The phenomenology of Alfred Schutz was a major influence on ethnomethodology, and on some other developments in sociology during the 1950s and 60s, notably the work of Cicourel and Berger and Luckmann. The character and reception of Schutz’s work is examined, and it is suggested that there are significant respects in which it has been misinterpreted. The context in which he began his studies is documented, and in particular his relationship to Austrian economics. Schutz’s aim was to resolve a problem that had been at the heart of this economic tradition: the grounding of its basic theoretical principles. And he identified much the same gap in the interpretive sociology of Max Weber. Schutz drew on the work of Bergson and Husserl in an attempt to clarify the nature of the lifeworld that underpins social and economic action. Two key questions are addressed here: whether his work served as a fundamental challenge to the positivism of the dominant sociological tradition in the 1960s; and whether Schutz regarded his work as part of social science or of philosophy, and therefore whether he was, in fact, aiming to build a phenomenological sociology, as seems to have been assumed by Garfinkel and many others.

This chapter explores how Russian data scientists learn and are taught technical skills. In the Moscow data science community, well-developed mathematical skills are almost universally treated as a given: a fundamental bedrock of established knowledge, upon which the specific methodological skills proper to data science can be scaffolded in the classroom and workplace. Beyond these concrete techniques, however, Russian data scientists are expected to cultivate more ephemeral forms of abstraction and judgement, which requires concrete experience developing applied research projects. This cultivation of technical skill is part of a broad commitment to lifelong learning shared by both academic and industrial researchers, and is allied to a widespread understanding of professional data scientists as constitutionally flexible workers. Rather than the product of a precarious labour market, however, I argue that my informants’ twin commitments to flexibility and lifelong learning are inextricable from their scientific and intellectual ethos.

The chapter concentrates on Nuala O’Faolain’s journalism, several media appearances (including her final interview on Irish radio just weeks before her death in 2008), and the astonishing international success of her confessional memoir, Are you somebody? In particular, the chapter considers her enduring fascination and involvement with Ireland and Irish culture, despite her extensive and sometimes despairing attention to the effects of misogyny, sectarianism and economic inequality in the country. It documents her treatments of sexuality and intimate relationships in the context of her experience of Ireland and of feminism. The chapter also details her account of the Irish family, of her own education and formation, and of her place in Irish literary, intellectual and political traditions.

The chapter concerns an attempt to bring an ethnographic sensibility to the data generated by contemporary software developers. It focuses on numbers as processes and counting as a form, and explores how re-counting might be useful in attempts to reconstruct platforms and their associative realities. Since launching in late 2007, the code repository Github (Github.com) has become tremendously popular amongst programmers. Github’s growth attests to some substantial transformations in the way coders, coding and code associate with each other. On Github, coding practices have been re-formatted in ways that emulate the traits and tendencies of contemporary social media platforms. ‘Sharing’, ‘liking’, ‘watching’ and recirculation abound. Not only does Github host a wide variety of commercial, industry, government, scientific, educational and civil society software (and non-software) projects, but highly dispersed and diverse human and non-human actors congregate there. Github in early 2016 claimed to host 29 million code repositories and 6 million coders. The chapter describes some ways in which such large numbers might be re-counted. It explores how coders render accounts of what happens on Github through analysis of big data generated by other coders. It outlines some preliminary attempts to map the ripples of associative imitation that animate the platform’s growth and capitalisation. The growth of Github as intersectional assemblage, the reshaping of coding practices in imitation of social media and the susceptibility of large-scale public data about coding to analysis by coders alter the scope and focus of ethnographic study.

The afterword outlines some communalities between the subjects of this book and compares their treatments of certain recurrent preoccupations such as religion and the idea of home or homeland. Despite the fact that all these women are seen as heralds of the modern, the afterword comments on their rejection of aspects of the new Ireland, especially consumerism. While there have been major advances in gender equality in Ireland, many of the political aspirations of feminists such as these remain to be fulfilled.

