Based on the argument developed throughout the book, emancipation is shown to be a process which potentializes relations of commoning in the direction of equality and solidarity. This concluding chapter summarizes the argument and shows how the different forms of spatiality through which contemporary urban form and experience is shaped (territory, public space, housing and object) define possible levels of spatial organization in which inhabited space is potentialized through commoning. In the cases explored in this book, spaces of commoning were actualized not as bounded places but as areas with porous boundaries. The Zapatista territory, the Bon Pastor, and La Polvorilla neighborhoods, the occupied spaces of the squares movement and the alternative learning space developed out of an arrangement of collectively constructed chairs, are all spaces that communicate with their outside. Thus, in conclusion, it is suggested that the image and the experience of the threshold becomes important, both as part of an interpretative effort and as part of an emerging spatial politics of emancipatory commoning. Commoning as a force that challenges enclosure may flourish in open communities which develop by including newcomers. Commoning is a process that gestures towards an emancipating society as long as it becomes metastatic, ever-expanding, and inclusive.

Old age in America represents the antithesis of American culture because cherished American values (e.g., independence, health, and productivity) become harder to achieve as people grow older. Thus, older Americans are ‘oppressed’ by cultural demands. This chapter explores how they negotiate the gap between the ideal (e.g., being independent) and the real (e.g., needing assistance), drawing on the data from my longitudinal research at a senior center. To discover elders’ strategies, I examine their social exchange and postretirement housing and demonstrate how their endeavour to conform to dominant values ‒ most importantly, independence, egalitarianism, and freedom of choice ‒ motivates and shapes their actions. Paradoxically, elders negotiate the reality within the realm of the very culture that oppresses them. Such seemingly contradictory actions are not only possible but also normal in human experience, because, as Bailey shows us in his works, sociocultural systems do not exist in the abstract but are embodied in people’s lives and shaped through their agency. Consequently, no matter how despotic the systems may seem, leeway always exists even for the most disadvantaged, invoking people’s ingenuity to achieve their goals.

This chapter considers the Indian state, which invariably mirrors the behaviour of the individual patriarchal predator rather than taking on the protective role it owes to female, femme and queer citizens. It asks whether the MeToo movement in India sufficiently addressed the role of the state in perpetuating cultures of patriarchal violence against the most vulnerable.

What is clear from the #MeToo moment is that the more visible sexual violation becomes, the more contested will be its meanings and implications. Now more than ever, the emotional energy (moral outrage, fear, anger) emitted by accounts of sexual attack gets appropriated for purposes far removed from the primary victims. There is more policing of what rape victims say than the rapes themselves. A dominant response to the greater visibility of victims of sexual attack worldwide is to marginalise victims’ perspectives and appropriate the issue for anti-feminist aims such as imperialist, anti-immigration, racist and xenophobic politics. This chapter focuses on the South African context where the heightened politicisation of sexual violence is most often tied to anxieties around black rule and the sovereignty of the new (nation-)state, instead of being drawn upon to further a feminist agenda of greater gender justice post-apartheid. Thus, typically, the ‘emotional capital’ or energy released by the suffering of rape victims is lifted away from them and their needs and deployed in the service of either racist or anti-racist masculinist-nationalist agendas. The chapter argues that what is needed in this context is to relentlessly centre the actual victim perspectives, of which the great majority are poorer women and children. Furthermore, it will claim that in contemporary South Africa, it is particularly pertinent for the pursuit of gender justice to include in this kind of feminist activism the voices of male prisoner victims of sexual violence.

