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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents empirical work on the intertwining of digital and physical places in the context of 'communities of interest' (book clubs, fandom), addressing conceptual questions about place and community in a digitalising world.

Paper long abstract:

It seems that digital spaces have become central to our lives, rendering 'real' places obsolete. However, digital space is no less real than physical space, nor can we speak of a dichotomy. Many people move easily between these spaces. We therefore need to study how these two spaces are intertwined - how the digital becomes physical and how the physical uses the digital.

In studying these interactions, the notions of community and networks become relevant, as place-based activities are assumed to belong to communities, while digital connections are assumed to constitute networks. While the distinction between communities and networks has been problematised, the interplay between the physical and the digital raises additional conceptual questions that have led scholars to use terms such as 'field, interaction, sociality' (Postill 2011).

The proposed paper will present cases of ‘communities’ organised around shared interests (i.e. so-called ‘communities interest’ around interests such as reading books, being a fan, knitting) and their online and offline interactions, showing how different groups of people move between different worlds. The ever-changing technical capabilities of different digital platforms allow for different types of interaction. The local knitting group meeting in a community centre will use Whatsapp to stay in touch and also follow Facebook groups related to their interests, while young readers will prefer TikTok as an information channel and use Whatsapp groups as a hangout space.

Based on these empirical observations, the paper will address conceptual questions about place and community.

Postill, J. (2011). Localizing the Internet: An anthropological account (Vol. 5). Berghahn Books.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the un/doing of place and everyday life through the prism of spatial anthropology and the social production of space. Arguing ‘against place’, the critical focus of the paper is the production of ‘dwellspace’ and the spatial phenomenology of ambience, spaciousness and slowness.

Paper long abstract:

The doing and undoing of place is epistemologically baked in to the very idea of ‘place’ as a geographical entity and locus of dwelling. Whether seen as an open or porous nexus of global relations (Massey 1991) or as a precarious bastion of identity, history and sociality that is buffeted and ‘emptied’ by the depthless flows of supermodernity (Augé 1995), processes of place-making cannot be readily disentangled from those that mobilise towards the negation of place and the inexorable threat of placelessness. Understood dialectically, the un/doing of place reflects tensions and contradictions that are critically bound up with the wider social and cultural production of space (Lefebvre 1991). Far from being ‘the most abstract, the most empty, the most detached from the realities of life and experience’ (Ingold 2011: 145), it is space not place that is the locus of everyday social practices and where spatial stories (Certeau 1984) are performatively rooted and routed. Exploring the merits of being ‘for space’ (Massey 1995) rather than ‘against space’, this paper questions the sustainability or efficacy of the very idea of place in a world where hybrid and digital spaces are proliferating and the embodied habitus of place (Hillier and Rooksby 2005) is no longer contingent on the proximate physicality of localised dwelling. Building on work in the interdisciplinary field of spatial anthropology (Roberts 2018), it is more specifically the production of ‘dwellspace’ (Roberts 2023) and the spatial phenomenology of ambience, spaciousness and slowness around which provocations ‘against place’ will be centred.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between place, culture, and the digital, examining a recent global transformation enabled by digital technologies - the normalization of remote work among knowledge workers across the world.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between place, culture, and the digital, examining a recent global transformation enabled by digital technologies - the normalization of remote work among knowledge workers across the world. While remote work has been studied mostly in relation to increased geographic mobility, location independence, and the distinctive lifestyle of digital nomads, many remote workers in the knowledge economy experience constrained mobility and protracted hours in domestic spaces. Within this context, the house becomes the main physical locus for social and personal interactions. It is the place where an increasing number of global knowledge workers, IT professionals, and middle-class white collars spend most of their everyday lives. This shift is having long-standing consequences on social relationships within and beyond the family and is also shaping experiences of home and place. This paper builds on ethnographic research among middle-class professionals living in Groningen (NL) during the pandemic, and on the notes that I collected in 2023 and 2024 on my partner’s everyday life as a full-time remote worker. The paper examines the diminishing significance of physical social interactions that coexist with the increasing importance of online relationships. It discusses how this change is having consequences on the experience of being in the world, and on practices and meanings of family and home. Exploring the daily lives of remote workers in both physical and digital realms provides insights into a profound shift impacting contemporary digital societies, which is the making of culture across expanded digital spaces and diminished physical environments.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ethnography in the absence of a physical field, focusing on online sexist violence against Spanish feminists. Embracing a "postdigital" paradigm, it highlights the intertwined nature of online and offline spaces in shaping both feminist networks and research methodologies.

