“The goal, as we have come to understand it, is not to bring knowledge to the public. It is to excavate where knowledge is already being made — in the pottery household, on the factory floor, in the walking interview, in the room where parents finally get to speak — and to create the conditions under which that making can be seen, heard, and taken seriously. That is what these seven pieces do. That is what we are trying to build.”

“When we place two images side by side, we create a diptych, which asks the viewer to read them against or along each other. I decided to produce a series of black-and-white and colour diptychs depicting these opposite worlds. But as the pairings took shape, I realised the diptychs were doing something more than merely comparing — they were making an argument. Colour held the embodied knowledge, the cultural inheritance, and the texture of life organised around craft. Black and white depicted extraction, speed, and the monstrosity of mass production.”

“A 36-year-old mother from the Bargaon block, for instance, described leaving home before sunrise to attend a school meeting. She walked to the main road, took a shared transport, travelled around 35 km to attend the Parent-Teacher Meeting, and returned late in the evening, losing a full day’s wage. “If I don’t go,” she told me, “they think I don’t care. But if I go, we don’t earn that day.” She paused, as if weighing the decision again. For her, participation was not about willingness. Rather, it was shaped by what she could afford.”

“Keeping these questions front and centre, my co-researchers and I set out to design a community-evolved and community-focused resource that could forefront these complexities and contradictions. By the end of the project, however, I had emerged with more than just a toolkit; rather, with a renewed affirmation in the power, possibility, and politics of feminist ethnographic practice rooted in shared responsibility, memory, and emotions (which define feminist ethnographic approaches. “

“The problem sharpens when placed alongside what the decree is trying to protect. The knowledge at the heart of Decreto 473 — the geometric patterns woven into the community’s huipiles, the stories behind each band of embroidery, the technique of the backstrap loom — is precisely the kind of knowledge that cannot be inherited. It has to be learned.”

“The project asked a deceptively simple question: how should the small towns of the southern Plains imagine the future use of their historic agricultural and civic infrastructure — gins, grain elevators, feedlots, courthouses, downtown storefronts — given declining tax bases, aging populations, and the slow erosion of the fabric that once held communities together? Our studio’s working hypothesis, which we carried into the project before that first meeting, was that the answer could not be designed for these communities from the outside; it had to be designed with them.”

“The walking ethnography is a tool for embodied learning – a process in which the researcher decenters themselves, and instead lets movements, sights, sounds, and hearing lead the way. Through this emplacement, the walking ethnography took me away from the top-down analysis of my initial research and embedded me within the fabric of a neighborhood facing multiple forms of gentrification, environmental fallout, and public health issues. Triangulated with other qualitative methodologies, the walking ethnography can be a vehicle for connecting the past to the present, and for interrogating the multiple visions, framings, and understandings of complex social processes in the world around us. “

“As I grew older, I kept my artistic heritage alive. Although I went on to study literature, folklore, and earned different certifications, one aspect of childhood stayed with me- the touch of clay and its stories. When I further entered the world of professional art, I felt a tension with what kind of knowledge was seen as legitimate. These academic spaces insinuated – or claimed directly – that knowledge is valued when it is written, structured, and formally taught.”

We are thrilled to present the inaugural issue of Semi-Structured, an open-access journal from the Public Ethnography Lab dedicated to showcasing ethnography as it unfolds in the world. This journal exists because we believe ethnographic work matters beyond the academy—that the insights generated through sustained engagement with communities, organizations, and institutions can and should inform decisions, shape practices, and drive meaningful change.

What does ethnography look like when global agendas encounter local worlds? In what follows, I attempt to address this question from my own situated experience. The very month I completed my PhD viva voce, I stepped into a professional world I had only encountered from its margins. I began working in the Monitoring and Evaluation Area of a Latin American NGO with an office in Argentina, where I was hired to coordinate research and publications.Until then, my knowledge of the “third sector” (that is, non-profit organizations) came from sporadic collaborations through community projects and university outreach initiatives

On 30 July 2025, at 9:00 a.m.‌, parents, NGO‌ practitioners, government representatives, and academic ‌scholar‌s gathered at Nigat Hotel‌ in Yabello for the workshop. This gathering marked the beginning of the research validation works‌hop for my doctoral study ‌entitled "An Ethnographic Look into Early Childhood Development (ECD) Interventions among the Borana Oromo Pastoralists of Southern Ethiopia." Participants took their seats wit‌h a shared sense of purpose, recognizing that the workshop created an exceptional opportunity for ‌parents and practitioners to sit together and share ideas on equal terms.

“The requirements laid out by the IRB cannot fully address the complexities of conducting collaborative research. IRB guidelines function as ethical standardization but also serve to protect institutions from legal liability. Once a project receives IRB approval, it becomes legitimized in academic eyes, yet the IRB "operates as an instrument of neoliberal consciousness biased heavily towards the positivist, the quantifiable, and a definition of evidence that is startlingly narrow" (Chin 2013: 202).”

“The point is to merge social and infrastructural knowledge into integrated solutions that address flooding's disruption of museum operations (now and next winter) while enabling museum futures to emerge through design concepts for managing the swelling river (time horizon: 2050). Environmental planning alone won’t suffice. You need ethnography.”

“Yet cultural expertise is not without tensions. Anthropologists grapple with essentializing cultures in legal contexts that demand bounded definitions, risk reinforcing stereotypes when explaining “cultural difference,” and must navigate the politics of representing communities in adversarial settings.”