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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores our experiences of designing and facilitating a cross-cultural virtual exchange between UK and US undergrads. We argue that virtual exchange offers a productive pedagogical resource, creating small generative spaces for students to practice ethnographic techniques first-hand.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores our experiences of designing and facilitating a virtual exchange connecting two UK and US undergraduate anthropology modules/ courses to provide student opportunities for cross-cultural exchange and to practice ethnographic methods. Whilst our work together, begun in May 2020 during the covid19 pandemic, was initially prompted by the shared desire to open out into the world when everything felt as though it was closing in, we detail here subsequent lessons learned via this experiment in virtual learning over the past four years of working together. We argue that virtual exchange can offer a productive pedagogical resource through which to create small generative, international spaces that enable students to practice ethnographic techniques first-hand even when included in the curriculum outside designated ‘ research methods modules’. Virtual exchange can also offer students a more inclusive international ethnographic experience, one which does not require additional costs, and can fit in around work and caring responsibilities. To illustrate our argument, we draw upon our ongoing series of virtual planning and discussion-based meetings in the fours years of running our virtual exchange, and we also employ data from three years’ of surveys and feedback from students’ on their experiences of taking part in the virtual exchange.

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Paper long abstract:

We report our experience of teaching a Virtual Field School at Durham University to final year students. This was first constructed during Covid, and since gained momentum and a life of its own. Online ethnography is incorporated into the course structure with themes focusing on colonisation, decolonisation, museum studies, migration, historicity and authenticity. We collaborate with Plimoth-Patuxet Museum (PPM) in Massachusetts, USA, which is a “living museum”. Students interview educators and “interpreters” at the Museum, the latter dressed historically and enacting Mayflower Pilgrims. PPM also has an indigenous Wampanoag homesite allowing students to interview contemporary indigenous representatives. Over time, we have included more Wampanoag activists and scholars into the course as well as other anthropologists and historians who, again, are interviewed by the students to gain practice in ethnographic techniques and to learn more about the course topics. Guests invited to the course are paid an honorarium. The VFC is highly structured, with students preparing questions for their interlocuters in breakout rooms that we then screen as a group. The course is supplemented by videos, and discussions of readings. We won a teaching award from Durham University in 2022 for “Most Impactful Innovation in Teaching and Learning”. Student comments have frequently stated that the course changed their world view and is rated as one of the best courses they have taken. A virtual learning environment has also allowed greater participation by students with special needs who cannot go to a residential field site as well as addressing decolonisation issues.

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Paper long abstract:

As technology changes, so do the possibilities for interacting directly with people around the globe and learning about one another. Educational programs such as virtual exchange / COIL provide interesting pedagogical tools with great formative potential. Such programs may facilitate cultural knowledge, understanding, and empathy between interlocutors, which may be particularly valuable for Anthropology students. In this paper, I discuss virtual exchanges in my undergraduate courses; I reflect on the ethnographic skills gained by my New York City-based university students; and I analyze the virtual exchange structure and learning processes. Participant experiences were marked by logistic, technical, and cultural challenges, and also by opportunities for the development of key ethnographic skills and perspectives such as cultural relativism, reflexivity, and the building of rapport—all at a distance, mediated by technology. Our virtual international exchanges also highlighted power dynamics as students learned to be sensitive to forms of stratification, stereotypes, and ethnocentrisms, both within our partners’ cultures and during interactions with our partners. They came to understand something of the complex cultural contexts that framed their partners’ lives and how these also shaped our interactions during our exchanges. While participating in COIL-type projects is often seen as a way to bring people together to support universalizing discourses such as human rights or the shared human condition, a keen student of ethnography may actually come away with a much more nuanced understanding of the human experience as one that is multiple, needing to be understood through the specificities of cultural framing.

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Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic research in virtual worlds poses new challenges for ethnographers and anthropologists. It calls into question the usual practice of ethnography and requires the implementation of new methods to conduct research on online communities. These adjustments are especially important to deal with situations like the Covid19 pandemic and to push for innovations by researchers in accessing and studying new digital fields.