Paper long abstract:

A “traditional” ethnography often opens with the anthropologist's arrival to the field – an opening narrative that plays the crucial role of anchoring that description in the authority-giving personal experience of fieldwork (Pratt, 1986). Whilst contemporary studies to a much higher extent rely on studying “us” (e.g., Nader, 2002), incorporating interactions also within digital domains, the predominant anthropological methodological tool, participant observation, still delineates an enduring presence in physical spaces. But what happens when there is no physical place to study? This paper is underpinned by original ethnographic research delving into the phenomenon of sexist violence in digital spaces, with a specific focus on violence directed at feminists in Spain. The methods employed adhere to a "postdigital" paradigm (e.g., Coleman and Jandric, 2019), transcending the dichotomy of online/offline or analogue/digital, thereby facilitating an exploration of the embedded nature of digital media and associated practices in everyday life through a critical lens. This approach encompasses a diverse array of methods spanning the online/offline continuum. Through exemplifications derived from this research, the discussion deliberates on ethnography in the absence of a discernible physical field. It elucidates how, despite the absence of a conventional "place", physical space and embodiment assume significant roles not only in the experience of harm, but also in the construction of feminist networks and resistance in digital spaces and beyond. These phenomena can be conceptualised as dynamic countercultures evolving along the online-offline continuum, wherein participants concurrently inhabit physical and online spaces, disentangled from the confines of a geographical "place".

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how netizens and the state narrate the financial past, present, and future of Hong Kong amid radical political transformation in 2019. Taking narration as a form of doing and undoing of politics, this paper proposes online narrations of time-space as a contested political field.

Paper long abstract:

Building on the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope and Blommaert’s discussion of their scaling (2015), I examine online politics of time-space in the context of the post-2019 authoritarian overhaul of Hong Kong, specifically cross-border relations and state-society relations with mainland China. Based on digital ethnography, I compare the recently emerged chronotope “financial relic” (gamyung waizi 金融遺址) on social media with the more historical one, “financial center” (gamyung zungsam 金融中心). They signify two time-spaces of Hong Kong demarcated by the radical political shift of 2019, encapsulating different sets of political outlooks, refusal, ascertainment, self-identifications, and affective ties. Originated from social media in mainland China, the term “financial relic” has gradually been reclaimed by Hong Kongers. I first compare how mainland Chinese and Hong Kong netizens have attached different affective, political, and historical meanings to “financial relic,” reflecting changing cross-border relations. Then, I investigate how Hong Kongers have challenged the chronotope of “financial center” that the local government has repeatedly narrated in mainstream media outlets, forming a contested discursive field. In the Chinese context of authoritarian politics, online venues have become instrumental in voicing dissatisfaction and opposition (Yang 2009), which can circulate through the porous physical and digital border between mainland China and Hong Kong. Tracing multiple chronotopic narrations and their narrators’ varied positionalities, I show that politics are mobilized and destabilized through such narrations. As such, this study identifies a multi-scalar field of regional, national, and geopolitical politics in chronotopes as “chronotopic politics”.

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Paper short abstract:

Using digital social protection infrastructure as a point of departure to connect both online and offline research sites, this paper investigates how digital welfare delivery infrastructure in China is planned and designed.

Paper long abstract:

Previous scholars suggest that digital technologies depend on everyday infrastructures such as power plants, WIFI network and social media platforms to function and connect with people (Pink etc.). Along a similar vein, I use digital social protection infrastructure as a point of departure to trace its planning and designing stages during which multiple actors become involved. I investigate one of the key steps of the public digital infrastructure expansion, wherein the Chinese local government designs training programs for its service delivery personnel. Based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation online, I introduce the digital platform, Cloud Exercise, wherein people can gain access to the training materials and enter trivia games to compete with their colleagues. Cloud Exercise is a lightweight application within WeChat, China's most popular messaging platform. It showcases rankings of participants based on points they accumulated via trivia contests, and the percentage of materials they completed, ranging from quizzes on welfare policies, administrative procedures and situational responses. My paper demonstrates that specific rules of the competition are designed not through straightforward, automated decision-making but through negotiations between the project manager, programmers as well as government officials. This process, I argue, not only reveals the institutional logic of subordinating public services to quantitative indicators, but also shows how local government outsources its responsibilities to the private sector and to individuals through the practices of standardization. My paper, therefore, contributes to the body of literature that scrutinizes how the shaping of digital spaces become entangled with offline social relations.

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Paper short abstract:

Even though offline-online distinctions analytically blur together, this dualism still holds relevance in everyday live. Drawing on empirical research in digital detox camps, this paper investigates how different human and more-than-human entities assemble to create offline spaces.

Paper long abstract:

As has been pointed out by Digital Anthropology, as well as in this CfP, current everyday lives are characterized by digitalization, which by now has become a ubiquitous, normalized and inconspicuous backdrop of many socio-cultural practices. However, over the last decade there has been increasing public debates about and criticism of digital technologies and media, as well as imperatives of networking and so called ‘always on’. This critique, often subsumed under digital detox, calls to spend more time offline, to be present in the moment and to find a more balanced way of handling digital media and communication technologies.

