Ethnographies of the Datafied State
Governments today are actively developing and integrating digital and computational systems, transitioning into what sociologists Jenna Burrell and Ranjit Singh call the “Datafied State.” Consequently, there is increased scholarly interest in studying the growing implications of algorithms, automation, and surveillance across civic life. This panel explores the use of ethnographic methods in examining the complex relationship between computation and statecraft. How does ethnography become useful for investigating the logic and labor behind the building and maintenance of these technologies? What unique challenges exist? Our panelists, Burcu Baykurt and Chuncheng Liu, will explore these themes through cases of smart city developments in the US and social credit systems in China.
Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research examines how digital infrastructures reshape and perpetuate durable inequalities. She is currently working on a book, Smart as a City, based on her fieldwork in an aspiring smart city in the United States.
Chuncheng Liu is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an incoming Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the sociotechnical production of data and classifications in authoritarian states. He is currently working an ethnography of a social credit system, a data-driven governance infrastructure in China.
Demystifying Dissertation-to-Book
The Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group is pleased to welcome University of California Press Senior Editor, Michelle Lipinski, for an online dissertation-to-book event! This event will aim to demystify the pathway from dissertation to book publication through engaging discussion and Q&A. We welcome doctoral students, early-career researchers, and any scholars looking to learn more about the terrain of academic book publishing. Attendees will have the opportunity to gain expert insights on approaching editors, crafting compelling book proposals, navigating peer review, obtaining contracts, and more.
Michelle Lipinski commissions general interest and scholarly books for UC Press’ economics and technology studies lists. Michelle joined the Press in 2020 with over a decade of experience in acquiring books across a range of social sciences for Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press. She is honored to work with a diverse array of driven and insightful thinkers who challenge and transform how we think about today’s most vital economic, technological, and social issues. Some highlights of her list include The Black Reparations Project by William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen and Lucas Hubbard, Busting the Bankers’ Club by Gerald Epstein, Resurrecting the Black Body by Tonia Sutherland, and The Gentrification of the Internet by Jessa Lingel. For the technology studies list, she recently launched the Co-Opting AI series.
Behind the Scenes of a Digital Ethnography Dissertation
As every ethnographer knows, there’s often a gap between our best-laid research plans and our research realities – whether because of time/mobility constraints, funding issues, access challenges, or any number of other roadblocks we may encounter. And for dissertating graduate students, this gap can be especially tricky to navigate. This panel will bring together advanced and recently graduated PhD students for a conversation about the gritty reality of doing a digital ethnography dissertation. Panelists will speak candidly about their experiences with digital ethnographic data collection, analysis, and writing, while also teaching, RAing, navigating the job market, and living lives outside of work.
Co-hosted with the Digital Ethnography Collective
Michelle Cera is a doctoral candidate in the sociology department at New York University where she studies politics, gender, inequality, and social media. She has studied and written about the pandemic and gender inequality, the ethics of digital ethnography, young adult dating practices, and the gendered nature of hookup culture. Her dissertation focuses on far-right extremism on social media platforms.
Dr. Zoë Glatt is a feminist media scholar with interests in platformised creative industries and labour, social media and influencer cultures, and digital ethnographic methods. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where she is working on her first book manuscript: Demonetised: Inequality, Co-Option and Resistance in the Influencer Industry, as well as new research into the intersections of AI and the creator economy. She is the co-founder of The Digital Ethnography Collective, an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods. She is also currently in the process of setting up the Content Creators Research Network, for scholars studying influencer industries and creator culture.
Yena Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern School of Communication. Her research interweaves political communication, the sociology of social movements, and political economy of new media to study the mediated forms and processes of democratic participatory politics with a focus on relationships. Her dissertation advances grassroots models of democratic citizenship that account for the ways content creators have translated conventional notions of good citizenships to form civic relationships. She has authored publications in leading outlets theorizing about relationships in networked grassroots activism. In a study published in Information, Communication & Society, she compares two case studies of feminist networked movement leadership from Korea—SchoolMeToo and Telegram Sextortion Ring Protest—to develop an understanding of brokerage as the type of communication that goes beyond the neutral act of connecting to reshaping the relationship between grassroots and institutional actors. Her research published in the International Journal of Communication adopts concepts of relational scripts and schemas to theorize networked relationships, illustrating the importance of studying relationships as integral building blocks of networked publics and instruments for resisting harmful technocultures.
Disability as Method
Disabled people, especially people of color and those living in nursing homes or other congregate housing, have been at greatest risk of infection and death from COVID-19. The NYU Center for Disability Studies (CDS) has been documenting the experiences of disabled and chronically ill people during the pandemic. The team has built a publicly-accessible archive to preserve memories, stories, artworks, and other materials in a range of accessible formats. They have preserved conversations on social media, records of digital public meetings, and photographs of street art and actions that are otherwise ephemeral.
