Two fundamental challenges in locative Augmented Reality (AR) storytelling are collecting data about places and the lived experiences within them, and using this data to produce compelling narratives that are experienced within their original context or in new contexts. This paper introduces a multi-phased methodology that helps creators directly address both challenges. Our primary contribution is a detailed process for (1) collecting lived socio-spatial experiences and analyzing spatial configurations from a source community (e.g., a high school) using diverse, complementary methods; and (2) collaboratively synthesizing this data, with experts in situated theatre and architecture, to produce immersive AR narratives that are highly reflective of their source environment. We further show how collecting both experiential and spatial data facilitates deploying these source-based narratives in different target environments (e.g., another school or a university building). A study with 48 participants indicated that universal themes from source-synthesized stories can resonate in different contexts when the stories are deployed using our method. However, challenges remain when transferring narratives to different contexts, including contextual dissonance and complexities when applying spatial analysis metrics for adaptive deployment. This research provides a replicable methodology for the design and deployment of locative AR narratives rooted in real-world settings.

Carnival in New Orleans is a complex, vibrant field of cultural production that generates a wealth of material culture. In the small-scale, countercultural ‘new wave’ of carnival ‘krewes’ or clubs that have proliferated since Hurricane Katrina, that material culture is often handmade. Framed by Daniel Miller's dialectical theory of material culture and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork spanning several carnival seasons, this paper unpacks what is at stake in new-wave carnival's costumes, throws, and floats. We argue that making these objects makes carnival itself: the handmade things shape people's experiences of carnival, generating vivid, memorable interactions and encounters, which they later encapsulate as mementos. In their handmade-ness, carnival-makers not only recognize the effort that people put into the events, but also carnival's sociality and relationality. While Miller emphasizes ‘the humility of things,’ these things are loud and flamboyant. They nonetheless help illustrate how culture unfolds with and through stuff.

Pop-up ethnography (ethnographie ponctuelle) is a collection of ethnographic methods that can be used to capture social life at the register of spaces and times that do not belong to any particular social group or milieu. Pop-up ethnography is especially useful for studying urban public spaces, as well as time-limited events such as festivals or artistic interventions.

Carnival season in New Orleans is a playful time. People of all ages play with words as they come up with themes for floats, costumes and throws (small gifts thrown to spectators). They play with materials and crafting skills as they make these items. They play with personas, roles and hedonic pleasures as they participate in the parades and parties that culminate in Mardi Gras day. With the 2021 parades cancelled, New Orleanians set about re-imagining carnival for pandemic times, playing with its structures to be able to celebrate at a safe distance. The idea that most captured their imaginations was the Krewe of House Floats, a Twitter joke that accidentally inspired thousands of households to decorate their homes as parade floats. Drawing on anthropological and geographical approaches to play and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over seven carnival seasons, I analyze the continuities and ruptures of playful carnival practices that were manifest in the creations and testimonies of people who participated in this phenomenon, also dubbed ‘Yardi Gras’. Like regular carnival, the house floats reflected uneven access to resources, materials, and know-how. Unlike regular carnival, they featured less satire and more whimsy, and often paid tribute to beloved local cultural icons. They also resituated carnival in domestic and neighbourhood space and sociality, temporarily reversing a trend toward centralization, and were a product of pandemic-specific temporality. Because carnival is re-made every year through improvisation and responsiveness to current events, resourcefulness and creativity are built into its social structure. I argue that this is what enabled its playful reconfiguration.

All cultures enact rituals to mark or celebrate significant events. Some are rites of passage marking life stages, like initiations, weddings or funerals, while others follow an annual ritual calendar. Carnival in the Christian calendar is one of these: a period of revelry and overindulgence that culminates in Shrove Tuesday – Mardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday", a last day of fun and feasting before the fasting period of Lent, which begins the following day, Ash Wednesday, and continues until Easter Sunday, 47 days later. The earliest written records of Carnival festivities date to the twelfth century, and it is still celebrated in many places around the world.

In February-March, 2021, Hermes, a gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia about the size of two large living rooms showed an exhibition called ESCAPE / The Great Indoors. Curated by Halifax’s then Young Curator Liuba González de Armas, the exhibition brought together “cozy, bright, and colourful explorations of domestic space by four emerging artists” working with textiles, painting, installation, and social practice. In this piece, I explore ESCAPE / The Great Indoors through interviews with the curator and one of the artists, its written documentation, and my responses to the pieces. The exhibition’s playful retreat into the inner sanctums of our homes—our bathrooms, bedsides, and bellies—seems to be a panacea for the agoraphobic times of the pandemic. However, it also presents a soft pandemic politics, playful but stitched through with threads of both anxiety and solidarity. The curator’s statement stresses the social over the solo: “the artists draw meaning from connections with themselves, others, culture, and the more-than-human.” ESCAPE / The Great Indoors folds back the screen around private space to invite the public in to listen to the artists’ stories and call up their own.

In this editorial, Martha Radice, JUE's Editor-in-Chief for seven years, discusses her work and contributions to the JUE.

As tensions around the politics of race, ethnicity, and culture move back toward the centre stage of politics in the global north, it becomes ever more important to investigate how social relations between diverse groups play out in everyday urban life. Many studies of urban diversity rely on in-depth interviews or focus groups reflecting on the topic as their main method, while the growing number that include observation in public often say little about what these methods contribute specifically. I argue that to describe and understand social relations in multiethnic cities, we need to use methods that are appropriate to the register of urban public space - methods that match and capture the kinds of interactions and expressions of views that occur in public. I discuss the strengths and limitations of methods that help achieve this objective. I call them 'pop-up ethnography', a term that reflects both their serendipitous development and their contrast at social and spatial levels with traditional immersive ethnography. Place still matters as we try to understand everyday cohabitation in diverse cities.

New Orleans was one of the first cities in the USA to be severely affected by the COVID‑19 pandemic. This article draws on long-term ethnography and recent remote fieldwork to explore how new-wave carnival krewes in New Orleans responded to the pandemic. New-wave krewes are one of the kinds of social clubs that produce carnival each year. During the first four months of the pandemic, some of them undertook various kinds of projects within their membership and in the broader community. I propose that these projects have three overlapping dimensions: creativity, sociability, and solidarity. My argument is that because they are so enmeshed in the social fabric of New Orleans, new-wave carnival krewes provided a solid foundation for social initiatives that sought to alleviate the existential and material insecurity of the pandemic. I further argue that carnival has emerged as an important way for New Orleanians to make the imaginative connection between the personal and the social that is necessary for grasping the scope of COVID‑19. More broadly, I contribute to what Joel Robbins has called an “anthropology of the good” in social relations.

American EthnologistVolume 47, Issue 3 p. 348-349 Book Review Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization. Emanuela Guano. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 248 pp. MARTHA RADICE, MARTHA RADICE Dalhousie UniversitySearch for more papers by this author MARTHA RADICE, MARTHA RADICE Dalhousie UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12950Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume47, Issue3August 2020Pages 348-349 RelatedInformation

This article introduces the issue and provides a short guide to the JUE publication process.

In this commentary, I argue that Lived Experiences of Multiculture makes a significant contribution to analyses of contemporary urban diversity, particularly in its innovative comparative research design and strong place-based analysis. However, I suggest that it needs a more thorough analysis of the forms and qualities of sociality at stake in everyday multiculture, which will help us think through the potential compatibility of the concepts of conviviality and community.

Temporary public art installations are an increasingly common sight in industrialized cities. This reflects local government and civic organizations' interest in the potential social and economic benefits of art, as well as artists and curators' interest in engaging the public. Yet little systematic social-scientific attention is paid to the ways that public art, once installed, affects its site, and the ways that people interact with it. How can these artworks be understood as public? What kinds of urban publics do they produce? Approaching these questions as an urban anthropologist, I analyze ethnographic material from two pieces. One of these pieces was Kim Morgan's 2006 work Time Transit, a mixed-media installation on an operational city bus in Regina, Saskatchewan, which invited passengers to co-produce the art via text messages. The other piece was Situated Cinema-created by Tom Evans, Craig Rodmore, and Will Vachon in 2012-a demountable micro-cinema that moved to different sites in Winnipeg, Manitoba, projecting short experimental films about cities. Analysis of the 3,960 text messages sent during Time Transit and interviews and observations conducted at Situated Cinema shows that each installation intervened in the socio-spatial dialectic of its sites in original and sometimes unanticipated ways. Moreover, each produced and mediated public dialogue in a distinct sense and to different degrees. I conclude by reflecting on what an ethnographic approach can reveal about the publicness of public artand what it might leave out.

combinable medium: a method able to not only integrate other coding systems but to uphold one’s ability to write more vibrant ethnographies (8, 16) or even to support the analysis of photographs (43). Nonetheless, the book could have benefitted from more attention to the history of drawing in anthropology. While it is clear that Causey aims to show others ways of implementing drawing in ethnographic research, my own experience in taking visual field notes and teaching graphic anthropology convinces me that this very goal would be more easily reached with more consideration to the circumvolutions of drawing in the discipline. That is, I would welcome not only a history of the rejection of drawing by anthropologists, but a reflexive work that integrates the evolution of the uses, tools and techniques of drawing and other modes of inscription with the unfolding of anthropological theories and paradigms. Such a perspective would better inform the reader on the (un)conscious ideas that sustain specific drawing styles and practices. While palpable in Causey’s words, this important perspective on the non-neutrality of graphic styles deserved a more direct focus. On top of this, such a discussion could help us expand our imagination about drawing exercises that are pertinent to the anthropological project. I also wonder if the main advantages of drawing lie in the drawing process as a way of ‘‘seeing’’ or rather in the social performance of drawing as ethnographic participation in the field. Getting confident with taking the notebook out of the pocket and making its contents public, having a reason to be somewhere for an extended period, fighting boredom, getting people curious about the ethnographer’s interests and supporting collaboration with informants are just a few reasons to encourage ethnographers to use drawing not only as an introspective process of ‘‘seeing’’ but as social practice in the field. As I have learned by leading graphic anthropology workshops in an ethnographic field school, this practice requires training and deserves calibrated etudes as well (think about graphic interviews and the challenge of speaking and listening as you draw). For this reason, I think more incentives to draw in situ to facilitate interactions between ethnographers and informants could be valuable additions to consider. But these are minor critiques of what stands out as an original and considerable contribution to making drawing a sound medium of ethnographic research, written in an accessible style and likely to encourage ethnographers to not only develop but share graphic experiences.