Experiments in Worldly Ethnography

This volume experiments with ‘worldliness’ as found in theory, method, and □eldwork practice. It provides readers with ten unique case studies that grapple with worldliness as an affective, relational, sensory, and multimodal experience. Attending to globalisation’s undulations and futures, the collection features research projects from around the world, as well as writing in a re□ective register about ‘global’ topics – including human traf□ficking, international adoption and migration, popular pedagogies, □nancial crises, data□cation and AI, and terrorism and civil war. The book is an invitation to use ethnographic practice in a way that recognises the value of ‘present conjunctures’ to interrupt and disrupt disciplinary ways of thinking. It is a provocation to collapse boundaries and scales between material and symbolic worlds, to explore connections between the human and the non-human, to work with entanglements of matter and that matter, and to feel or sense – rather than know or explain – one’s way through ethnographic encounters. The volume will be of interest to upper-level students and researchers in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, especially those interested in global ethnography and the possibilities of qualitative research.

Sevasti-Melissa Nolas is a visual sociologist who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is known for her research on childhood publics, children’s visual cultures, children’s archives, multimodal ethnography, and publics creating methodologies. She co-founded and directs The Children’s Photography Archive. She also co-founded and co-edited the journal Entanglements: Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography (2018–2022).

Rachael Stryker is Professor of Human Development and Women's Studies at California State University, East Bay. She is the author of The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy and the Promise of Family (2010) as well as many articles on the biomedicalisation of attachment and adoptee experience in the US.

Christos Varvantakis is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on political activism, archives, the commons, and the cultural sector. He is a Partnerships Manager at Wikimedia Deutschland where he is responsible for onboarding global cultural organisations to the Linked Open Data web. He loves working with socially minded people and organisations on issues relating to opening, diversifying, decolonising and democratising knowledge.