Drawing on ethnographic research in digital detox camps, this paper seeks to map and understand how actors, materialities, practices, bodies and socio-technical imaginaries of disconnection assemble to constitute offline spaces. The ethnographic material – namely fieldnotes and interviews – stems from my ongoing PhD research located in Germany and Austria.

By employing a relational concept of space (Fuller & Löw, 2017), this paper argues that these offline spaces are only forming against the backdrop of digitalization criticism, and therefore, always point towards popular conceptions of the digital. I understand the camps as a form of dreamscapes, where the online-offline dualism alongside other dualisms like nature-culture are reinforced. By highlighting a bodily and sensory mode of experience, which is created in the camps, actors negotiate what it means to be authentically human in contrast to their everyday lives, which are seen as entangled with digital technologies and ambient media.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores online counter-mobilization against the Istanbul Convention, revealing misogynistic narratives, by delving into the digital realm to understand how social media fosters gender-based violence normalcy in Turkey.

Paper long abstract:

In our current epoch, characterized by intensified gender conflicts, the battlegrounds of direct violence have extended into both online and offline spheres. Notably, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have emerged as crucibles for a distinct form of counter mobilization, where attacks on gender and women's rights materialize through the development of misogynistic narratives.

This presentation investigates the landscape of online hate expressions and networked harassments directed at women, offering a nuanced understanding of the underlying dynamics and nature of misogyny. Specifically, the study zooms in on the online misogynistic narratives that surface as a counter movement surrounding the Istanbul Convention. By doing so, it seeks to underscore the conservative and polarizing discourses that normalize gender-based violence in Turkey within the digital realm.

By shedding light on this digital counter-mobilization, the research contributes to the overarching theme of the conference, which calls for a re-evaluation of place, culture, and their digital interconnections. Through this exploration, the aim is to illuminate how online spaces play a pivotal role in shaping and perpetuating attitudes towards women, bridging the gap between the virtual and physical dimensions of gender-based violence.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on a sociolinguistics with default multilingualism & ‘language’ replaced by ‘languoids’, ‘doculects’ & ‘glossonyms’ I make a default multilocated anthropology with documentation of places some online (locudocs), place names, ‘toponyms’, & then a locuoid, a representation of a set of locudocs.

Paper long abstract:

In a review of sociolinguistics in West and Central Africa Connell and Zeitlyn (2023) make some big suggestions about our default assumptions. They suggest that these should switch from a monolingual norm to default multilingualism and if at all possible we should stop talking about languages! Instead of language as an analytical or technical term they suggest talk of the trio of ‘languoids’, ‘doculects’ and ‘glossonyms’ (as suggested by Jeff Good and colleagues). These work as models for thinking about place and places: we should shift to a default multilocated anthropology as suggested in effect as recently as 1922 by Malinowski (is it still too soon?).

And we should consider a new terminology for thinking about places. This starts with the documentation of somewhere (a locudoc) and seeing how it relates to place names, ‘toponyms’ (i.e. creating a locudoc linking some data (documentation) with a toponym), and then through a process of analysis arriving at a locuoid, which is a representation of a set of locudocs.

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Paper short abstract:

Through participant observation in VR communities, this study examines how users’ embodiment and technological interaction shape varied cultural Umwelts, suggesting a reevaluation of anthropological vocabulary to conceptualize virtual place and culture.

Paper long abstract:

This study examines the ways in which digital environments become familiar to their users. Challenging Boellstorff’s assertion that social immersion tied to being in one online place is more critical than sensory interfaces (like Virtual Reality, or VR) for online community and identity formation, our research suggests a more nuanced picture. Our analysis is based on participant observation and interviews within various VR communities. VR is a unique medium and arguably the first truly embodied mediated experience which constitutes a virtual place akin to physical reality, leading to profound engagement with virtual worlds. Our focal observation is that there are many “cultures” inside VR: users display different patterns of relating to their digital selves and environment depending on how they are present there and how they employ its resources. This diversity is attributed to the unique embodiment and sensations provided by 3D avatars, presence modalities, technological proficiency, and social connections. We suggest exploring the conceptual potential of the Umwelt notion, initially used to describe the biological agent-object relations and later adapted in linguistic anthropology to understand the process of familiarizing oneself with a technologically saturated environment. This approach allows us to explore how VR affords the progressive accumulation of diversity, wherein users create varied interpretations and interactions within the same online space. Our fieldwork illustrates these varied cultural Umwelts in VR settings. This study offers a critical reassessment of anthropological vocabulary used for digital environments and presents a compelling alternative to the commonly used concept of affordances.