This chapter considers the influence of ethnomethodology on qualitative research methodology, one of the main areas of mainstream social science where it has had an impact. The reception of Cicourel’s (1964) book Method and Measurement in Sociology is discussed, and also how conversation analysis shaped the work of many discourse analysts and some ethnographers. Cicourel’s argument is outlined: that sociology needs to be re-founded methodologically on an empirical theory that respects the complex and contingent character of human action and communication, along lines suggested by ethnomethodology. His early work encouraged the rise of qualitative research and reflexive attention to the processes by which data are produced; though these developments often tended to go in directions that were at odds with his conception of rigorous analysis. Later, conversation analysis encouraged the use of electronic recordings and transcriptions as data, raised doubts about the traditional uses of interviews, and encouraged the micro-analysis of patterns of social interaction. Furthermore, like Cicourel’s work, it facilitated the spread of social constructionism. It is argued that these effects have been beneficial in many respects but more negative in others.

The concluding chapter begins with an examination of Canadian author Yann Martel’s What is Stephen Harper Reading? book club project, in which he sent literary texts to now-former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper once a fortnight. This public act of citizenship was intended to expose Harper, who was responsible for CAD 45 million in cuts to arts, culture, and heritage funding, to the importance of literature and the arts. The chapter closes with a reflection of how the texts and authors under study in this book have explored only a few ways in which citizenship can be encountered, acknowledged, critiqued, troubled, and queered by readers who have the power to collaborate in the continuing struggle for recognition, rights, and representation in North America and around the world.

The ultras’ performance is not restricted to ninety minutes at the weekend. It lives through regular interactions throughout the week through the traditional media, conversations and social media. The last of these has become an important public sphere where the way fans and ultras should act or react are debated and discussed. Social media is an important site of the ultras’ performance as the visual style permits groups to create a lasting image of themselves that extends far beyond the stadium and can be spread across the world.

This chapter examines how a combination of approaches from anthropology and data science disciplines has supported my exploration of lives lived at similar intersections. It describes work I have done at two research sites. One, through self-tracking and the quantified self, is focused internally. The other, with a community of startup developers in Jamaica, is focused on struggles to realise the potential of the global knowledge economy from its margins.While differing in their geographies and scales, both spaces allow for an interrogation of the potential of combining data science and ethnography: its new methods, modes of inquiry and modes of expression. For both myself and those I work with, data acts a conduit across borders of nation, history and flesh, promising new existential and epistemological models, and a means of affecting personal and national transformation. Its analytical lines offer the ability to connect and communicate, to modulate ideas of difference, and to help construct new identities. I discuss the uneven realisation of this potential, and how the attempts at its operationalisation reveal productive complications and reformulations at the convergence of engineering and ethnography.

The chapter concentrates on the music of Sinéad O’Connor, encompassing all her albums from The lion and the cobra up to I’m not bossy, I’m the boss, with particular attention to key songs and video performances. It analyses her extraordinary vocal performances in relation to ideas about femininity in traditional Irish music and in popular music. It considers the evolution and significance of her image, especially her rejection of aspects of conventional feminine beauty. Her treatment of trauma, Catholicism, colonialism and her protests against child abuse are also detailed here. The chapter traces an ongoing negotiation in her work between the individual female artist and the idea of the collective.

In 2014 Toronto, the first Canadian sanctuary city, reaffirmed its commitment to improving undocumented migrants’ access to programmes and services from city-funded agencies. However, research shows that official policy has not been consistently realised in practice. Service providers experience difficulties such as unfamiliarity with the needs of undocumented migrants and lack of formal organisational policy. Moreover, confusion still exists as to the nature of and extent to which municipal programmes cohere with federal/provincial law. Consequently, fear of arrest, detention, and removal from Canada still result in the marginalisation of undocumented migrants, and susceptibility to exploitation and abuse. This chapter provides a critical analysis of the operation of sanctuary city policy in the Greater Toronto Area. Using the theoretical framework of ‘local governance’, this chapter offers a reflection on the importance of the municipal context in crafting policy responses to the legal, economic, and social marginalisation of undocumented migrants. The chapter maps the nature and extent to which formal policy effectively protects the human rights of undocumented migrants. Drawing on research conducted from 2015 to 2016, the chapter explores the insights and perspectives of city officials, civil society organisations, and practitioners in the Greater Toronto Area.

This chapter introduces the main focus of the book, and discusses a range of current work exploring debates on migration, citizenship, and rights focused on sub-national spatial scales, including the urban, the neighbourhood, and the spaces of everyday life. The introduction thus examines some of the ways in which migration is experienced, politicised, and policed when framed as a concern for cities, communities, and everyday life, rather than purely for the policies, rhetoric, and imaginaries of the nation-state. The chapter works through three key bodies of work to explore this rescaling process and to set the framework for the rest of the collection: first, the increasing devolution of mechanisms of security and border enforcement to local levels, and to cities in particular, suggesting a growing governance of migration at the urban level; second, the growth of sanctuary movements across the Global North, from social movements and campaigns to the legal establishment of sanctuary cities; and third, the connections between cities and forms of irregular migrant activism that seek to contest the boundaries and nature of citizenship. In exploring these areas of recent debate, the introduction establishes the context for the collection’s two main parts – sanctuary cities and urban struggles.

It is important to start by looking at the very first films that were made, because that's where the story of film editing begins. In many ways it is surprising, given that filmmakers were constructing films of actualities from a variety of viewpoints from quite early on that 'constructed' films remained as one-shot entities for as long as they did. Georges Méliès pioneered the development of trick films. In France, he was also experimenting with multishot films. Méliès's first was L'Affaire Dreyfus made in 1899. Like Attack on a China Mission it was an imagined reconstruction of an actual event, but unlike James Williamson's film it consisted of a series of twelve separate one-shot films detailing separate events of the Dreyfus affair which, when showed together, lasted an unprecedented fifteen minutes.

This chapter chronicles and reflects on the experiences of working ethnographically within, alongside and in collaboration with a large-scale interdisciplinary experiment in computational social science. It does so by recounting, from the ethnographer’s point of view, a number of ‘collaborative moments’ at the awkward intersection of computational data science and ethnographic fieldwork, as partners in the same research project. Here, the anthropologist finds herself in a position at right angles to both the population under study and the other scientists studying them; a chronic condition of oscillating between practising ethnography in a (partly) computational social science framework and doing an ethnography of the very scientific data practices and infrastructures involved. We consider this in/of oscillation not as a point of disciplinary comparison but rather as involving ‘transversal’ collaborations that instantiate forms of non-coherent, intermittent and yet productively mutual co-shaping among partially connected knowledge practices and practitioners. Such a rethinking is crucial, we argue, for understanding new social data ‘complementarities’ and their epistemological, ethical and political ramifications.