As I explored various virtual fields, such as social media, video games and the metaverse, the unpredictability of online worlds appeared. With a different temporality, different concepts of identity, and no geographic boundaries as we usually perceive them, it is necessary to analyze virtual worlds within their own framework. The question of ethics and confidentiality is also an important point to (re)discover in online places, where individuals come and go as they please, in a simulation of equality and privacy, and where general consent is difficult to get. While people constantly connect and disconnect in these virtual persistent worlds, the mass of data to be processed is a major issue too. Indeed, digital fields offer a wide amount of easily accessible data while, paradoxically, flooding the researchers at the same time.

Lastly raises the question of accessing the field, with the creation of a virtual identity or an avatar to carry out observations online, to interact with users from all over the world, and to take part in the different group's activities.

Within this analysis, I intend to present different tools and methods available to conduct virtual ethnographic research.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an ethnographic study during lockdown, this paper explores the method of tracing iterative concerns in digital experiences to investigate virtual activities and conduct online ethnography. It reconnects the virtual “there” and the real “here” for reimaging teaching virtual ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon the author’s ethnographic study conducted during a strict lockdown, this paper explores tracing iterative concerns as an innovative method to better engage with both online worlds and the real-life that is increasingly augmented by digital virtuality.

The fundamental question emerging concurrently from investigating virtual activities and conducting online ethnography is: What thread can we follow to capture people’s virtual experiences, which often involve jumping between different interfaces and tasks as well as between virtual and real worlds? Or, how can we structure our investigation into dynamics between individuals and between humans and technology, when the interactive process is distanced or inherently absent?

Confronting these questions, this paper explores the potential of tracing iterative concerns found in digital designs and virtual activities. Iterative concerns suggest that an individual’s response to the current concern determines the form of subsequent concern. Its repetitions create a continuous chain of concerns for people to channel their actions. Iterative concerns have been prominently observed in programmed experiences generated by digital games while they have also profoundly shaped digital labor today.

Building on challenges and insights from my virtual study among platform workers in China, this paper first demonstrates practical ways of delineating iterative concerns. Then, it explores why tracing iterative concerns enables us to reconnect the virtual “there” and the real “here”, which may be previously separated by site-based methods. Finally, it discusses how this method offers a fresh perspective for envisioning virtual ethnography and how it can be taught alongside other ethnographic methods.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the production of digitally-mediated social spaces through research on university students’ experiences of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and research on how young indigenous media makers from South America shape the digital publics that form around their content.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on two periods of research regarding how the construction of social space is mediated by digital communications platforms. The first period of research occurred immediately after the end of the first semester during which all instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was shifted to online distance learning in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second period of research is ongoing; based at the University of Manchester, I am engaged in a study of how indigenous youth from Ecuador and Argentina make use of new media platforms to explore and express their indigenous identities. While the first period of research revealed how students accustomed to face-to-face learning felt disconcerted by the social space of online learning, it did not provide answers to why a digital and in-person learning space feel qualitatively different to students. The second period of research provides much needed insight by attending closely to the construction of digitally-mediated social spaces.

First, I establish the need to attend to the affordances of digital communications platforms as well as the social production of loose “scripts” that shape users’ participation in digital social spaces. Then, I explore how indigenous media creators draw upon those affordances and scripts in their efforts to influence how digital publics take shape around their media productions. Finally, I reflect on what educators can learn from indigenous media producers.

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Paper long abstract:

First-generation university students, the first in their families to attend higher education, took on additional responsibilities for their families and faced more disruptions to their learning than their continuing-generation peers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The First-Gen Pandemic Journaling Project examines the long-term effects of Covid-19 on the educational trajectories and caretaking practices of first-generation students across the US through almost entirely digital methods, including online journaling and zoom-based interviews. The project’s other main aim is to mentor cohorts of first-gen and/or minoritized student researchers as full collaborators in this digital anthropological research. Based on our co-learning with students, we argue that there are clear benefits to online methods. First, we find that reflexive implementation of digital methods can destabilize hierarchies of knowledge creation while creating robust and experience-near ethnographic insight. However, to achieve this aim, careful mentorship—across student and professor positionalities— is needed. The paper also attends to the challenges of online ethnography and methods instruction, including creating trust online and generating proximity in digital interviewing.