Taylor Dube** Taking a knee to take a stand Social media connects us virtually – we upload, like, comment and share pictures and thoughts. Social media platforms can be democratizing, making previously exclusive discussions accessible (Bouvier, 2020; Rosenbaum, 2019). Despite this, social media can also be a double-edged sword, creating an environment of exclusion, an […]
Syntia Hasenöhrl* Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many scholars had to transfer their research into the digital. At first sight, this seems to tie in with a trend in social sciences that moves towards objectivist big data approaches and neglects personal interactions (Leurs, 2017, p.131ff). Against this trend, digital ethnographers have been practicing […]
Martin Slama* The realm of the digital is a quintessentially modern one in the sense that it is geared towards constantly producing new things, be that apps, platforms, devices etc. For the inhabitants of this realm – producers or consumers of the digital or both at once – novelty and being up-to-date is often a […]
It was our pleasure to organize the Master Class Participatory Digital Ethnography together with the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab and the Visual Studies Platform (CEU). The public co-lecture (Nov. 9, 2021) by Darcy Alexandra (University of Bern) and Koen Leurs (Utrecht University) was a great inspiration and attracted a large and diverse audience. The succeeding […]
Yichen Rao, Anna Castel & Lili Almási-Szabó* During the outbreak of COVID-19, everyday life has been modified in accordance with the protocols that every country has implemented. These modifications have posed ongoing challenges for fieldworkers, artists, and practice-based ethnographic researchers, while they have simultaneously produced opportunities for these researchers to reimagine fieldwork, ethnography, art, and […]
Looking back at an extraordinary year – in every sense – the Digital Ethnography Initiative has celebrated its first birthday with colleagues from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. Thank you to everyone who has been part of it so far and we look forward to what lies ahead!
Sophie Colas** Engagement with digital technology takes numerous, often very abstract and tenuous forms that sometimes involve the intervention of other people. Such multiple engagement with digital technology appears to be particularly relevant in old age but would probably apply to other age groups likewise. While studying how elderly Parisians engage with ICT (Information and […]
Simone Pfeifer** As contact restrictions tightened last year with the developing pandemic, ever more colleagues began asking me for advice on “how to do digital ethnography”, knowing that I had been doing it since long before the virus transformed life as we knew it. Their immediate concern was “how to enter their field digitally” to transform […]
Sanderien Verstappen* Report on the RAI conference panel “Critical play: Smartphones as a mode of creative engagement with crisis” during the RAI Film Festival 2021. Smartphones are increasingly used in anthropological research, teaching, and knowledge dissemination. While their usage is not limited to the pandemic, situations of social distancing and online teaching have increased the dependency […]
Marie Hermanova** Ethnography of and on social media, in which my own research on female influencers on Czech Instagram is embedded, presents a growing, diverse and exciting field of research. It also places the ethnographer in an intricate network of relationships that are both more distant, yet also more intimate than their offline counterparts. As […]
