The history of ethnomethodology is outlined, along with the context in which it arose. Responses to it from conventional sociologists are noted. The character of ethnomethodology is sketched, and the question of whether or not it constitutes a methodology is addressed. Summaries of later chapters in the book are provided.

John Burton's conflict and conflict resolution theories demonstrate the use of human needs theory and medical metaphors in peace and conflict studies. Implicit denial of the importance of culture in human affairs is at the very core of his theory of international conflict resolution. The strong universalising tendencies constitute his theory as a form of totalist theorising in the social sciences. In order for a problem-solving conflict resolution attempt to be successful, a dialogical community is necessary in which the parties can scrutinise each other's views of reality. In such a community the understanding of the uniqueness of the characteristics of the conflict at hand is developed by the facilitator and the parties themselves. The conceptual and theoretical framework suggested in this book can be translated into ten practical non-totalist guidelines for international conflict resolution, and especially for problem-solving conflict resolution. This chapter summarizes these for international problem-solving conflict resolution.

Football is an emotional game. Emotions are not restricted to the agony and ecstasy of victory or defeat, but the warmth of friendships and relationships built through engaging with other fans and clubs. Emotions are a primary constituent of social life and how we build relationships, yet they have been absent from the analysis of football fandom. The ultras’ performance helps generate the emotional atmosphere at matches and this sustains the emotional engagement with their club. It builds solidarity, motivates conflict and links individuals to the collective behaviour of the stadium. This emotional engagement also acts as the driver for political mobilisation around issues that affect their club, the sport or the groups.

This introduction provides a rationale for querying and queering the way state citizenship functions. Beginning from a reading of Indigenous author Thomas King’s 1993 short story, ‘Borders’, the introduction offers a justification for rethinking citizenship. Drawing on border studies, queer theory, and political developments at North American borders since 9/11, the introduction shows how reading can translate into civic action that foregrounds recognition, rights, and representation in North America.

While immigration policy making has traditionally been the sole prerogative of nation-states, recent research has documented increased instances of migration policy making at sub-national levels across migrant receiving societies. These findings have begun to bring attention to the ways in which immigration policy is now being set through the actions of lower levels of government. This chapter extends these findings, arguing for attention to the role of sub-national actors in defining the politics of contemporary processes of migration, settlement, and incorporation. The chapter engages with these broader issues by discussing a group of sub-national actions, the implementation of migrant labour market regularisations (LRs) in the US. LRs are discrete arenas of policy making at the sub-national level that affect aspects of migrant workers' status and include laws and ordinances related to anti-solicitation, language access, local enforcement of federal immigration law, and employment verification. The chapter thus builds on findings from individual case studies, through an analysis of a unique national dataset of over 3,000 LRs passed in US counties and municipalities between 2001 and 2015. In doing so, the chapter provides a national perspective on the social, economic, and political processes influencing the adoption of LRs over time and across space.

This chapter explores Dominican-American author Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Reading the novel as a Caribbean text that offers a revisionist history of the Dominican Republic, the chapter theorises how Diaz crafts a ‘dictator-narrator’ in protagonist Yunior, whose presence allows readers to reflect not only on the dangers of dictatorship but also on the transformative possibilities of multilingual, hemispheric citizenship. At its core, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao allows readers to reflect on the hybridity of contemporary American literature, offering routes to conceiving of citizenship as an archipelago of rights and responsibilities, as well as readerly, participatory, and queer.

This chapter examines a range of Canadian Métis writer Gregory Scofield’s poetry, exploring his revisionist treatment of the history of the Métis and other Indigenous people in Canada. As it provides a history of the Métis, the chapter also explores the impact of Scofield’s two-spirit queer identification, his codeswitching, and his community work, on his poetry. Writing in Métis and two-spirit vernaculars, Scofield’s hybrid vernacular texts become vehicles for his critique of Canadian citizenship in the case of the Métis.

Football fandom is an important area of research that covers a wide range of activities, people and places around the world. This chapter introduces the ultras style of fandom and situates it within the wider academic literature on football fandom. It highlights how fandom meets in the broader public sphere and engages politically within the wider politico-economic changes in football, and wider social world. Within the football stadium, there is a performance of fans’ identities which helps generate and sustain their emotions. Significantly, fandom is emotionally charged and this fuels the ultras’ engagement in the sport, but also their interactions, relationships and sense of individual and collective self.

This chapter investigates the intensification of data practices that has occurred over the last decades in the environmental sciences. Moving away from a critical focus on the commodification of the environment, the chapter examines how a recent international databasing initiative in Global Earth Observations can be understood through the critical analytic of the archive. However, a focus only on the archival logics of such infrastructural data practices risks losing sight of other important elements of emergent data-driven scientific landscapes. One such element is data collection. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a large-scale Earth Systems project in the Brazilian Amazon, in comparison with a historical analysis of British colonial collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chapter argues that paying attention to data collection as a process of both appropriation and transformation is crucial for understanding the relations that constitute contemporary scientific knowledge production.