This chapter reflects the main ‘lesson’ I drew from the experience of doing a PhD in Bailey’s department at Sussex – the lesson being the virtues of understanding ‘big level’ phenomena by ‘soaking and poking’ at street level. I’ve written a lot about the World Bank with this approach. My chapter starts with reference to Tomas Piketty’s recent Capitalism and Ideology, in which he gives ‘ideology’ (or ‘mindset’ or ‘world view’) much more causal role – in income/wealth inequality trends – than other economists do. Then on to the Washington Consensus ideology, dominant in western capitals since 1980s, about appropriate public policies for developing countries. My interest is in how its dominance has been protected, via ‘the social construction of reality’. Then to ethnography – of a particular two-day meeting at UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade & Development, based in Geneva) I attended in 2012, on ‘rethinking trade policy’ with some 30 people (as I recall, offhand). I bring out how little rethinking there was, by design. The ‘rethinking’ meeting confirmed the Washington Consensus – which is all the more striking, because UNCTAD is the one UN development agency meant to be run by and for developing countries.

In this chapter the author reflects on his experiences of respondent validation following a publisher’s acceptance of a book proposal, which was based on ethnographic fieldwork he had conducted with a social work team for his doctoral thesis. The author was surprised to find that the participants in his study were initially resistant to the idea of the publication of the book, and he experienced guilt as he realised that he had presented two distinct versions of himself to participants: his affable ‘field self’ and the more critical ‘author self’. The author’s experience of leaving, and then returning to, the field has provided insight into the way that social life can create conflicting selves that exist authentically, depending on the social context. The self is a dynamic, performative process, not a state of being, and its forms coalesce according to people, place and time. Most of the time, we shift between selves smoothly and without giving our fragmentation thought. Doing ethnography can force us to confront the dissonance of different selves that are equally real and authentic, because, by its very nature, it requires that we encounter the field self from the perspective of the authorial self. Engaging in respondent validation lays the otherwise hidden ‘author self’ bare to participants, and this provides an unsettling challenge for the management of field relations.

This chapter discusses different modes of reflexivity accompanying (re)entering and (re)leaving the field. The focus is a specific ‘intermission’ in fieldwork; how it shapes the field and becomes a moment of transition in reflexive thinking. The details are from an ethnographic study of homeless outreach workers in Manhattan. The discussion is of realising the potentialities of the boundaries of this fieldsite – which are anthropologically clear (geographically and temporally) but sociologically blurry (exploring ‘homelessness’ as a subject) – and are affected by different modes of reflexivity. This emphasises the significance of an ‘intermission’ as a time to develop sociological reasoning and review how ‘the field’ might be getting done. The chapter discusses how ‘intermissions’ provide the opportunity to engage in at least three modes of reflexivity: Anthropological/Ethnographic, Philosophical and Ethnomethodological. This addresses how leaving the field – geographically, temporarily and permanently, and reflexively – can assist the researcher in seeing the field and the social phenomena. The idea of an ‘intermission’ is not intended as a methodological prescription but as a conceptual tool for thinking reflexively with ‘initial observations’ and, further, as an ongoing process of reflexivity and analysis throughout the research process both in and out of the field. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how leaving the field in combination with such reflexive concepts might enable the researcher to identify social resources and social phenomena, and distinguish this from preconceived notions; making way for a deep engagement with the ethnographic method, the fieldsite and fieldnotes as data.

Over a four-year period, we engaged in a community-based post-critical ethnography in Riverhill – a mid-sized city located in southern Appalachia in the United States. Beginning in 2007, a non-profit organization placed Burundians in public housing projects in Riverhill. Through English as a Second Language tutoring and a small interdisciplinary research team, we met with Burundian children and families the next year. Most Burundians came to the United States from refugee camps in Tanzania, Republic of Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This chapter, traces the authors’ layered and multiple exits from living in Riverhill. Specifically, the authors mark exits from some places and people within the community and the exit from an interdisciplinary research team itself, and from thresholds of communication and relationships that became unbearable to maintain. Haunted by what was, and in touch with some of what is through connections with some members of Burundian families through social media, they authors use autoethnographic reflection alongside fieldnotes and e-mail communication, and interactive interviews with each other, to represent the ways of living through and living with entrances and exits. Some of the exits easiest to leave personally were the hardest to give up professionally. Among their exits the authors focus on what shattered all preparation and expectation, their privileges that allowed them to leave Riverhill as a place once lived, and their thoughts of the children, now young adults, who never leave them at all.

