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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:
The paper reveals how during the Covid-19 crisis, a participant observation has been transformed to a virtual one. It focuses upon the online transition of social and cultural activities of folklore dancing groups during the confinements in 2020 thus providing highly desired sense of a community.
Paper long abstract:
When doing a participant observation, a researcher becomes part of the life at the fieldwork itself and he/she is prepared for that both theoretically and mentally. It is that long-term ethnographic approach that can be scholar’s best friend or worst enemy, because a crisis can hit in an instance and threaten the entire process of monitoring and data gathering. The paper aims to reveal how during the Covid-19 crisis a participant observation has been transformed and taken into the virtual reality. It focuses upon the online transition of social and cultural activities of folklore dancing groups during the time of confinement in the Spring and Autumn of 2020. Despite the fact that online fieldwork, as well as online communication are both part of the academic and everyday life the study sheds light on the very transformation of strictly embodied practices (such as dance) into virtual experience. It provides the online dancers not with movement per se, but with a sense of community, as this is the folklore groups' primary social goal nowadays. Based in Bordeaux, France the author has been able to take part in a number of online events in Lyon, France and Barcelona, Spain thus managing to expand the ethnographic field turning the crisis into an opportunity.
Paper short abstract:
I research the narratives around a ritual impurity (nidda) in Judaism. During menstruation a married woman and her husband are expected to sleep separately, cannot touch each other in any way or pass objects. I conduct digital discourse analysis in a couple of women’s Jewish Facebook groups.
Paper long abstract:
I research the narratives around a ritual impurity (nidda) in Judaism. According to Jewish law, a married woman becomes impure once she starts her menstruation. During the time of menstruation plus an additional seven so-called “clean days”, she and her husband are expected to sleep separately, cannot touch each other in any way or pass objects. After the period of separation, a woman should immerse herself in a ritual bath – mikvah – after which she is perceived as ritually clean and can be available for sexual relationships.
My research was supposed to benefit from traditional fieldwork among Modern Orthodox Jewish women, as well as digital ethnography. I was supposed to conduct a feminist critical discourse analysis of the narratives of nidda and mikvah. Due to the current situation, all of my field trips to the USA and Israel were canceled. I had to look for a new methodological approach that would enable me to continue the research.
At the moment, I conduct digital discourse analysis in a couple of women’s Jewish Facebook groups. Additionally, I decided to create an anonymous questionnaire online, which is not traditionally used by anthropologists, but given the current situation, it’s one of only a few tools available.
I would like to describe the sensitivity of researching such an intimate phenomenon online; What freedoms and limitations do digital ethnography offer? I would like to share the struggles over the ethical issues regarding the digital fieldwork and well as some practical suggestions I personally considered.
Paper short abstract:
When meeting people and travelling abroad has been restricted, researchers are in a new situation. I study the experiences of the first female cyclists that participated in the Olympic games and need to seek new solutions on how to make transnational research in five different countries.
Paper long abstract:
The year 2020 and a global pandemic has marked a remarkable shift in doing distance work and having online meetings that might have been difficult to even think before. In many cases live meetings can well be relocated online and this can even be very practical, but restrictions in travelling and meeting interviewees bring new challenges to researchers. My research on the first women that participated in Olympic cycling in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984 requires interviewing six of the women in their home countries – or so I originally thought. In my paper I will discuss possible solutions to doing transnational research in a situation where face to face interviews abroad are not possible. Online interviewing offers one answer, but it also raises new questions. Together with technical solutions new kind of ethical and methodological issues must be considered. Is something left out of the interview when people are not present in the same space? How does online communicating effect the atmosphere and the expressions used? What kind of new possibilities does online interviewing offer?
Paper short abstract:
The contribution stems from an ongoing ethnographical research on food practices of hospitality toward refugees in the public space. Through a case study based on a digital cooking workshop carried out by refugees hosted in the town of Padua, Italy, it aims to explore the digital domain as feasible terrain for ethnographical research in the Covid 19 era.
Paper long abstract:
The present contribution stems from an ongoing ethnographical research on food practices of hospitality toward refugees carried on in an urban public space: such research, due to the constraints imposed by the lockdown prevention measures of the COVID 19 pandemic, is facing the necessity to put under question the methodological tool as well as the setting of the research initially identified.
Despite the obvious difficulties tied to the rephrasing of the research project, such contingency gives nevertheless the opportunity to explore the digital domain as feasible terrain for ethnographical research. In particular, I’ll present a case study based on a digital cooking workshop carried out by refugees hosted in the town of Padua, Italy. Some of the question at stake are: what kind of connections can be highlighted between the online and offline environment of the research (Burrell 2009)? Secondly, what kind of relation between the researcher and the subjects of the research can be built in such a context (boyd 2011)? Thirdly, which food can be shared in a context where the physical presence is substituted by the online one? First data show a dynamic interplay between the online and the offline research context, despite the peculiarity of each domain; furthermore, being the digital domain an environment where actors can be simultaneously users and producers of media content, the paper will critically discuss if and how digital devices can allow subjects to be active part in the construction of relations and contents; finally, the role of the audience will be explored in the construction of imagined online communities.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores challenges in teaching ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews during the COVID-19-Pandemia. Based on recent teaching experiences, I will reflect ethical and methodological challenges and the solutions that digital technologies can provide.
Paper long abstract:
“Are you actually giving a fieldwork course? Now?” I have faced these questions during the past months both as a university teacher of Folklore Studies. At first it seemed that my classes of ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews should be cancelled or postponed until the future when everything would be “back to normal” again. But I decided give it a try, encouraged by my collaborators at the Finnish Youth Research Network, Sofia Laine and Susanna Jurvanen. We collaborated already a year ago in the fieldwork course, where students of Ethnology and Folklore Studies at University of Helsinki did observations and interviews on the activities of Break the Fight-project, which runs workshops and performances of hip-hop arts (breakdance, beatboxing, graffiti) in the Eastern suburbs of Helsinki (www.breakthefight.net). This year everything was different: students did the observations through Zoom video links, and interviews were made with Zoom, WhatsUpp and a few as contact interviews. Students also wrote a joint essay on their experiences which will be published in the blog of Finnish Youth Research Network. I am right now planning a course on oral history, focused on the changing work practices in the Högfors Ironworks in my hometown Karkkila. This will mean new challenges and ethical issues, because the interviewees are retired workers with limited access to internet and digital tools. In my paper I will reflect these ethical and methodological challenges and the solutions that digital technologies can provide to promote involvement and interaction.