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- Convenors:
-
Jolynna Sinanan
(University of Manchester)
Rebekah Cupitt (Birkbeck, University of London)
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Short Abstract:
The panel aims to explore strategies, identify key themes, developments, opportunities, challenges and new directions in teaching digital anthropology. Presenters are invited to draw on research-based teaching for a culturally comparative approach to studying increasing human-digital entanglements.
Long Abstract:
Approaches in digital anthropology are committed to better understanding the relationships between people and digital technologies in context through examining communities of practice. Digital technologies and people are studied in relation to: histories, technological developments, and the media ecologies of different geographical regions; and in relation to core themes in anthropology such as political engagement, activism and advocacy, work, gender and ethnicity and infrastructural developments. With these general principles in mind, this panel explores directions in teaching digital anthropology, and asks how anthropologists might facilitate students (in university and beyond) in their critical examinations of shared meanings, practices, and experiences of digital technologies for different populations.
Public conversation tends to adopt adjudicatory positions on the current and future unfolding of sociocultural-digital entanglements based on reductive arguments. A key challenge for teaching digital anthropology is that of giving students the skills necessary to foster critical-analytical skills to problem-solve, and to communicate the implications of emerging digital ecologies. This panel aims to explore current strategies, identify key themes, developments, opportunities, challenges and new directions in teaching digital anthropology. Drawing on their research-based teaching experiences, the panel invites scholars in anthropology who are developing effective ways for or grappling with ways of instructing students to think through digital technologies and their entanglements with human social worlds. Presentations might discuss methods and resources for instruction, collaborative techniques, and forms of assessment, reflections on using creative practice in the classroom, public educative practices, teaching platforms, modes of learning and student experiences.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 27 June, 2024, -Christian Ritter (Karlstad University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper appraises the potential of object-based student learning for teaching mobile media. The essay illustrates how students can develop understandings of the haptic materiality and semiotic embeddedness of mobile games, fitness wearables, and video recording apps through an ethnographic lens.
Paper long abstract:
This paper appraises the potential of object-based student learning for teaching mobile media. Object-based learning activities encourage students to assess human histories and stories surrounding the production of mobile devices and the consumption of mobile apps (McGowan et al., 2022). Drawing on three cases of supervising students in media studies, the essay illustrates how students can develop understandings of the haptic materiality and semiotic embeddedness of mobile games, fitness wearables, and video recording apps through an ethnographic lens. Grounded in digital anthropology approaches, mini-research projects allow students to negotiate their personal presence in digital and physical environments (Fairless, 2017). By articulating moments of discomfort occurring during their fieldwork (Macdonald, 2013), students untangle the socio-technical relations between datafied everyday practices, geocoded mobile data, and regimes of privacy. Finally, the chapter accentuates the epistemic value of embodied experience in media research amid the rise of machine learning and data science.
Danijela Birt Katić (University of Zadar)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed presentation intends to delve into the inaugural year of the Digital Anthropology course at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology. It aims to explore central themes and potential new avenues in teaching digital anthropology, emphasizing student involvement as a key component.
Paper long abstract:
The field of digital anthropology is growing rapidly, becoming an integral part of university study programs, and increasingly captivating the attention of both scholars and prospective anthropology students as an appealing factor during enrollment. Considering that I am teaching the Digital Anthropology course for only the first year, and it is an elective course in the Ethnology and Anthropology program, my practical experience and knowledge regarding the subject and its scopes are currently limited. Despite this fact, encouraged by several independent student works and my mentorship throughout the course, I propose a presentation with the intention of reflecting on the topics encountered during the course.
Furthermore, the aim is to scrutinize strategies in learning and teaching digital anthropology framed within students' practical experiences working on two digital platforms. In other words, the observed experiences are based on dedicated work over the past three months and an attempt to understand how contents on digital platforms (our example includes Topoteka and Omeka) should be prepared and shaped for continuous and purposeful use by a broader audience (such as users interested in their own everyday history, family history topics, and/or researchers of visual forms, etc.).