In October 2017, a law school student in California posted a list on the social media platform Facebook of Indian men accused of sexual harassment. In response, within a day, a group of feminists had posted a statement asking the group that had posted the list to consider due process rather than anonymous accusations with ‘no context or explanation’. These two texts became the subject of an intense and fraught debate among feminists in India. This chapter focuses on feminist arguments, disagreements and solidarities in the wake of #MeToo rather than on the debates surrounding sexual harassment itself. Rather than sexual harassment, it was feminism which became the subject of contestation. This chapter traces narratives from this debate and engages in conversations with feminists to think back to that moment. The chapter is located around the idea of what it calls internet time and its capacities to reshape the trajectory of feminist debates. It reflects on what it means to have an argument in internet time. What does it mean to engage as feminists with each other in the online space? What are the specific pressures and anxieties produced by articulations and disagreements in online spaces? How might one reflect on the question of disagreement, especially disagreement with allies, in a time of social media? And how might one think of and construct the possibilities and circumscriptions of feminist solidarities in internet time, in messy circumstances?

This chapter shows how the #MeToo moment in India became an important turning point for the engagement of Indian women’s movements with legal processes Based on an autoethnographic account of being a member of university committees framing anti-sexual harassment policies and dealing with complaints, it also examines the specific site of complaints committees in Indian higher education institutions in the context of #MeToo. Finally, in mapping vast changes to the legal and institutional landscape of sexual harassment in India, it reflects on the ‘messiness’ of these spaces and insists on the role of care and conversation in feminist debates and their engagements with the law and university complaints processes.

This chapter draws inspiration from F. G. Bailey’s The Witch Hunt (1996, Cornell University Press) to analyse an instance of political conflict from a growing transnational field of epidemiological researcher-advocates who are working to promote Indigenous health equity. While Bailey’s ethnographic focus on the Indian village of Bisipara in the 1950s may seem worlds apart from transnational Indigenous activism at the turn of the 21st century, his attention to how participants in political conflicts regularly reframe what others experience as injustice in morally positive terms, as they attempt to achieve their own agendas, remain timely and relevant. In The Witch Hunt: Or, the Triumph of Morality, Bailey documents how key participants in a conflict in the village of Bisipara ended up framing the persecution of one man as a morally appropriate act in support of the collective good. For comparison, I draw an example from the twists and turns of a political conflict in Aotearoa New Zealand, in which Māori researchers have contended with recurrent political efforts to deny copious evidence that ethnicity patterns health and social inequities, and responded to the ways in which proponents of these denials have attempted to invoke the positive moral rubric of ‘fairness’.

This chapter approaches bureaucracies as mechanistic systems struggling to perform functions that are suited to entrepreneurial styles of modern management. In resource-scarce communities facing droughts or poverty, the system functions in an environment of uncertainty or dynamism. As a result, such bureaucracies must wrestle with choice among normative, strategic, and pragmatic rules (Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils 2001) of their institutions in order to cope with influences coming from the top down, from the state, and from the bottom up, from community-based organizations. This choice among normative, pragmatic, and strategic rules by the bureaucracy is the ad hoc response to the asymmetrical flow of information resulting from the contingencies thrust upon them by the politicians and or the ordinary people. Case studies from the internationally implemented Participatory Irrigation Management Program in Sri Lanka, India and the Philippines and the Quantification Settlement Agreement in Imperial Valley, California, are used to illustrate how these choices result in different outcomes at variance to the original goals.

This Editors’ Introduction reviews existing literature on ‘leaving’, as well as highlighting how the actual business of exiting a research setting has, by and large, been neglected in accounts of fieldwork. We find this odd, given recent moves toward open and ‘confessional’ forms of methodological writing. We also make a strong case for examining exits as a meaningful stage of the research process, rather than a bookend to it. We provide our own tales of exiting (or not…) our own field sites in order to suggest that the last day can be just as generative of insight as the first. We introduce the chapters across the four sections of the book and, in sum, argue for the need for all ethnographers to experience exits, and the difficulties or impossibilities thereof, as active researchers.