This chapter discusses the social constructionist view of human being and social world offered by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. His view erects nonbiological foundations for human existence and, thereby, challenges the Burtonian biological account. It provides the readers also with conceptual tools which can be employed to give the problem-solving workshop a phenomenological interpretation. The chapter then discusses the cultural dimensions of the social world on the basis of Schutz's views. It is important to see how phenomenology differs from positivist social science and especially from political behaviouralism. It is also vital to understand the points of departure between such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Schutz whose philosophy is inclined towards phenomenological sociology. In order to understand the origins of Schutz's phenomenology and a seminal difference between Schutz and Husserl, one needs to return to the notions of the natural attitude and intersubjectivity.

This chapter retrospectively explores Rabih Alameddine’s fiction dealing with the Lebanese diaspora in the USA: The Hakawati, I, the Divine, and KOOLAIDS: The Art of War. The chapter initially considers The Hakawati’s reinscription of homosexuality in Islamic (hi)stories and its problematic censorship in contemporary Lebanese communities. Such a disorientation of heteropatriarchal mores is rendered possible through Alameddine’s ‘druzification’ of history – a pun on Rushdie’s ‘chutnification of history’ – from his diasporic perspective, by adapting and interweaving stories, histories, and religious texts in a manner that syncretises them. It then examines the queering of gender performance in I, the Divine, a novel that critiques both Druze patriarchy and homonormativity in the West. It concludes by analysing the queering of time and place, via Judith/Jack Halberstam, in KOOLAIDS, a novel that, it is argued, assembles the Lebanese Civil War, the American AIDS crisis, as well as America and Lebanon, through a queer Muslim pseudo-prophetic narrator living with AIDS. It is proposed that Mohammad irreverently dismantles heteronormative scriptural exegesis and amalgamates sacred texts in order to defy literalist religious orthodoxies. It is also suggested that KOOLAIDS posits a form of queer family at a remove from the prescriptions of bloodlines.

This chapter looks at how practices of scientific analysis are being put under strain by the appearance and necessity of working with new kinds of data. Whilst most commentary about new forms of data have focused on the value and ethics of analysing and using transactional consumer data, this chapter is concerned with the analytical challenge of another field of ‘big’ data – that of environmental modelling.The chapter provides an ethnographic account of the challenges faced by a particular group of climate modellers based at a UK university as they attempt to work with emerging forms of data that promise to bridge a divide between natural processes (sensory data on weather and climate) and social relations (statistical data on poverty, tourism, economy). A central concern of these climate modellers (and shared with analysts of ‘big’ data) is the problem of how to conduct analysis without a controllable baseline for comparison. The chapter compares statistical analysis that informs climate modelling with the epistemology of ethnography, a method which has long operated with an alternative analytical foundation that does not start with the necessity of a generalisable baseline. Reflexively engaging the analytical commitments of the ethnographic method, the chapter considers whether an alternative approach to numerical data might be developed out of ethnographic analysis and what kind of knowledge this approach to data would produce.

This chapter explores Richard Rorty’s pragmatist model of ‘conversational philosophy’. By experimenting with new descriptions and novel vocabularies, he aimed to break through old impasses where the conversation has lagged or stalled or been abandoned. For Rorty, experiments in ‘re-description’ potentially reignite the conversation, allowing us to undertake acts that we have never undertaken before. In this view, the point of philosophy is not to mirror the world but to enlarge our cultural repertoire, allowing us to realise new achievements. The chapter applies this approach to the work of the maverick American human geographer, William Bunge (1928¬–2013). Bunge understood maps to be geography’s language, and he believed that by changing the vocabulary of cartography he could break through the crust of previously held conventions, creating something new, potentially changing society and social relations for the better. The chapter looks at three different phases of Bunge’s experiments in cartographic re-description: his early work within spatial science on formal map transformations; his later work in black inner-city Detroit; and his last substantive work on the Nuclear war atlasto warn against atomic Armageddon.

