Raktim Ray
(University College of London)
Arunima Ghoshal
(De Montfort University)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Knowledge production
Technology & innovation
Sessions:
Wednesday 6 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Researching the post-pandemic city through digital ethnography.
Panel P22a at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
The panel seeks to explore how (post)pandemic cities can be researched through digital ethnography. By doing so, it also addresses how digital ethnography is a complex entanglement of spatial scale, race and power relations.
Long Abstract:
The palimpsest of the urban world is increasingly marked by fragmented, evolving power geometries of digital technologies that are impacting the everyday lived experience of the city through the messiness of the web and data revolution. The inherent politics of digital technologies have been heightened by the pandemic as there is a surge of interest amongst various actors of the state, civil society, citizens, and industry to extract, produce, circulate and influence urban life through the digital realm(from embodied practices to policy implications). On one hand, digital technologies have opened up possibilities for new avenues of research through remote engagement which not only reconfigures spatial scales but also unsettles the normative discourse of ‘field’. On the other hand, digital technologies are also shaped by structural inequality and hegemonic power relations and hence provides a tool for “sustaining colonial amnesia” (Dar, 2020).
Acknowledging these contradictions, this panel focuses on the use of digital ethnography as a methodological and analytical tool. It recognizes the manifold ways that the digital has pervaded lived realities and shifting conceptions of self, community and culture and how it is important to understand the interpretive processes that are constituted by these technologies (Pink 2009; Postill & Pink 2012; Degen 2015; Kaur-Gill & Dutta 2017).
This panel invites debates and discussions about the theoretical and methodological challenge that is posited by digital ethnography. Does a rigid distinction exist between conventional and digital ethnography and does that reify an ill-placed dualism? Does it instead, lead to ethnographic places that can traverse online/offline contexts and are collaborative, participatory, open and public (Pink, 2009, Walker, 2010). It also raises the question of whether current digital ethnographic practices are being conceptualised/utilised to their full potential that allows it to encapsulate the social, physical and cultural systems of the urban digital space.
This panel aims at bringing together scholars, activists and artists who are operating with this understanding of digital methodological tools and to reflect on questions related to using digital ethnography in researching the (post)pandemic city. The panel also seeks to invite non-academic submissions from activists and artists which may include digital arts, photography or any audio-visual material as forms of submissions. The themes that this panel aims to address are:
• Positioning digital methodological tools in the context of access and inequalities of everyday practices
• Does digital ethnography provide a pathway to collaborative, democratic & participatory researching practices?
• What broader connections does this method make to gaining an in-depth understanding of multi-scalar politics of data-driven urban infrastructure and policymaking?
• How does race get addressed in digital ethnography?
• What are the ethical and practical considerations for using digital ethnography in understanding the everyday embodied experiences of the digital citizen?
Panellists need to upload pre-recorded presentation or creative contributions. Convenors would request the panel members to watch each other’s work in advance to the synchronous session. Based on the contributions from the panel members, the convenors will identify overarching themes which will be part of the discussion round. Each presenter will be given 6 minutes time to present their contributions which will be followed by 2 minutes discussion. The summary discussion round will take place after all the contributions in that panel and the convenors will start the round by pitching the previously identified overarching questions. At the end of the discussion round the floor will be open to the audience for further discussions on the contributions.
This paper posits that as a polycentric practice, #AanaJaana offers an appropriate metaphor to expand the 'contact zone' in order to decolonise gendered knowledge and power across digital-analogue margins by looking at self authorship in the margins.
