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- Convenors:
-
Anne Heimo
(University of Turku)
Marija Dalbello (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Digital Lives
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Digital technologies and the current global crises have had major consequences for research. The panel welcomes papers, which explore how these changes generate new, innovative methodological approaches, solutions, and best practices for future historical, ethnographical and oral history research.
Long Abstract:
In recent decades, digital technology has become an essential part of our everyday life and a necessary tool for conducting multi-sited ethnography and oral history research. This is more than ever obvious now, when the COVID-19-pandemia has abruptly cancelled, altered or postponed our plans, and revealed the vulnerability of our private lives and research. The current pandemia, compounded with the realities of climate change and ubiquity of mediated lives, will continue to have unpredictable and long-standing consequences on our scholarly life and research methods. In this panel, we reconsider the rules of ethnographical and oral history research and working in the archives. We will explore new venues for engagement when we are not able to observe the everyday life or be actively engaged in the activities of our research participants, when we can conduct interviews face-to-face only virtually or when we cannot conduct archival work in ways we are accustomed to. The panel will orient itself to how we need to carry out ethnographical and oral history research in the future. What kind of new methods and mindsets do we need? How do digital methods, multi-sited ethnography and remote access to archival materials effect our studies and the people we study? What are the intended and unintended consequences of these? The panel welcomes papers, which explore these changes and provide new, innovative methodological approaches, solutions, and best practices for future ethnographical, historical, and oral history research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
My focus is on the ethnographic discourse of the data collection questions, when a researcher is not able to be psychically present in the study field. These discussions are based on my research on cultural identities of the Bolivian Aymara living in New York City.
Paper long abstract:
Cross-border cultures are becoming more common due to globalization. Therefore, in this paper I present my research where I focus on the cultural identities of the Bolivian Aymara immigrants living in New York City. The main expected outcome of this study is identifying how Aymaras in New York City see their cultural identity and how they describe their identity “between” two cultures.
My research is ethnographic, and I collect my data by using several methods such as questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and storytelling sessions. While collecting ethnographic data during the pandemic, I have realized the complexity of the study methods, but also the importance of finding new ways to communicate and from a far distance. Building connections and trust via video meetings is not easy. How does a researcher collect data during COVID-19? Could we as a researchers find new ways to encounter this?
The purpose of this paper is to reflect and arouse discussion of these data collection processes in ethnographic research in the time of COVID-19.
Paper short abstract:
Digital open data sites have problematic epistemologies and ontologies. This paper critically examines the provenance of an archives of migration and its oral histories as a medium for accessing historical migrants’ subjectivities, proposes ways of narrating vibrant yet precise tales of experience.
Paper long abstract:
The 2020 pandemic year shut researchers out of archival collections as it heightened their awareness to the potential of digital open data sites and their personal digital collections for research. A corpus of oral histories collected half a century ago and opened to the public through digitization reveals the potential of such archives. The Ellis Island Oral History (EIOH) collection discursively constructs the migration from Europe to America a century ago while it documents the experience of historical transatlantic migrants. This paper relies on conceptualizations of “post-memory” to consider a historical artifact that captures a particular structure of feeling at the center of the popular politics of memory in the United States alongside documenting the experiences of cohorts of mostly white immigrants. Multiple sites of construction and re-mediation of the archives are the points of creation as a social memory technology. Building on prior historical ethnographic analyses of this corpus (cf. Dalbello 2019; Dalbello & McGowan 2020), this paper highlights the constraints of pre-elicited oral histories but also their potential in migration historiographies. Thematizing the discourses of the body, kinship, illness, and contagion of the past captured in digitally mediated life histories, studied during the pandemic year, allows for a layer of auto-ethnographic encounter with the archives. This research is supported by the Rutgers Research Council Grant 2020-2021.
Paper short abstract:
In our paper, we will present the fields of communication in mediated cultural war between globalists and localists. We use the approach of social network analysis applied to big data. Our theoretical approach is based on the ritual model of communication.
Paper long abstract:
The political situation after the Cold War and the change in communication technology seemed to make national identity old-fashioned in. Some identified themselves as global citizens. Political leaders, also at the EU level, supported the intermingling of the global and the local. The technological revolution has contributed to the differentiation of the fields of communication of these groups - globalists and localists.
The theoretical-methodological framework of our research stems from the idea that identities can be studied from the perspective of community-produced communication, especially the strengthening of communicative group symbolism. Therefore, we theoretically utilize the ritual model of communication (see Couldry 2012, Sumiala 2011, Carey 2009).
Due to the large amount of source material, we use the approach of social network analysis applied to big data. We collect digital source material from RSS feeds and databases provided by media companies through APIs (Application Programming Interface) that allow access to them in the Python programming language.
Our hypothesis is, that the cultural war of identities in communication technology reinforces communicative group symbolism. We use the media as a window through which the narrative construction of different identities between groups can be seen. Cultural war is fought especially on social media platforms. The information produced by the study will help to elucidate how this type of communication creates divisions that are dangerous for democracy and lead to polarization. Admittedly, as in previous digital media culture research, we take advantage of a comparative perspective between globalists and localists debates.
Paper short abstract:
Evaluating my experiences as an ethnographic researcher and a research assistant in archives, in this paper I reflect on how digital technologies allow for adapting established rules about our research to contemporary global challenges like the Covid-19-pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid-19-pandemic has disrupted our research routines. Long scheduled time tables had to be modified, meetings postponed and methods reconsidered. Drawing from my own experience, I want to examine approaches to digital ethnographic and historical research from different perspectives:
One is the perspective of the researcher herself, working on contemporary craftsmanship and intensively engaging in Oral History. Both fields require – as established rules would suggest – a severe commitment and presence on-site. Can we think of new ways to engage in the same way digitally? Which are the limits or even prospects in this?
The other perspective is the one of the research assistant working in archives, facilitating access to material relevant for other researchers. The pandemic limited access to and availability in archives. A distress for many researchers, this has also been an opportunity to reflect on ways of accessibility to archival material. With more and more digital files being archived every year, the discussions about archival digitalisation projects are already on the agenda. Therefore, the current situation encourages to think about short-term digitalisation projects to prepare material that otherwise would be inaccessible for years.
In reflecting on these two aspects of my work, I want to discuss how we can bring closer our established rules about ethnographic and historical research to the realities we are facing with different global challenges that will have long-lasting effects on our research.