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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.