Paper long abstract:
Using Marie Louise Pratt's notion of 'contact zone', we examine #AanaJaana as a space of encounters that emerges by visually 'composing-with' as well as 'learning-with' the realities and constraints of space, technology and power. Based on self-authorship over a period of 6 months within a 'safe space' of a WhatsApp group of young women living in the urban margins, we draw attention to #AanaJaana as a set of crosscutting networks of power dynamics over women's bodies across the home, mobile phone and the city. #AanaJaana refers to how young women in the margins negotiate the 'freedoms' of moving (aana) in online space with the 'dangers' of going out (jaana) into the city, or the restrictions of entering (aana) online space with the freedom of leaving (jaana) home. We argue first, that #AanaJaana is a space of confinement because of the infrastructural paralysis in the peripheries, second that it is also at the same time translocally produced by referencing several textual, digital and material spaces of self-realisation. Finally, we argue that #AanaJaana is a space of intertextuality through encounters between emojis, shorthand, voice notes on the mobile phone, with parody and dark humour of their gendered experiences that can transform shame, humiliation and fear into reflection, resistance and agency.
This paper will provide an account of the authors' experience initiating a digital ethnographic archive on understudied small cities and towns in India during the pandemic, and will posit an intervention on digital ethnography as a method and a process.
Paper long abstract:
Kasba Chronicles, a digital ethnographic archive-in-progress of small cities and towns in India, was launched just as Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and parts of the world went into lockdown. The project recognises the need for a layered understanding (and a new vocabulary) of the urban vis-à-vis the small city in India, as distinct from the metropolis. Our archival process has been intuitive as well as consciously non-hierarchical: we have focused on recording everyday lives through narrative interviews, a series of podcasts, and photo stories, all conducted virtually, coordinated across continents through the pandemic. From this vantage point, this paper provides an account of our experience initiating this archive, and critically engages with a few questions. What are the interlinkages between existing digital infrastructures in small cities and towns and the digital ethnographic methods used to reimagine such spaces? Where there is an existent lack in such infrastructure, what are the implications of the 'post'-pandemic as methodological logic? An initial project within the larger archive focuses on understudied regions in Eastern India, where the authors also hail from; this also allows us to ideate on the role of positionality in digital ethnography. As we continue building this archive, this paper makes a methodological and theoretical intervention on ways of democratising the record and representation of everyday lived experiences as well as spaces within the field of urban research in India.
The paper engages with researcher-researched relationships, its multitude of inherent imbalanced power relations, and the opportunities and challenges they present when the site of interrogation and knowledge co-production moves into the digital space.
Paper long abstract:
The covid-19 pandemic and the global lockdowns that followed, brought with it unprecedented challenges to research by making the field, locally and globally, inaccessible. Digital methods then allowed access to the site and geographically diverse population, bringing with it inherent issues of ethical and power imbalances. This paper presents a framing of such challenges, particularly at the moment of this methodological transition. It draws from a study of learner and alumni trajectories in premier institutes of Planning education in the global South. The study focused on individual narratives and meaning-making processes, relying primarily on comparative qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, following the principles of narrative storytelling and reflexive methodology.
In particular, this paper engages with researcher/researched relationship, its myriad imbalanced power relations, and the opportunities and challenges presented when the site of interrogation and co-produced knowledge production moves into the digital space. Centrally, it is concerned with how the experience is narrativised and 'made meaning of' through collaboration between the researcher and the participants when the moment and site of contact become virtual.
Conducting our study as researchers from India working on a project funded by the Global North in Tanzania, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India put us in a unique contact zone where the researchers and the researched came from different cultural backgrounds without asymmetrical power relations. The paper discusses how using reflexivity as our guiding principle, we constantly engaged in revisiting the multiple legacies of knowledge production we carried to arrive at a collaborative and participatory research practice.
The paper discusses field experiences and compares it to the data collected online to understand the strengths and the challenges posed by each method, in understanding decisions which are taken at the level of households.
Paper long abstract:
The administrative territory of Jammu and Kashmir, due to its tumultuous history and geopolitical location has often been considered a conflict zone. This paper draws from my Ph.D. research in Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh on the issue of what determines a gendered preference for children in varied socio-political and religious contexts and the reasons for a strong preference toward sons in certain areas. While conducting my fieldwork in Kashmir, article 370 (which grants special status to Kashmir amongst Indian states) was revoked, leading to a widespread curfew and almost a year-long internet clamp-down in the valley. Post this, as Covid-19 made in-person fieldwork impossible, online methods were used to complete the remaining part of the research.
