This chapter outlines the ethnographic and qualitative methodology employed in this study. The methodological choices focus on understanding language ideologies in a multilingual setting. The study does not engage in a linguistic focus on speech patterns and instead emphasizes the cultural and social meanings that speakers attach to language. It challenges monolingual, Western-centric assumptions by exploring complex links between language and social structures. Data collection included interviews, field notes, observations, classroom recordings, and surveys on language use. The study uses grounded theory to analyse data, and it prioritizes speakers’ perspectives as experts of their own language culture. The chapter argues that decolonising research practices have to treat local language ideologies as legitimate frameworks rather than folk beliefs. A linguistic analysis examines public English, inspecting its variability and influence from both local and external norms. By integrating linguistic, cultural, and social data, the methodological approach provides a holistic view of how language ideologies emerge and intersect with broader social discourses.

The chapter explores the social relations of renewable energy and everyday life in the Indian state of Karnataka, focusing on the 2 GW Pavagada solar energy park, said to be the largest in Asia, and on the experience of wind energy at the local level. It analyses these installations in the historical context of national and state-level energy policy, framed by wider developmental dynamics and stratification in the Karnataka locality. We contrast the renewable ‘resource’ with fossil fuel sources and highlight differences between solar and wind power. We discuss the drive to attract renewable investment to the region, along with development finance, in the context of Karnataka’s development trajectory. We interpret the transition to renewable energy in terms of social structures and the extent to which it exacerbates or alleviates pre-existing social divides. There is a strong focus on implications for land, water, livelihood, caste, gender, and environment, including for instance the role, or displacement, of rural landless and lower-caste groups.

The chapter centres on the expansion of wind power and the subsequent ‘solar rush’ in the German ‘energy state’ of Brandenburg, where the energy transition (or Energiewende) has been underway for more than two decades. We follow the unfolding process of renewable energy development and socio-ecological capture, paying particular attention to the changing scale of operations exemplified by a move to larger wind turbines and the current shift to large-scale solar farms. The chapter provides a rich account of the nexus between a well-established renewables sector and other forms of land use, such as leisure, aesthetics, agriculture, or forestry. The conflict between narratives of regional and local development, prompted, defined, and mobilised in the energy transition, is seen as opening new fields of engagement and disputation in the emerging ‘green’ economy.

The chapter focuses on South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf region in South Australia, which now aspires to 500% renewable energy by 2050. The state has access to world-best onshore wind and solar, with downstream industrial linkages that are now fuelling new spatio-temporal planning horizons. While the state promotes the new energy industry as a ‘green’ industrial economy, ethnographic research reveals mixed outcomes. Local socio-ecological relations are changing favourably for some groups, such as for host landowners and Aboriginal native title holders. Others find themselves left out or further marginalised. Post-construction, renewable energy installations offer few jobs, in localities where unemployment rates are high. Dissatisfaction erupts during the project application processes, where the limits of local demands for meaningful involvement, equitable sharing of benefits, and accountable planning regulation become clear. These, we argue, pose significant threats to the social legitimacy of renewable energy.

The Northern Crusades came to an end not with the formal conversion of Lithuania but with the victory of Poland and Lithuania over the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Grunwald in 1410. This victory made possible the conversion of Samogitia and, by the 1440s, the final neutralisation of paganism as a political force in the Baltic. However, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople intensified curiosity about non-Christian religions and peoples from beyond the edges of Christendom and coincided with the rise of a new humanist ethnography grounded in curiosity about human nature as well as a desire to convert people to Christianity. This chapter examines the responses of the fifteenth-century humanist project to the apparent survival of pockets of pre-Christian religion from Vilnius to Tenerife, paying attention to the ways in which this discourse anticipated debates that would follow European voyages to the New World. The chapter considers the unique contribution of Pawel Wlodkowic in arguing for the rights of unchristianised peoples and assesses the reliability of humanist ethnographies as a source for pre-Christian religions. The chapter argues that ‘mere Christianisation’, a surface identification with Christianity, was often enough in this period for a region to be assimilated to Christendom.

In the post-World War II era, international lawyers have occupied the front seat in the study of international organisations (IOs). During the past decade, this disciplinary hierarchy has grown to feel increasingly unsatisfying. This chapter offers an anthropological take on the study of IOs building both on the past decade of anthropological work and my ethnography at the UN Human Rights Committee. IOs are frequently accused of ineffectiveness embedded in endless paper-pushing techniques. In this chapter, I engage with these criticisms and ask: can we find another perspective from which to assess effectiveness? What happens if we stop investing our analytical attention in what we think IO operations and their desired ‘impacts’ should be and instead engage in non-normative inquiries into what IOs actually do? I explore what can we learn about IOs’ visions for world improvement by focusing on the legal technicalities and material forms that define their operations. I propose that, instead of a hindrance or distraction, these forms embody ‘standards for a better world’ that are an essential component of IOs’ civilising mission.

The introduction explains the setting of the ethnography at the intersections of law, NGOs, the Indian state, and the global anti-trafficking regime. It explains the sequence of interventions the book will follow, from rescues to courts to shelters, prescribed by Indian law and implemented by legal actors and NGOs. It lays out the sites and processes the book will explore through encounters between those implementing these interventions, and those experiencing them. It outlines the book’s central aims: how it uses the intersections of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions as points of entry to foreground how sex workers navigate them, critique the prevalent assumptions and preferred solutions of the global anti-trafficking regime, and explore the complex relationship between law and NGOs in India. It discusses the broader concerns and approaches these interventions bring to the governance of prostitution – global humanitarianism, policing and criminal justice, the paternalism of the Indian state and NGOs, neoliberal women’s empowerment programs, and an anti-immigrant sociopolitical climate. The introduction also explains the author’s methods, research design, and positionality, and the organization of the book.

This chapter introduces the book, laying out its central questions, including what it means to be postdigital, what diverse kinds of life and humanity can be found in screens, and what new technologies such as automation and AI might mean for screen lives. Chapter 1 also describes both the background and aspirations of the book, as well as its structure and a guide on how to approach reading it. Beyond discussing the defining research questions, this chapter also details the ideas underpinning the book, including the notion that there has been a tangible shift between how we related to screens a decade ago and how we do now. In addition, the book is guided by an awareness of the often conflicting and intricate relationships people have with screens, as well as the concept of the ‘smallness of screen lives’, inspired by Deborah Hicks’ notion. The Comfort of Screens is a tapestry which unfolds a story of postdigital life, sewn from the fabric of 17 people’s screen lives, interviews with whom form the backbone of the book. These ‘crescent voices’ are also introduced in this chapter.

This autobiographical fragment begins in a working-class high school and traces a career trajectory shaped by the world I grew up in and the world I entered. As a White woman from an American working-class background, I was an uneasy fit for the academy, circa 1979. I experienced obstacles and intellectual pleasures. I found many fascinating topics to study (e.g., class and cultural variation in early narrative) and many fascinating colleagues and students to work with. The outsider/insider position I occupied offered novel vantage points on the what, who, and how of developmental inquiry and on its telling omissions. My story of marginalization intersected with a historical moment when developmental psychology began to reckon with its narrowness and ethnocentrism. Thanks to the efforts of many developmental scholars, the field is now headed in a more context-sensitive and pluralistic direction while still contending with entrenched deficit discourses and other blind spots.