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- Convenor:
-
Timothy Hall
(UCLA)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Thomas Weisner
(UCLA)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 7 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
This panel consdier the opportunities and limitations of contemporary digital ethnographies and studies of culture-at-a-distance, during the enforced social distancing and push to online social activities during COVID, with necessary restrictions on in-person interactions and travel.
Long Abstract:
What kinds of ethnographies can we safely and ethically conduct during a pandemic, and what limitations and advantages do they bring? The COVID-19 pandemic has sharply curtailed in-person gatherings, including traditional ethnography, and restricted international and even regional travel. In response, people are adapting video chat platforms to fill in for traditional meetings, celebrations, schooling, and other activities. Many of us are also spending much more time on social media, consuming and creating cultural productions from news to crafting and other forms of self-making. Concomitantly, many individuals whose work or schooling has transitioned to video chat platforms now report burnout, “Zoom fatigue”, and ambivalence about further online participation.
In-person ethnography normally gains insights through observation of chance occurrences in natural settings, engaging our interlocutors’ social networks interacting in daily life, and learning about rules and behaviors that our informants might not think to tell us and we might not think to ask. Ethnography of online interactions potentially misses much of this, while focused interviews are necessarily limited when we cannot participate in interlocutors’ daily lives.
This recalls debates over study of culture-at-a-distance (Bauer, et al. 1956; Benedict 1946; Mead and Metraux 1953), which, like digital ethnographies, often privileges works of high culture or commercial culture, or particular self-presentations of digital creators, rather than their lived, non-digital worlds. This panel invites ethnographers who have worked in both traditional and digital/distant ethnographies to reflect on the challenges, benefits, and limitations of psychological ethnographies in the current situation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 7 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
When COVID-19 made in-person data collection unsafe, we faced the problem of doing ethnographic research without access to a field site. We altered our cognitive ethnographic study using collaborative autoethnography, remote interviews, digital artifact analysis, and virtual participant observation.
Paper long abstract:
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, all in-person research at our institution was halted. Our research team was conducting a cognitive ethnography study of learning in the engineering research lab and was forced to stop all in-person data collection. Our primary method of participant observation in the field site was suddenly impossible. We made several alterations to continue our ethnographic research remotely. Unlike most virtual ethnography studies that observe online activities, however, we had to observe activities that do not take place online. First, we adopted a collaborative, autoethnographic approach. Participants in the field site were asked to write short reflections describing their situation, thoughts, and activity. We analyzed those narratives and used them to conduct follow-up interviews remotely. Second, we collected and analyzed artifacts such as presentation slides and written paper drafts as records of lab meetings—a locus of major social interactions as revealed by our earlier in-person observation. Third, online chats and email exchanges became everyday social activities in the lab, and our ethnographer participated in and recorded those activities. During the initial phase of complete lockdown, all field site activities were conducted online, and we conducted virtual participant-observation of those activities. In the later phase, lab members had limited access to the laboratory and essential activities resumed under safety restrictions. The lab activities were no longer completely online, but our research still was online-only. This presents a new challenge to participant observation methods as well as an opportunity to test our approach to online participant observation.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from a collaborative NSF project and individual ethnographies, we show that digital social connections promote immune health and provide sources for psychological resilience during the pandemic, while exploring variable online opportunities and risks faced by marginalized communities.
Paper long abstract:
We argue that digital social connections can provide innovative sources of health resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw from collaborative and individual research carried out in the context of a Fall 2020 Culture of Virtual Worlds research methods seminar (taught by Jeffrey Snodgrass) at Colorado State University. Although digital social connections have been typically viewed as health risks rather than sources of mental resilience, research also shows that virtual identities can promote individual wellbeing. In the collaborative project, funded by NSF, we investigate whether, when, and how digital relationships and experiences promote rather than compromise health at the level of immune biology, in the context of dramatic losses of offline social connections and shifts into online contexts. Complementing that work, seminar students drew from psychological anthropological theories, including cultural consonance/dissonance, and employed mixed qualitative/quantitative ethnographic methods, to investigate links between virtual lives and health during the pandemic. Here, we synthesize findings, which includes studies of educational communities like Zoom classrooms, social interactions via media platforms such as TikTok, and online gaming, streaming, and fanfiction writing. Overall, we argue that digital lives can compensate individuals for their lack of crucial yet impossible offline connections, by creating new cultural niches for social connection and identity negotiation, while highlighting the variable opportunities and risks faced by marginalized communities in digital environments. The research combines biocultural and psychological anthropological approaches to gain new perspectives on health processes, including the continuing production of health disparities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of online and distant ethnography and proposes an approach using Ecological Momentary Assessment. This paper pushes ethnographers to consider alternate ways of collecting biocultural data of interest to psychological anthropologists.
Paper long abstract:
The challenges of the year 2020 have forced anthropologists to seriously reconsider traditional fieldwork. In the United States and around the world anthropologists are grappling with our past and our future as a place where safety and health are achieved for all. This paper discusses approaches to doing fieldwork at a distance. Based on fieldwork conducted before and during the pandemic, this paper will discuss what psychologists have been struggling with for years, how to get data that matches up with the “real world”. Having done research which “studied up” by examining the pharmaceutical industry through advertising schemes, and more “traditional” fieldwork with substance users, this paper will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital and distant methods. Specifically, this paper will discuss the types of data that are well captured and what is missed. Additionally, this paper will propose an approach using Ecological Momentary Assessment to capture biocultural data, from a distance. In this approach, the participant becomes the ethnographer, using accessible technology and employing thick description in order to detail psychological and ethnographic data of interest. This rethinks the positions of the ethnographer and participant but gets at quality, fine-grained data that traditional ethnographic techniques aim to capture. Beyond the methodological, it pushes us to reconsider the future of ethnographic fieldwork and focuses on research closer to home and the potential applied outcomes of such work.
Paper short abstract:
We identify the opportunities and challenges our team has faced in researching local responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Unable to carry out traditional ethnography, we designed an online questionnaire and conducted targeted interviews. We also relied on researchers' autoethnographic accounts.
Paper long abstract:
Doing research on local experiences during the coronavirus pandemic has presented opportunities as well as challenges. The biggest challenge was not being able to carry out traditional face-to-face ethnography, which compelled our team to explore a collection of new-to-us methods. The pivot point has been an online questionnaire asking people about their experiences. We are also interviewing people who may not have access to the internet or who would prefer to talk to us, even if remotely. We have also asked people to submit photos that document their experiences. Finally, we found that our own experiences with COVID-19, including reports from those in our social networks, provide opportunities for authoethnography.
In addition to putting methods together in new ways, doors have opened for new university-based collaborations between units and people: Involved in our project are three academic programs (Anthropology, History, Psychology) and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion. Graduate and undergraduate students alike have been involved in many capacities. We are all involved in collecting and analyzing data, even as we struggle through online meetings.
The goal of our project is to create empathy and the valuing of diversity and inclusion. We aim to do this through public exhibits giving voice to varieties of experiences and through reports to community leaders. We look to feminist methodological values of reducing hierarchies within our team, as well as between our team and the informants and communities we work with. We seek to develop an ethic of (inter)acting and listening on all levels.
The opportunity we have embraced has been in facing an opening of a new kind of space that has not only allowed but demanded creativity in how we work together, what we consider ‘data,’ and how we put it together to find meaning.