This article explores how researchers adapt to disruptions that cost them access to their field sites, advancing a uniquely sociological perspective on the dynamics of flexibility and adaptation in qualitative methods. Through interviews with 31 ethnographers whose access was preempted or eliminated, I find that adaptation varied systematically…

The Alien Worlds project teaches ethnographic skills using the societies of dystopian, postapocalyptic, and science fiction texts as imagined field sites and targets for analysis. These exercises and assignments, which illustrate principles of qualitative fieldwork, were developed when COVID-19 precautions made it impossible to assign tasks that…

What is education, and who counts as an 'educated person' amidst competing religious, political, and pedagogical ideologies, which have shaped contemporary educational practices and institutions in Nepal? How have social and political changes, an increasing commodification of education, a continued reliance on foreign aid, and expanded…

"Pastimes" (7th ed.) introduces the phenomenon of leisure and reflects a wide range of material from the disciplines of leisure studies, sociology, psychology, economics, political science, history, anthropology, geography, the humanities, and media and cultural studies. This book discusses leisure from personal, societal, and systems…

In an institution where assessment was viewed as meaningless box-checking for the purpose of accreditation, a new reflective assessment practice changed 15 faculty members' perception of assessment in a single semester. Piloted with an interdisciplinary graduation requirement for Cultural Competency, the new assessment practice became a powerful…

Key features of open video repositories (OVRs) are outlined, followed by brief descriptions of specific websites relevant to the social sciences. Although most were created by instructors over the past 10 years to facilitate teaching and learning, significant variation in kind, quality, and number per discipline were discovered. Economics and…

Students often fail to develop a sophisticated understanding of scientific topics despite years of formal education designed to help them do so. Through studying how students learn the physical sciences, conceptual change researchers have amassed a large body of evidence that people, rather than being empty vessels who passively accept scientific…

In the past decade, there has been a growing recognition that society's emphasis on speed and efficiency came with some costs: a loss of the ability to appreciate activities and understand their meanings. Recently, this meta-movement has made its way into the literature on literacy, causing the author to embark on an investigation into the…

The proficiency in vernacular has long been a methodological ethos pervasive among field researchers and--despite new dynamics of fieldwork--still overshadows discussions related to collaboration with translators and interpreters, which are either marginalized or hidden within the category of a 'research assistant'. The purpose of this study is to…

Secular scholars have criticized Christian education and counseling on sex as restrictive, ineffective, and outdated. The authors of the current study explored both common non-Christian and Christian approaches to human sexuality with reference to overarching domains of religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Secular…

To what extent, and why, do social science undergraduates experience anxiety about taking statistics courses? Despite holding assumptions of rampant statistics anxiety among students, sociologists have conducted few empirical studies of this issue. We extend the literature by analyzing data from a survey of sociology, social work, and criminal…

This paper explores the potential of observational sketching as a social science research tool, informed by our own recent experiments with observational sketching techniques and approaches. We first outline the historical roots of academic sketching and note a recent resurgence of interest in sketching in certain disciplines. We then introduce…

Historically, black women's hair has been a site where power and social relations are defined. In Puerto Rico, cultural production has been critical in perpetuating as well as in contesting the prevailing white European ideal of beauty and its impact on women's hairstyling practices. Nevertheless, the link between aesthetic preferences and the…

This article argues that cross-disciplinary linkages -- that is, relationships among phenomena studied by those in different disciplines -- often serve to destabilize, at least temporarily, systems of stability that are theorized to operate within the sets of phenomena studied within most disciplines. It surveys across disciplines both systems of…

This book brings an international group of writers together to offer an authoritative state-of-the-art review of, and critical reflection on, educational ethnography as it is being theorized and practiced today--from rural and remote settings to virtual and visual posts. It provides a definitive reference point and academic resource for those…