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.”