This article reflects on solidarit ies as a subject and a mode of research in the context of the privatised UK asylum system. This system excludes those seeking asylum from belonging to and in the local communities to which they are dispersed. Against this background, our research explored solidarities as imagined, practiced, and (re)constituted in negotiations of migrant deservingness in the context of asylum dispersal. Inspired by ‘patchwork ethnography’ and decolonial and feminist scholarship, we worked with a group of co-researchers with lived experience of the asylum system. Through the research, we created a space of care and mutual recognition. Drawing on ethnographic examples, we document ‘moments of repair’ and reflect on the research process, including the relationships we developed, and tensions between procedural ethics and ethics on the ground. We argue for the importance of ‘small formations’ and recognition, reasserting the humanity and dignity of people seeking asylum.

This article draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Rajarhat, a planned township on Kolkata’s urban fringe, to develop what we term an “epistemology of discomfort”. Rajarhat, often portrayed as a frontier of neoliberal urbanism, is shaped equally by speculative real estate, displacement, and precarious inhabitation. As researchers situated within caste, class, and institutional privilege, we encountered discomfort—not despite our positionality, but because of it. Rather than treating these frictions as obstacles, we approach discomfort as a productive methodological and affective register that reveals the relational, contingent, and power-laden nature of ethnographic knowledge. Engaging with postcolonial and post-structuralist critiques, we explore three interlinked dimensions of discomfort in Rajarhat as a field. First, we interrogate the symbolic capital of academic authority and how institutional affiliations mediate access, trust, and visibility. Second, we reflect on the affective dissonances of having to navigate a familiar but evolving site that blurred the insider-outsider in unsettling ways. Third, we examine the discursive limits of our analytical tools when documenting the lived grammars of informality in Rajarhat. In foregrounding these frictions, we argue for a reflexive, ethically attuned urban anthropology that treats discomfort not as failure, but as a generative site of insight into India’s contemporary urban transformations.

With notable exceptions, ethnographers engaging in observant participation have not reflected on what it means to become the object of inquiry. Very little scholarly engagement has focused on the longer-term implications for such becomings for the ethnographer. In the current article, we draw from field notes and broader reflections on our ethnographic experiences, as a cis gender male participating in mixed martial arts and as a cis gender female participating in correctional officer training, to theorize what metamorphosis means for our understandings of our respective fields and our day-to-day lives as academics. We analyze how metamorphosis is experienced differently for our respective genders, and the marks our ethnographic experiences have left on our selves and bodies. The current article is intentionally heuristic, pushing ethnographers to reflect on what ethnography means and the broader effects of ethnographic experiences on our bodies and on our selves.

Under the aegis of what we term “broad data ethnography”, we outline four principles for the standardized collection, processing, and analysis of ethnographip data, particularly fieldnotes: compilability, compatibility , counting , and computability . As we demonstrate via examples from an interdisciplinary study at a Danish politics festival: compilability denotes the need for a shared data structure; compatibility refers to the demand for high similarity in data content; counting captures how standardizing both form and content emables systematic use of quantitative measures in the field, which in turn, and finally, allows for subsequent computational analysis. Finally, we address the potentials and pitfalls of adhering to these four principles, suggesting that in an age of increasing interdisciplinary collaboration and ubiquitous digital platforms and AI tools, “broad data ethnography” offers an attractive alternative to conventional “thick data” by allowing for short-term, computationally-augmented, team-based ethnography in situations where more individual and idiosyncratic approaches are not feasible.

The article focuses on the everyday struggles of the Māori precariat in Auckland City. As an excerpt from urban ethnography on lived precarity in Auckland, New Zealand, it reveals structural constraints that Māori face on a daily basis. This includes unemployment, precarious work, poverty and precarious housing. Understanding precarity as a mode of domination, the article first looks at the history of Māori precarity that is strongly bound to colonialism and structural violence. Ethnographically, the article presents two Māori couples who are struggling with various dimensions of precarity such as intergenerational trauma, violence continuum and the accumulation of disadvantage. Being in survival mode, they seek ways how to cope with everyday struggles and trauma. The reader then visits the infamous K Road where two artists explain their experience of precarity. Finally, the ethnographic record reveals the everyday struggles of young Māori students, working up to three jobs to get by.

The article explores the links between consumption, deservingness and social inclusion through an analysis of the spending practices of the ‘unemployed poor’ in rural Hungary. After the 2008 economic crisis, the offering of informal credit by shopkeepers became a widespread practice in the studied village, allowing unemployed people to buy goods that were otherwise out of their reach. However, shopping “above their means” invited negative judgements from other locals who had regular, formal work. By analysing the various value frames that unemployed people invoke to legitimise their spending practices alongside the ways these are refuted by others, the paper reveals how notions of deservingness are locally negotiated and used for recreating social boundaries. Ultimately, the article re-visits the question of whether everyday consumption can offer an alternative to work as the basis for social inclusion, in contexts where a majority of the population have no access to regular, formal work.

In 2017, Moscow launched an urban renewal campaign proposing to tear down eight thousand panel-block apartment buildings aiming to relocate over a million and a half residents into newly built high-rises. The campaign provoked diverse reactions ranging from anger to excitement for the chance to improve living conditions. The author began ethnographic research on the eve of the first phase of demolition in 2021, inviting Moscow-, and Berlin-based artists to examine the stories, memories, and feelings of their panel-block homes in a collaborative visual anthropology research project. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine interrupted research, beckoning the author to reevaluate their study from affective and ethical positions. Studying responses to the war using autoethnographic methods allowed the author to acknowledge disaffection and withdrawal as significant emotional responses to the threat of political violence—dispositions that make for ethnographically and ethically important moments of research.

In this article, I explore how older, jobless informal workers in urban Ghana’s transport sector struggle to sustain their livelihoods by relying on associational solidarity, particularly the redistributive practice of ‘chop money.’ I situate my analysis of the social and economic implications of chop money dependence in the context of the sweeping precarization of urban labour since the 1980s, as well as the absence of public welfare provision and diminishing family support resources. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine tensions around solidarity, dependence, and culturally shaped notions of male responsibility. I argue that a focus on the (failed) life course transitions of ageing transport workers offers important insights in relation to informality, the challenges of unretirement, and the ambivalent relationships established through non-kin support networks.

The article examines the discourses and positions that emerged in the Summer and Autumn of 2020, during the public discussion of bill 44/XIV, which regulated the operation of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services in Portugal. The bill was perceived as a moment of change and impending crisis and divided the film-making sector. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of film production practices in Portugal, I ask what made this crisis different from previous and ongoing experiences of crisis. I draw on interviews, informal conversations, participant observation, and published documents to discuss how ideas of the local, national and transnational, discourses of quality and diversity, and practices of future making and life making converged in the defence of a film production culture to which older and younger practitioners attributed a non-economic (or more-than-economic) value considered worth preserving.

Heritage and security are distinct research topics in anthropology, but some of their connections have been unpacked, particularly in scholarship about heritage during conflicts and peace building. This article, however, brings them analytically together to understand how they entangle to shape cities and their futures. In scrutinising overlooked similarities between heritage and security, my longitudinal ethnography in Banaras (Varanasi) suggests that both intersect productively in anticipating and making urban futures. I argue that a Hindu majoritarian urban future—as materialised in the walls, signboards and checkpoints of the Prime Minister’s flagship Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor—unfolded precisely through security and heritage. This future seems to be, at least partially, shared by those who are excluded from it. Bridging the largely disconnected anthropological scholarship on heritage and security, this article offers a first ethnographically-grounded theorisation of security and heritage as cross-fertilising urban processes that make futures.