This collaborative work will culminate in an upcoming edited volume, How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, est. 2024), which provides models of disability justice for post-COVID living. In addition to this volume, members of CDS have recently edited another collaborative volume that presents crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (2023) convenes leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore how disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media.
In this panel, Mara Mills, co-founder and co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, will reflect on the value of collaborative and public humanities work while discussing their two recent volumes. Emily Lim Rogers, a contributor for both volumes, will share her insights on “virtual ethnography” as a disability method.
Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and founding co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently co-editor of Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford 2020), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU 2023), and a forthcoming special issue of Osiris on "Disability and the History of Science" (2024). Upcoming publications include the NSF-funded edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press), a coauthored book with Jonathan Sterne on time stretching, and an NEH-funded collaborative research project with Michele Friedner on "The Global Cochlear Implant."
Emily Lim Rogers is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She has published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and in the volume Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023), among others. Her current book project is about the politics of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), patient activism, and biomedical knowledge in the US.
The Role of Digital Ethnographic Approaches in Understanding and Combating Digital Authoritarianism
This panel explores the use of digital ethnographic work in understanding the complex relationship between digital platforms and authoritarianism. Challenging underlying assumptions of both the nature of this relationship and typical methodological approaches, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and João C. Magalhães discuss their own important and innovative approaches to studying these messy and deeply ambivalent spaces.
First, Dr. Pinheiro-Machado discusses the radicalisation of some segments of precarious workers in Brazil. As informal workers start enterprising on digital platforms, her work investigates the extent to which these technological shifts impact political radicalisation. Is this political identification a reflection of predisposed political views that were already latent previously? Or are the digital platforms pushing them to the far right? Based on a combination of intensive long-term ethnography and extensive computational approaches, Dr. Pinheiro-Machado will explore push and pull factors that enable the encounter between precarious workers and authoritarian populism.
Next, Dr. Magalhães explores the messy relationship between digital platforms, democracy, and authoritarianism. Early celebratory accounts were replaced by fears of ‘filter bubbles’ and induced polarization, which have been however constantly contradicted by empirical research. Dr. Magalhães suggests that this hazy picture is largely the consequence of a misleading assumption, one that takes exposure and consumption of “information” as the most important aspect whereby platforms affect the formation of political subjects. Reminiscent of older, deterministic views of media’s social power, and closely associated with the ‘marketplace of ideas’ paradigm, this assumption tends to flatten human agency and ignore the multiple registers, experiences, and inequalities through which political phenomena happens. Dr. Magalhães argues that an ethnographic sensibility towards the messy reality of how ordinary people imagine and engage with digital networks is needed if we are to develop a more realistic understanding of how the Internet transformed our political lives.
João C. Magalhães is an Assistant Professor in Media, Politics, and Democracy at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen (Netherlands). His work concerns the multiple intersections of platforms and politics and has been published in the ‘Journal of Communication’, ‘International Journal of Communication’, and ‘Social Media + Society’, among others. João holds a PhD from the LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science).
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado is a Professor in the School of Geography at the University College Dublin. She is the Director of the Digital Economy and Extreme Politics Lab and the Principal Investigator of the project Flexible Work, Rigid Politics in Brazil, India, and the Philippines, funded by the European Research Council, Consolidator Grant. Twitter: @_pinheira
Postponed to 2024: Curating Hope: the aspirational self and social engagement in early-onset cancer communities on social media
(Date TBA)
Early-onset cancer patients and survivors have unique needs in comparison to their older counterparts and so often turn to social media to find others with similar experiences. This presentation reports on a study which used reflexive qualitative interviews to understand the unique needs of early- onset cancer patients and caregivers as they engage with digital communities related to their illness. Drawing from such theories as uses and gratifications, context collapse, and aspirational self-presentation, Hodson shows how people engaging with social media communities related to early-onset cancer employ “affordances-in-practice", choosing what to post based both on the technical affordances of each platform, and also based on the audience they imagine on each platform. Hodson’s research reveals that in addition to providing information and social support, participants in early-onset cancer communities use social media to seek hope. This finding in particular suggests a nuanced reconsideration of the existing dichotomy between online authenticity and the aspirational self on social media platforms like Instagram.
This event will be moderated by Yonaira M. Rivera (Rutgers University), member of the DEWG steering committee.
Jaigris Hodson is the Canada Research Chair (tier 2) in Digital Communication for the Public Interest. Her SSHRC and CIHR funded research examines the ways that misinformation can be mitigated through digital communication efforts, particularly those targeted at the research community. Thus her current work examines such interdisciplinary topics as educational interventions to address COVID-19 related misinformation, the online harassment of diverse researchers, ecological approaches to understanding misinformation in a modern context, and the communication of health and science in a time of misinformation.