The conclusion summarises the book’s findings about queer interethnic desire, Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the queer self in time and place. It suggests that none of the artists referenced in the book have the same relationship with Islam, and that their Muslim identity is a matter concerning their own relationship with God. It is suggested there is no queer Muslim diasporic community of writers and artists as such, but a variety of communities locally created. It is argued the work of the chosen artists is often not part of the cultural mainstream, so their visibility is still an ongoing issue. Finally, ways forward in the study of global Islam are sketched, particularly the recent flourishing of decolonial studies, with its specific focus on the role of Islam in the global South, as well as the possibility of non-literalist and mystical dimensions of Islam, such as Sufism, to offer the metaphysical conditions for decolonisation. It is finally proposed that for decolonial Islam to emerge fruitfully, it needs to remain intersectional and also transversal, uniting with heterodox Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the fight against Euro-American and Islamic hegemonies.

This chapter is devoted to a political figure, Bernadette McAliskey. As Bernadette Devlin, she came to world-wide prominence as one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and she remains an important republican, socialist and feminist activist. Drawing on her early autobiography, interviews and a selection of key speeches delivered over the course of her career, the chapter argues that her accounts of family, community and nation are in some regards strikingly different from those of female writers and artists from the Republic of Ireland. The chapter concludes with a discussion of this material focused on ideas of home, the state and incarceration.

After the rise of the studio system in the early 1920s, there was a gradual erosion of the film director's authority, and the producer was now securely in place as the key functionary. An example of the studio system's pragmatic approach is exemplified by the occasional practice of replicating a film, which saved costs on costume designing and music scoring and recording. One aspect to the studio system that was central to its evaluation procedure was the universal dependence on the preview. Making films inside the factory-oriented studio system required that they should be made within the time allocated, and the measure of this was the amount of cut footage that could be produced in a single day's filming. The shooting and editing principles that evolved through the 1930s, particularly with regard to the editing of dialogue, determined largely how sound films would be edited internationally from that point on.

Evidence seems to suggest that 1903 marked a watershed in the development of editing principles and film structure. Poaching Affray marks a kind of transition between the episodic form, with its roots in the lantern slide show, and the move towards a sophisticated film continuity. The excitement lay in those scenes which maintained a continuous time flow across adjacent aspects of a single event. A film of particular significance which constructs a narrative by carrying action across different scenes to produce an unbroken continuity is Rescued by Rover, directed by Lewis Fitzhamon who joined the Hepworth Manufacturing Company early in 1905. Nöel Burch has directed attention also to the significance of the emblematic shot which appeared regularly at the beginning or end of films between 1903 and 1906.

This chapter explores the performance practice and aesthetic of Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra. The chapter identifies the queer rasquache elements of Gómez-Peña’s performance pieces and texts, drawing on material from the 1980s to after 9/11. The chapter shows that Gómez-Peña creates an alternative North America by presenting figurative crossings of the US–Mexico border. This alternative nation is free from border concerns and founded on a radically new understanding of citizenship. In allowing his audience entry into this alternative nation state, Gómez-Peña brings together a collective (if temporary) challenge to and re-evaluation of the role of the citizen.

Pragmatism as a philosophy has emphasised the significance of process, temporality and historicity in human organisms’ transactions with their environment. This chapter explores the significance of spatiality for human–environment transactions. This is closely associated with John Dewey’s idea of ‘situation’ as capturing both immediate experience and more enduring and extensive spatial/temporal resources. Through a pragmatist idea of spatiality, as well as temporality, we might start to bring together the more vitalist pragmatism concerned with an active environment of humans, non-human organisms and objects in assemblages, and the more rationalist pragmatism that emphasises the distinctiveness of human practices (especially in language use). The chapter concludes with some illustrations from Chicago ethnography and Hull House social activism to suggest the significance of this idea of time, space and situation in problem solving, including problem solving in social science.

The Sheffield Photographic Company was a family photographic business run by Frank Mottershaw. Some of the family toured with projection equipment, giving film shows in different parts of the country and, like William Haggar, Mottershaw made his own films. Daring Daylight Burglary entered the Edison Catalogue as Daylight Robbery but little is known about Robbery of the Mail Coach which apparently no longer exists. What is clear is that Edwin Porter was inspired by Mottershaw's films to make his own version of a train robbery, for The Great Train Robbery was made later that year. It is instructive to consider the structure and editing of The Great Train Robbery because, although it marks an important point in the development of cinema, in some ways it also defines a point from which filmmaking was restarted.