Digital Ethnography Seminar Series 2024: Tools, Ethics, Futures
Digital ethnography is a research approach that applies anthropological sensibilities and tools to study digital technologies. Since digital ethnography occurs across many fields, it takes on different priorities and modalities. It extends from an ethnographic epistemology that privileges immersive and emergent qualitative methods, and applies techniques and ethical principles to explore the experiential aspects of socio-technical systems.
Regardless of focus or approach, digital ethnographers are drawn together because they find something compelling in combining the two concepts of “digital” and “ethnography” in their practice. What does that mean?
We invite interested persons to join our series of six seminars in 2024, to explore the power, potential, challenges, and ethics of digital ethnography as a lens. Each event in the series is a 90-minute session (hybrid format) that focuses on a specific topic and highlights the work of 1-2 practiced and well-regarded digital ethnographers. The speakers will spend the first 30 minutes talking about their own approach or responding to pre-selected questions, which will then prompt the direction for wider discussion among participants.
You can attend these sessions in person at Utrecht University or online. Invitations are open for anyone to attend, and there is no fee for participating, but pre-registration is required.
To sign up for each session, please visit our coordinating partner, the Research School for Media Studies (RMeS)
The series is facilitated by Professor Annette Markham, recent Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia, and Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement at Utrecht University. This series is part of a larger initiative we are building at Utrecht University to amplify the strengths and techniques associated with creative, critical, and emergent qualitative methods, especially in understanding AI-implicated and digital media saturated cultural contexts. This larger, nascent nitiative is being facilitated by Professor Payal Arora, Dr. Donya Alinejad, Dr. Nermin Elsherif, and Professor Annette Markham.
See below for our exciting lineup of topics and featured guests in 2024.
Note:
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- While the topics and speakers are confirmed, there may be minor date/time changes later in the year to accommodate the guest speakers.
- This series is co-sponsored by RMeS and is suitable for EC credit for Dutch students (3-6 EC available, see RMeS for details after April 11, 2024).
- For international PhD students who would like ECTS credit please consult with Annette Markham a.n.markham@uu.nl with questions.
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April 22, 2024, 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Digital Ethnography: Always a Mixed Method Approach
Online via Teams, or In Person at Muntstraat 2A, 0.04 (may be changed depending on audience interest)
<<Register here>>
Featured Guests:
Tania Lewis is a Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. From 2017-2022, Tania was Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT, and is co-author of the book Digital Ethnography (2016). She has published widely on the politics of lifestyle, sustainability, and ethical consumption, and on global media and digital cultures. Lewis's extensive ethnographic research over more than a decade has seen her venturing onto the set of reality TV productions in South and East Asia and Australia, hanging out with households watching lifestyle television in Mumbai, investigating the cool rooms, bins and commercial kitchens of restaurants across Australia, and participating in permaculture makeovers in suburban Melbourne backyards.
Annette Markham is Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement in the department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University. Between 2020-2023, she was a Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre. A pioneering interpretive sociologist of digital culture since the mid-1990s, she has a long history of adapting methods to study the impact of digitalization on identity formation and organizing practices since 1995. As a methodologist, she studies epistemological frameworks for research design as well as on-the-ground techniques and tacit practices of researchers across scientific and everyday science domains. She also is well known for developing or remixing existing models for mindful, ethical, and rigorous approaches to qualitative or mixed-method, ethnographic, and multi-entity research design. Among her publications, she co-edited Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method (2009) and is author of the video series, On Method: Being a Reflexive Practitioner (2020).
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May 28, 2024, 2:30-4:00 p.m. (confirmed)
Digital Ethnography’s Ethical Dilemmas: Doing Sensitive or Antagonistic Fieldwork
[Description in progress]
Online: via Teams, or In Person: Muntstraat 2A, 3512EV Utrecht, Grote Zaal
<<Register here>>
Featured Guests:
Dr. Nermin Elsherif is a critical geographer, designer, and an urban researcher, with a range of experiences between academia and the heritage practice since 2012. Her counter mapping collaborations with communities foregrounds question about what ‘remembering together’ means in the age of social media, and the kinds of subjectivities that are produced through this memory work.[bio in progress]
Dr. Marissa Willcox is a Digital Ethnographer and feminist theorist. She works at the University of Amsterdam in the Media Studies Department as a Lecturer and Researcher. A former member of DERC, the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in Melbourne, Willcox has experimented with various techniques for engaging in the hybrid, networked and ever-shifting 'field' of Instagram. An important strand of her research research looks at how feminist, queer, non binary and POC artists use Instagram to create belonging for marginalised groups.[bio in progress]
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Sept 11, 2024, 9:30-11:00 (confirmed)
Innovative Digital Tools for Digital Ethnography of Decentralised Communities
Several challenges exist in undertaking digital ethnography in distributed, online communities, such as blockchain-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and other opensource field sites. These challenges include high volume of data, transient participant culture, and ethics consent. In this talk, we explore digital tools and methodologies that we are actively involved in developing and working with to enable researchers to navigate these decentralised, digital environments more effectively. These include a Discord bot (called "Telescope") that facilitates more participatory and ethical research with Discord communities, and a project with Large-Language Models (LLMs) that combine the ethnography of AI with the ethnography of online communities using AI tools.