Lies of Digital Ethnography
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The work of digital ethnography – and all ethnography for that matter – invites and perhaps requires certain illusions and self-deceptions on the part of the researcher around issues of fieldwork, participation, and representation. In his seminal 1993 essay, “Ten Lies of Ethnography,” Gary Alan Fine argues that illusions around the virtues, skills, and presented selves of ethnographers represent key dilemmas of ethnographic work. In “Three Lies of Digital Ethnography” – published more than 25 years later—Gabriele de Seta offers common deceptions around ethnography of online social spaces as heuristics for productive research. This panel puts Fine and de Seta in conversation and invites us to examine our own challenges as researchers across modes of communication as well as disciplines. Our panelists discuss whether “lies” may be a more productive framework than “truths” for moving through some of the messy methodological tensions of digital ethnography.
Gabriele de Seta is, technically, a sociologist. He holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei. Gabriele is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bergen, where he is part of the ERC-funded project “Machine Vision in Everyday Life”. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices, sociotechnical entanglements and vernacular creativity in the Chinese-speaking world. He is also interested in experimental music, internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice.
Gary Alan Fine is a sociologist and the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Social Psychology. As an ethnographer, he has written extensively on the role of culture in small group settings from youth sports to mushroom collecting to senior citizen activism. His current ethnography is a study of American Civil War history enthusiasts. He is the recent co-author with Tim Hallett of Group Life: An Invitation to Local Sociology, and the author of The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments.
Studying Online Radicalization and Disinformation
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In recent years, digital platforms have proven themselves to be fertile ground for the spread of political disinformation, propaganda, and radicalization, particularly on the far right. Ethnographic work promises to shed valuable light on how these processes unfold over time and in diverse sociopolitical contexts. This panel will explore how digital ethnography can contribute to the burgeoning area of critical disinformation studies, and will consider key methodological concerns related to research design, ethics, and safety.
This event will be moderated by Caitlin Petre (Rutgers University), member of the DEWG steering committee.
Alice E. Marwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and a Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of social media technologies, and is currently focused on disinformation, conspiracy theories, networked harassment, and identity. Marwick is the author of The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media (Yale 2023), Media Manipulation & Disinformation Online (Data & Society 2017), Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (2017). As an Andrew Carnegie fellow, she is working on her third book, Down the Rabbit Hole: The Intellectual Journeys of Violent Racists, Conspiracy Theorists, Flat Earthers, and Other Americans on the Fringe, about online radicalization.
Alice will be talking about her recent work critiquing the concept of far-right online radicalization and a research project on conspiracy theories on TikTok.
Bruce Mutsvairo is professor in the department of media and culture studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, studying the development of journalism and media in non-Western societies.
Bruce will be talking about findings from expert interviews on the future of disinformation on the African continent particularly as it relates to worsening the conflict in ecology.
Julia Ticona Book Talk: Left to Our Own Devices
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Introduction Chapter: Left to Our Own Devices
In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar “digital hustles” they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.
Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where her research investigates the ways that digital communication technologies shape the meaning and dignity of precarious work. She received her Phd in sociology from the University of Virginia and is currently an Associate Fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She is an inaugural distinguished fellow at the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication and core faculty at the Center on Digital Culture and Society. She’s a graduate of Wellesley College, and a third generation teacher. You can find her work in the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Information, Communication, and Society, as well as Wired, Dissent, and FastCompany.
Moderated by Jeff Lane and Melissa Aronczyk of the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group
Methods for the Climate Crisis
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About this event
In the context of rapidly escalating climate emergencies, we need to do research differently. This panel will address how qualitative researchers can bring values of humanity and collective ethics to bear on large-scale climate and environmental problems; what affordances and limitations are established by digital methods; and what opportunities exist for interdisciplinary practices.
Hosted by the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group
Moderated by Jeff Lane and Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers University
PANELISTS
John Chung-En Liu, Associate Professor of Sociology
National Taiwan University
John Chung-En Liu is an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, and a faculty affiliate in the International Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Liu received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research adopts a sociological perspective to study climate change, especially on how climate change discourses circulate in China’s cyberspace.
