- Convenors:
-
Nada Al-Hudaid
(Lund University)
Yafa Shanneik (Lund University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 6 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Digital ethnography facilitated the empowerment of research participants and help articulate what matters to them. This panel is open for case studies that used video, sound, VR and/or AR to communicate and engage audience to achieving specific types of experiences that other means cannot.
Long Abstract:
Digital tools have significantly expanded research methodologies and allowed scholars to become more linked to their field sites than ever before (Pink et. Al 2015). Many anthropologists and researchers are interested in involving their research participants in approaches that empower them and encourage use of technologies that can facilitate the articulation of emotions in a relatable way, hence aiding in the development of empathy for the subject matter. This is efficiently accomplished using digital and multi-sensory ethnographic research methods. Video, sound, Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality are a few examples of these technologies (AR).
For instance, Yafa Shanneik was able to create an embodied and immersive virtual experience of Syrian and Iraqi women refugees in Jordan using art, AR and VR. This experience was significant for the research participants in certain ways, as was the impact it had on those who experienced the VR and AR. We seek to learn more about other ethnographers' experiences in which giving back through digital technology is invaluable. We want to hear more about other ethnographers' experiences with giving back using digital technologies.
This panel welcomes submissions that focuses on case studies of researchers who used any of these strategies to not only give back to the community, but also communicate research findings in a variety of ways to help viewers/audiences engage with the subjects covered.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 6 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This article focuses on refugee lifeworlds, encounters and the everyday and combines walking with 360video, methods of participatory theatre and cinematic Virtual Reality (VR), for participatory immersive storytelling with Syrians in Jordan.
Paper long abstract:
Immersive media technologies continue to provide new and challenging opportunities for participatory approaches in social sciences and visual anthropology. In particular, the use of small 360-video cameras for visual ethnographic work provides new and innovative research methods for migration research and participatory research methods. In this study, participatory 360-video is used as a methodology for a multi-sited ethnographic enquiry with Syrians living in urban areas in Sweden, Turkey and Jordan. This article focuses on refugee lifeworlds, encounters and the everyday and combines walking with 360 video, methods of participatory theatre and cinematic Virtual Reality (VR), for participatory immersive storytelling with Syrians. Providing preliminary conclusions and lessons learned from fieldwork in Irbid, Jordan, the author reflects on building rapport with Syrians in the field, empathic ethnographic encounter, embodiment, place-making, sensorial experience, sense of presence and the various levels of agency of research participants in the participatory approach. This ethnographic study is conducted within the framework of a 6-year research programme entitled 'Refugee Migration and Cities: Social Institutions, Political Governance and Integration in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden', led by Gothenburg University in collaboration with Malmö University, Sweden and Bogazici University in Turkey.
Paper short abstract:
This paper endeavours to reconcile idealist phenomenologies of digital mediation with materialist ontologies of worshipful communities of Shi'i Muslims in the context of devotional poems broadcasted online and recited in Urdu with a natively digital framework inclusive of Shi'i digital experiences.
Paper long abstract:
In the holy periods of Ashura and Arba’in, Shi’i Muslims commemorate the martyrs of the Battle of Karbala (Umayyad Caliphate, now Iraq, 61 AH/680 CE). Ruffle (2021) finds these commemorations to be “intersensorial.” However, scholars routinely conclude that technological mediation "decays" (Benjamin 1935), “numbs” (McLuhan 1964), “amputates" and "reduces” (Kittler 1968), or “closes off” (Lupton and Maslen 2018) sensoria. Paradoxically, Rahimi and Amin (2020) observe digital forms of Shi'i commemoration. This presentation outlines an attempt to reconcile this paradox through theoretical tools that permit "natively digital" methods (Rogers 2013). It considers an expression of digital bereavement in which the whole sensorium is activated, animated, and entangled: the videos of Royall Records, led by Nadeem Sarwar and founded in Pakistan. This presentation conceives of these videos and evidence of their varied reception as "digital artefacts" (e.g., Beigl et al. 2002) and their producers and interlocutors, not as "digital subjects" whose bodies express gestures that are received as "incomplete" (Goriunova 2019), but as "cyborgs" (Haraway 1991) whose bodies have been "recalibrating to a new political and technological order" for decades (Hirschkind 2006). An elaboration of digital intersensoriality can challenge idealist and techno-determinist views of digitality, in which the digital is held, contradictorily, to be at once a "virtual" and "simulated" (i.e., immaterial) other and a tangible “distancing” barrier (Richardson 2011). In contrast, this article posits “digital atmospheres” as a means to articulate their materiality and describe how bodies come together in ways which accurately account for the digital experience explicated by Shi'as.