The content on the digital platforms Topoteka and Omeka was prepared within the framework of two projects. After some time of platform usage, a post-project research was conducted on how the content is utilized and searched. Based on the results the aim of the practical course work was to reshape the content to be more user-friendly.
Natalia Orrego Tapia (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to characterise the baseline elements to consider when crafting situated syllabi for digital anthropology courses in Latin America, starting with a characterization of the challenges that professionals face to, then, pinpoint useful topics to localize and strengthen the subdiscipline.
Paper long abstract:
Latin America has a history where communication and media studies and, more recently, science and technology studies have led the discussions around culture and digital technologies. Anthropology has had a background role. Ethnographic monographs are still scarce, yet dissertations are slowly flourishing parallel to graduates finding UX research and technology development jobs. Interest, both academic and applied, has surpassed the university curriculum. In this context, anthropologists face several challenges, such as finding proper literature within Latin American authors to strengthen their frameworks (1), balancing local production from other disciplines with broader conversations in anthropology (2), and dealing with the language academic divide between the Global North and South (3). Some authors have highlighted the latter point because it tends to produce a delay in perspectives and contributions, particularly regarding methods. ¿How to make a situated syllabus in this panorama? The paper proposes, first, to characterise each challenge and, secondly, to pinpoint the elements to consider when crafting syllabi for digital anthropology courses in the region. The methodology focuses on analysing secondary sources, databases from the Latin American Network of Digital Anthropology, and short interviews to make visible the educational needs as well as the hopes for strengthening the subdiscipline. Here, aspects like the weight of national policies in technology use, the discussion of communication dynamics and the digital divides around technical systems give a peculiar baseline for future teachers on the topic.
Jolynna Sinanan (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on my ongoing but periodically interrupted fieldwork that has informed my research-led teaching and the challenges and opportunities for teaching digital anthropology at undergraduate and postgraduate course levels.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2017, I have made return visits to the Solukhumbu (Everest) region in the Nepali Himalaya. Initial visits became the basis for ethnographic fieldwork, which was interrupted by the pandemic and recommenced in 2023. I argue that an ethnographic approach more effectively investigates experiences of mobile populations that have been characterised by work in remote areas, crisis and precarity. In the study, digital methods (through visual content analysis and digital ethnography) have been effective for gaining insights to the discourse and imaginations that shape the tourist encounter on treks and mountain summit expeditions in the Everest region, however, the continuity of return visits for fieldwork have been invaluable for maintaining relationships with research participants. The paper examines relationships of trust and the role of digital practices that have become essential for mapping economic and social change in the region.
The context for the ongoing but periodically interrupted fieldwork has informed my teaching in an undergraduate digital anthropology course and a masters level course in methods for designing and implementing a short project in anthropology. The paper reflects on my research-led teaching and the challenges and opportunities for teaching digital anthropology.
Rebekah Cupitt (Birkbeck, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Human-centred design promises familiar territory for anthropologists. Investigations of 'what people want and do' with technologies are centred within the design process yet are often lost. This paper explores inventive modes of making space for the anthropological in the digital design classroom.
Paper long abstract:
User experience and user research in human-centred design promises familiar territory for anthropologists inserted into computer science and design disciplines. In these areas, investigations of 'what people want' and 'what people do' with technologies are usually centred within the design and development process. But when it comes to educating designers, the core component of the work for someone who is anthropologically trained, is to expand the essentialised notion of a 'user' and the archetypal experience. Standardised toolkits, formulaic design frameworks and innumerable guidelines and principles struggle to encompass 'thick descriptions' of people and their everyday intra-actions with technology. The challenge then becomes, how to rework established methodologies to consider people, contexts, and the social lives of things. By reflecting on the strangeness of doing digital anthropology 'in' the HCI community, this paper offers some insights into how to use core anthropological theories to speak to ways of designing everyday technology and its use. Channelling the legacies of Suchman, Orr, Irani, Dourish and others, I highlight how anthropological research in HCI has been incorporated into the toolkits and guidelines. Guidelines which are then critiqued and de-formalised in the classroom through participatory modes of teaching digital anthropology and critical inquiry so that it speaks to design and against essentialised versions of 'the human' in human-computer interaction.