In this context, the paper explores the opportunities digital methods offer to understand areas in conflict, by providing a relatively safe haven for the researcher, flexible timings, and even greater access to certain risky zones. The paper also stresses the challenges of using technology for studying intra-household relations and family-building strategies, given the inherently gendered nature of technology and its use being limited to a certain age group ( younger, literate population). These issues are further exacerbated since women are considered more vulnerable in conflict zones and hence their mobility and interactions are closely guarded. Thus, issues of access to technology, understanding of its usage, infrastructural gaps, navigating language barriers, and understanding the non-verbal responses and the emotions behind the responses become tougher to navigate in the online mode.
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Arunima Ghoshal (De Montfort University)
Short Abstract:
The panel seeks to explore how (post)pandemic cities can be researched through digital ethnography. By doing so, it also addresses how digital ethnography is a complex entanglement of spatial scale, race and power relations.
Long Abstract:
The palimpsest of the urban world is increasingly marked by fragmented, evolving power geometries of digital technologies that are impacting the everyday lived experience of the city through the messiness of the web and data revolution. The inherent politics of digital technologies have been heightened by the pandemic as there is a surge of interest amongst various actors of the state, civil society, citizens, and industry to extract, produce, circulate and influence urban life through the digital realm(from embodied practices to policy implications). On one hand, digital technologies have opened up possibilities for new avenues of research through remote engagement which not only reconfigures spatial scales but also unsettles the normative discourse of ‘field’. On the other hand, digital technologies are also shaped by structural inequality and hegemonic power relations and hence provides a tool for “sustaining colonial amnesia” (Dar, 2020).
Acknowledging these contradictions, this panel focuses on the use of digital ethnography as a methodological and analytical tool. It recognizes the manifold ways that the digital has pervaded lived realities and shifting conceptions of self, community and culture and how it is important to understand the interpretive processes that are constituted by these technologies (Pink 2009; Postill & Pink 2012; Degen 2015; Kaur-Gill & Dutta 2017).
This panel invites debates and discussions about the theoretical and methodological challenge that is posited by digital ethnography. Does a rigid distinction exist between conventional and digital ethnography and does that reify an ill-placed dualism? Does it instead, lead to ethnographic places that can traverse online/offline contexts and are collaborative, participatory, open and public (Pink, 2009, Walker, 2010). It also raises the question of whether current digital ethnographic practices are being conceptualised/utilised to their full potential that allows it to encapsulate the social, physical and cultural systems of the urban digital space.
This panel aims at bringing together scholars, activists and artists who are operating with this understanding of digital methodological tools and to reflect on questions related to using digital ethnography in researching the (post)pandemic city. The panel also seeks to invite non-academic submissions from activists and artists which may include digital arts, photography or any audio-visual material as forms of submissions. The themes that this panel aims to address are:
• Positioning digital methodological tools in the context of access and inequalities of everyday practices
• Does digital ethnography provide a pathway to collaborative, democratic & participatory researching practices?
• What broader connections does this method make to gaining an in-depth understanding of multi-scalar politics of data-driven urban infrastructure and policymaking?
• How does race get addressed in digital ethnography?
• What are the ethical and practical considerations for using digital ethnography in understanding the everyday embodied experiences of the digital citizen?
Panellists need to upload pre-recorded presentation or creative contributions. Convenors would request the panel members to watch each other’s work in advance to the synchronous session. Based on the contributions from the panel members, the convenors will identify overarching themes which will be part of the discussion round. Each presenter will be given 6 minutes time to present their contributions which will be followed by 2 minutes discussion. The summary discussion round will take place after all the contributions in that panel and the convenors will start the round by pitching the previously identified overarching questions. At the end of the discussion round the floor will be open to the audience for further discussions on the contributions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -