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- Convenors:
-
Britta Ohm
(University of Heidelberg)
Ting-Fai Yu (French Centre for Research on Contemporary China)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/025
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This Roundtable wants to discuss remote ethnography as mediated ethnography, reflecting and exploring the chances, complications, problems and outright dangers that (have) come with medially/digitally connecting with our fields (or with failing to do so).
Long Abstract:
With the conditions enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic, 'remote ethnography' has seen a sudden surge not only in anthropology but across disciplines that have come to engage ethnographic methods. Even though the term - and practice - had gained traction well before (then often under the pressure to justify itself), the restrictions on physical mobility and local presence under the pandemic have lent it unexpected validation, even elevated it to a panacea. What has so far remained under attended, though, is that 'remote ethnography' conceals its intrinsic relationship with media and information technologies. In fact, as working 'remotely' is inherently dependent on bridging, if not erasing the very remoteness in its name, media make the ever more capacious transition from being subjects of exploration to becoming indispensable means of research also for scholars whose fields of study appear to be 'remote' from media.
Themes and questions offering themselves for critical debate include, for instance, the reduction of the 'ethnographic gaze' (during on-site observation or visual documentation), but equally the risk of sidelining a critical perspective on media technologies themselves, the problem of enhanced media-centrism, i.e. the further normalising of both media access and media use, and reinforced inequalities in the safety of researcher and informants. Under globally precarious political conditions, moreover, the data traces we leave and who might have access to these data (tech-corps, governments, para-state units) throw up the question of a long-term altogether changing research field and practice.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Iwa Kolodziejska (Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw) Iwona Kaliszewska (University of Warsaw)
Contribution short abstract:
What are the dangers of privileging digital fieldwork during pandemic? We will point to Western centric biases in promoting Digital Anthropology and reasons why in Dagestan – location with universal access to the digital technology and good network coverage – digital ethnography fails.
Contribution long abstract:
Pandemic expanded the anyway growing field of Digital Anthropology (Horst & Miller 2012; Hine 2000), where digital media is used as tools, methods or subject of study. New ideas, methods and reflections about the collected data are discussed and applied also by those who never planed to explore the field of Digital Anthropology. ‘How to conduct fieldwork during the pandemics?’ was the question many anthropologists tried to answer, experimenting with various digital methods and tools. Having experimented ourselves and having failed, we ask: how to, after all, conduct on-site fieldwork during pandemics? What additional problems and dilemmas arise?
In this paper, based on digital and non-digital fieldwork in Dagestan (Russian Federation), we discuss concerns and ethical dilemmas connected with fieldwork during epidemics and ask: what we got wrong with assuming that almost everybody’s life went online? We will point to the wrong assumptions and Western centric biases behind the “surge” to online methods during the pandemics. We will also add to the existing literature skeptical towards online methods by pointing to other (than mentioned before in the literature) reasons why they are not applicable in certain, less evident, contexts. We will conclude with the far-reaching risks of over-promoting/privileging digital fieldwork during the pandemics.
Ka-Kin Cheuk (University of Southampton)
Contribution short abstract:
This paper proposes to create transferable tools, methods, and skills that will to create alternative forms of ethnographic field learning activities, especially ones that will directly challenge the traditional place-based definition of ‘field’.
Contribution long abstract:
In this time of the global pandemic, a major challenge to teaching field-based subjects, including but not limited to anthropology, is the difficulty of organizing in-person, on-site ethnographic field activities for students (e.g. the instructor brings a group of students to visit a field site). This is particularly the case in East Asia, where students continue to face considerable barriers to in-person, group-based, and beyond-university learning due to the ongoing ‘Zero-COVID-19’ policies. This short position paper proposes to create transferable tools, methods, and skills that will create alternative forms of ethnographic field learning activities, especially ones that will directly challenge the traditional place-based definition of ‘field’ as well as ones that will support students to overcome the barriers of learning during the pandemic time. In so doing, the paper explores innovative field-based teaching approaches that will (1) bring the field sites to the classrooms, (2) cultivate long-term and sustained community engagement with ethnic minority and diasporic populations in Asia, and (3) disseminate teaching outcomes to multicultural populations in and beyond the local Asian societies.
Jordan Wondrack Zaidi (Southern Methodist University)
Contribution short abstract:
Conducting remote ethnography entails new considerations for ethical data collection and the use of secondary data sources. In this roundtable, I ask about participant observation, social media data analysis, and the ways online participation creates vulnerabilities in activist spaces.
Contribution long abstract:
I wish to discuss some of the quandaries that have arisen during my long-term remote thesis research on Islamophobic policy, resistance, and health in the UK, from Texas, USA. Because the topic is sensitive and politicized, and some of the data sought relate to those who have been targeted by racist and harmful counter-terror policies, ethical and practical questions have entered into methodological considerations. For collecting sensitive data, should ethnographers shift focus to analysis of accessible testimonies via social media rather than seeking interlocutors for semi-structured interviews? What are the tradeoffs, and how does movement away from interviews toward secondary data analysis change the study? What does this tell us about how we value and hierarchize data sources? Additional quandaries to discuss include the dangers of persons entering "safe online spaces" where they are not welcome or intend to cause harm, and the ways to know when/if fieldwork is complete since one does not "leave" the field.
Sean Smith (Tilburg University)
Contribution short abstract:
This contribution examines the accumulative logics that social media platforms foster in user practices and the resulting considerations for mediated ethnography. Three factors are discussed: interlocutors’ access, hegemonic stylization, and the researcher’s visibility as a participant observer.
Contribution long abstract:
Social media data is a valuable resource for accumulation by platforms, private interests, and governments, and can be utilized to shape users’ practices. Less discussed but arguably no less important is how individual users likewise approach social media as a field for accumulation, as ‘likes’ and followers act as currency both in economies of symbolic exchange and in mediated markets. If social media platforms inculcate users to sociocultural practices organized around the bid to accumulate (social and/or financial) capital, these structures are likely to become embedded in the ethnographic research process, too. While field researchers are perhaps already susceptible to accumulative logics, as citations rather than ‘likes’ can motivate practice, mediated ethnography introduces a series of factors that may significantly impact the content of the research produced. This contribution draws upon ongoing research located in Oman and the broader Arabian Gulf region, in which the social media platform Instagram significantly mediates both remote and in-person fieldwork. Attending to the platform-specific infrastructure of Instagram, three factors emerge as demanding attention in the research process: interlocutors’ access, which is unevenly dependent upon far more factors than mere connectivity; hegemonic stylization, in which users who successfully embrace and reproduce dominant aesthetic regimes gain visibility; and the problematics of the researcher’s own visibility as a participant observer. Yet rather than merely critiquing the deleterious potentialities of mediated ethnography, this contribution acknowledges the necessity of engaging social media with the aim of working towards a constructive practicum for current and future research.