Online via Teams, or In Person at Muntstraat 2A, 0.04 (may be changed depending on audience interest)
<<Registration Link Forthcoming>>
Featured Guests:
Dr. Kelsie Nabben is an ethnographic researcher specialising in the social impacts of emerging technologies, notably decentralised digital infrastructure (such as blockchains, peer-to-peer protocols, and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) and other algorithmic systems (such as Large-Language-Models). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on resilience and accountability in contexts of digital governance. Dr. Nabben completed her PhD as a scholarship recipient at RMIT University’s Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society on the topic of resilience in decentralised technologies. She is currently Max Weber Fellow at European University Institute.
Ellie Rennie is a Professor at RMIT University and an Australian Research Council-funded Future Fellow working on the project "Cooperation Through Code". Her research is examining permissionless systems (including public blockchains) using ethnographic methods. Prior to her fellowship, Ellie's work was focused on the topic of digital inclusion in remote Indigenous communities, and she currently serves on the Expert Panel for Australia's First Nations Digital Inclusion Advisory Group. From 2018-2020, she was one of the Directors of DERC, the Digital Ethnography Research Centre.
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October 17, 2024, 2:30-4:00 p.m. (confirmed)
Digital Ethnography as participatory and collaborative: Challenges and creative practices for making a difference with/in communities
How can the mindset and tools of ethnography be leveraged to build stronger participatory and collaborative research models in and with communities? This session focuses on the value of making research spaces more accessible or inclusive when working with communities, juxtaposed with the challenges of shifting the academic lens from observation to co-creation and co-learning. Livingstone and Alinejad discuss these topics in the context of their own research practice with homeless youth and diasporic communities, respectively. These cases launch a larger discussion of how the participatory and collaborative features of ethnography enable an adaptive and reflexive mindset, important for communities who have traditionally experienced marginalisation and/or exclusion.
Online via Teams, or In Person at Muntstraat 2A, 0.04 (may be changed depending on audience interest)
<<Registration Link Forthcoming>>
Featured Guests:
Dr. Donya Alinejad is an Assistant Professor in the departmenet of Media & Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She is a media researcher with a focus on digital media and a background in anthropology. She has studied the role of social media usage in people’s experiences of spatial mobility, community-formation, emotional care, and scientific knowledge communication. She has conducted this research in multiple countries, paying special attention to how digital communications technologies become integrated into people’s everyday lives.
Stephanie Livingstone is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a long-time community development professional with local and international experience in the areas of program management, digital inclusion, youth engagement and advocacy. She is particularly interested in addressing AI inequalities and social justice through community engagement practices. A member of DERC, the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, Stephanie brings expertise in being flexibly adaptive and collaborative in thinking about appropriate research design.
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November 19, 2024, 2:30-4:00 p.m. (time/date <not> confirmed)
Digital Ethnography and Future Making: Adapting methods, Adjusting Frames
Overview: Futures Anthropology is a new approach to engagement across academia and other organisations, which seeks to bring innovative research design and methodology, theory and futures knowledge and foresight to diverse audiences. Digital ethnography practice is a key participant in this agenda as we investigate possible future life in climate change, with emerging technologies through new attention to how people will live in changed environments and with other species in possible, unknown and uncertain futures.
Online via Teams, or In Person at Muntstraat 2A, Grote Zaal
<<Registration Link Forthcoming>>
Featured Guests:
Sarah Pink is a design and futures anthropologist, documentary filmmaker and methods innovator. She is Professor and Founding Director of the Emerging Technologies Lab and the new FUTURES Hub at Monash University and Visiting Professor at Halmstad University, Sweden. She is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, an elected member of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, and has Honorary Doctorates in Technology from Malmo University, Sweden and in Philosophy from Halmstad University, Sweden. From 2015-2017 Sarah was Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and Distinguished Professor at RMIT University and co-author of Digital Ethnography (2016).
Annette Markham is Chair Professor in the department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University. Former Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT, and a critical digital literacy specialist, Annette has been researching the impact of digitalization on identity formation and organizing practices since 1995. As a methodologist, she studies epistemological frameworks for research design and tacit practices of researchers across scientific and everyday science domains. She also is well known for developing or remixing existing models for mindful, ethical, and rigorous approaches to qualitative or mixed-method, ethnographic, and multi-entity research design. Authored or co-edited works include: Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity; Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method; and Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space; and the video series, On Method: Being a Reflexive Practitioner.
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Dec 9, 2024, 3:30-5:00 p.m. (confirmed)
The Future of Work in AI-impacted Societies: Digital Ethnography's State of the Art
[description in progress]
Online via Teams, or In Person at Muntstraat 2A, Grote Zaal
<<Register here>>
Featured Guests:
Nancy Baym is Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research. She studies how people understand and act with new communication technologies in their relationships. She is currently working on AI and the future of work, using a mix of qualitative and ethnographically inspired methods. A pioneer in the field of internet research, Baym wrote some of the first articles about online community in the early 1990s. With Jean Burgess, she is the author of Twitter: A Biography (2020, NYU). Other books include Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018, NYU), Personal Connections in the Digital Age (2010, Second Edition 2014, Polity), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (co-edited with Annette Markham, 2010, Sage), and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (2000, Sage).
Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University, a digital anthropologist, and Co-Founder of FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative. Her expertise draws from more than two decades of user experiences among marginalized communities worldwide to shape inclusive designs and policies. She and her FemLab team have designed and deployed creative digital ethnographic methods with local artists, activists, and educators in India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Namibia. These projects have been funded by global public and private entities such as UNESCO, Adobe, GE, Dutch Brewers, UNHCR, and HP. She is the author of award-winning books including The Next Billion Users (Harvard Press). Her upcoming book with MIT Press & Harper Collins India, From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech comes out in the summer 2024. Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and “the right kind of person to reform tech.