored. Four main themes forge the connections of this volume: reworking everyday life, fieldwork as craftsmanship, mapping connections and conversing with the past create a dynamic matrix of novel takes on ethnologies for the future. The six contributions are supplemented with four comments; in commenting on the revisits, they contribute their own reflections on revisiting European ethnology.

Special issue: European Ethnology Revisited

Ethnologia Europaea vol. 44:2

Addressing and conceptualizing the changing character of borders in contemporary Europe, this book examines developments occurring in the light of European integration processes and an on-going tightening of Europe's external borders. Moreover, the book suggests new ways of investigating the nature of European borders by looking at border practices in the light of the mobility turn, and thus as dynamic, multiple, diverse and best expressed in everyday experiences of people living at and with borders, rather than focusing on static territorial divisions between states and regions at geopolitical level. It provides border scholars and researchers as well as policymakers with new empirical and theoretical evidence on the de- and re-bordering processes going on in diverse border regions in Europe, both within and outside of the EU.

Marie Sandberg

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