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- Convenors:
-
Joanne Byrne
(La Trobe University)
Alex Pavlotski (La Trobe University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
As a discipline, COVID has made anthropology confront outdated assumptions about digital research. We seek ethnographic or theoretical papers discussing the affordances and challenges of digital methods
Long Abstract:
The digital and the social are intimately entwined. Currently, outdated assumptions about the ease and transferability of traditional methods to digital social spaces understate the complexity of this research. We have been debating the boundaries of the field since the 1980s but COVID has made us viscerally face the amorphousness of space, time, field, and home. So too, contemporary digital ethnographic work confronts methodological and ethical dilemmas; their solutions negotiated in real-time by researchers in the field. In this panel, we hope to discuss the challenges researchers face in digital fieldwork as well as share and consolidate creative solutions discovered.
This panel seeks to explore the plethora of digital methods used by contemporary ethnographers and demonstrate how people synchronously negotiate problems in the field. This allows for submissions on conceptual and methodological problems. These may relate to: data-management, digital interviewing, metadata, digital ethics, privacy, self-care, self-presentation or the reliability of users in a post-truth world.
These are open issues. This panel seeks ethnographic or theoretical papers discussing the affordances and particular challenges of anthropological digital research: (1) come up with solutions, (2) encountered a particularly wicked problem that highlights the complexity of this field that (3) would benefit from open discussion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses Internet intersecting with the totalitarian past to shape the AIDS governance in Taiwan to lead individual fear of longevity. A research methodology to investigate the block chain technology for doing ethnography digitally on individual COVID-19 experiences is also discussed.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how Internet had intersected with the totalitarian past to shape the landscape of gender/sexualities as well as AIDS movements in Taiwan that social minorities assembled as “union of unwanted” for social justice. My project had drawn on digital technology to connect my research participants for their social sufferings to be heard and learned in a remote and longitudinal manner.
The "altruistic" and "decentralised" regulatory regimes, I argue, redistributes state power to local social bodies where the decentralised governance of sexual minorities and social deviants is exercised through compassionate voluntary labour. As a result, this health regime has escalated and engendered everyday struggles which the affected endure and will continue to confront.
My approach to explore individual everyday struggles through Facebook and the application for instant communication was beneficial to my study of AIDS governance in Taiwan. I observed that qinggan (情感, sentiment) or emotional labour experiencing my research participants under the AIDS governance in Taiwan was also impacted by their everyday use of digital technologies. Allowing this research to expound individual fear of living longer despite their pharmaceutical access, the virtual connection also overcome chronic loneliness or depression constantly facing ganranzhe (感染者, HIV-infected individuals) to not easily end one’s life.
Extending the approach for studying AIDS governance in Taiwan, this paper also attempts to investigate the block chain technology in relation to both Taiwanese and Australian indigenous knowledge to learn individual experiences of COVID-19 embedded in digital landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I draw on research with Thai video production workers to offer an ethnographically grounded viewpoint on the way that global colourist and racialist aesthetics seek out, and interact with, local aesthetic value judgements.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I draw on research with Thai video production workers to offer an ethnographically grounded viewpoint on the way that global colourist and racialist aesthetics seek out, and interact with, local aesthetic value judgements. In Bangkok, Thailand, local value judgements appealing to international marketing clients frequently draw on a range of gestures, speech acts and other performances of socially appropriate, morally acceptable and aesthetically pleasing behaviour. Meanwhile, the often politically conservative power of these value judgements is felt in Thailand in terms of the strength of authoritarian politics and in the everyday demands for polite and submissive performances in everyday life.
I then consider Thailand’s recent youthful protest movements not only in terms of their direct political claims, but also their radical attempts to shift social expectations around aesthetic and moral value judgements. Thailand’s youthful protesters are reconstructing the digitized tail end of Thailand’s first democratic century with creative aesthetics, the subversiveness of which matches and propels their dramatic political demands. Drawing on Strassler’s (2020) “image-events” as a frame through which to interpret subversive political images shaping community and action, I examine the ways in which Thai protest aesthetics become politically and socially active.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the functionality of #AcademicFreezeNOW in creating ‘ad hoc’ publics (Bruns et al., 2016). A total of 85,372 tweets were harvested and processed using visual analytic platforms, offering an alternative way of doing anthropological research in a pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Days after colleges and universities in the Philippines started their school year and roughly a month before primary and secondary schools reopen amid the Covid-19 pandemic, #AcademicFreezeNOW was the top trending hashtag on Twitter on September 4, 2020. This paper explores the functionality of this hashtag in creating ‘ad hoc’ publics (Bruns et al., 2016). A total of 85,372 tweets containing the said hashtag were harvested within a certain time period using Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) and processed using visual analytic platforms such as Tableau and Gephi. Using sentiment and network analysis to map out the conversation on academic freeze on Twitter, initial findings reveal the shifting form and composition of publics, as well as its key themes. Although the hashtag started to gain traction through users who were for an academic freeze, a counterdiscourse later emerged when Twitter picked up tweets from users with extensive networks. The use of this methodology in understanding the public conversations on Twitter offers an alternative way of conducting anthropological research in a pandemic.