Alice Mah, Professor of Sociology
University of Warwick
Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and was Principal Investigator of the large-scale European Research Council project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry” from 2015-2020. Her research focuses on environmental justice, corporate power, and the politics of green industrial transformations, which are the subjects of her two most recent books: Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It (Polity, 2022) and Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Adrienne Russell, Mary Laird Wood Professor and co-director of the Center for Media, Journalism and Democracy in the Department of Communication
University of Washington
Adrienne Russell is Mary Laird Wood Professor and co-director of the Center for Media, Journalism and Democracy in the Department of Communication, University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of journalism, technologies and social issues. Her forthcoming book, The Mediated Climate (Columbia 2023), examines the overlapping climate and information crises. She is the author of Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (Polity 2011) and Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (Polity 2016). She is co-editor of the volumes Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies (Cambridge 2021), Journalism and the NSA Revelations (Reuters 2017), and International Blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics (Peter Lang 2009). Her research has been published in the top journals, and she is co-editor of “2K,” a special section of Social Media + Society that is dedicated to public scholarship related to media and technology.
Brittany Schaefer, Project Manager
Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)
Brittany (she/her) is a settler of European descent living on and working remotely from Dish with One Spoon territory. As a researcher, she is interested in human-environment relations and ways of doing science better; specifically, human-nature relations, interdisciplinary collaborations, and feminist approaches to knowledge production. Brittany is participating in this panel as a representative of CLEAR, an interdisciplinary, feminist, anti-colonial lab located in St. John's, NL on the ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaq and Beothuk.
Qualitative Sociology Special Issue on Digital Ethnography
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Join us as the editors and authors discuss their contributions to the September 2022 Qualitative Sociology Special Issue on Digital Ethnography. The special issue features an introduction by guest editors Jeffrey Lane & Jessa Lingel, an afterword by Mario Small, and seven empirical articles that use digital ethnographic methods to answer core sociological questions related to community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. This public event will be moderated by Melissa Aronczyk (Rutgers University); co-founder of Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group.
Doing Digital Ethnography
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HELPFUL LINKS AND QUESTIONS FROM CHAT
Doing Digital Ethnography in collaboration with Ethnographic Café
The significance of the digital world and online technologies have come into focus in the wake of the pandemic. As they transform many facets of social life—work, play, finance, relationships—online spaces also invite a rethinking of social science methodologies and theories. This panel examines the craft of digital ethnography, or participant observation of online social spaces. We consider the promises and challenges of fieldwork in online social life, hybrid combinations of data in-real-life and online, and the future and limitations of participant observation in an increasingly digitized world.
Moderated by Melissa Aronczyk (Rutgers University); co-founder of Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group
Participants
Melissa Aronczyk is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. She is interested in how ideas, things and practices become valuable; and the technologies that render them that way. Her latest book is A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism (co-authored with Maria I. Espinoza), with Oxford University Press, a critical look at the intertwined history of environmental inaction in the United States and the rise of the PR industry in the twentieth century.
Sophie Bishop, is a Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at the Management School of Sheffield University.
Bishop researches promotional culture and creative work on platforms. A feminist scholar, she examines the labor of beauty and fashion influencers, as well as algorithms as they are understood by users. She has published in Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies and more. She is currently the Specialist Advisor on the UK’s Parliamentary Inquiry into Influencer Culture.
André Brock, Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies in the Department of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology
Trained in Library and Information Sciences, Brock is a leading scholar of race and social media with groundbreaking work on Black Twitter. His research in digital humanities and media studies documents racial representations online. His book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020, NYU Press) received the 2021 Nancy Baym Book Award in Internet Studies, among other recognitions.
Jeff Lane, Associate Professor of Communication at Rutgers University
Lane studies how living in poor neighborhoods is being transformed via social media. His work combines digital and in-person ethnography to rethink sociological notions of neighborhood crime, violence, policing, and gentrification. His book, The Digital Street (Oxford University Press, 2019), has received awards from the American Sociological Association and Association of Internet Researchers.
Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University
Seaver is an anthropologist at Tufts, where he also teaches in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. His ethnographic research on the developers of algorithmic music recommendation has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Big Data & Society. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and author of the forthcoming Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. His current research explores the use of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds.
Melissa Aronczyk & Maria I. Espinoza
Book Event: Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza, A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (Oxford, 2022)
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In A Strategic Nature, Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century. More than spin or misinformation, PR affects how institutions and individuals conceptualize environmental problems. Revealing the linkages of professional strategists, information politics, and environmental standards, A Strategic Nature shows how public relations restricts alternative paths to a sustainable climate future.
Book Cover Design: Kimberly Glyder
Deeper Human Insights in the Age of Digital Disruption
UNESCO and the LiiV Center are launching a global partnership to advance digital innovation and ethnographic methods. DEWG was a featured panelist at the launch event, Deeper Human Insights in the Age of Digital Disruption, held on 10 February 2022.
Deborah Lupton
Public Talk: Deborah Lupton, Centenary Research Professor in the News & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra, Australia
Caitlin Petre
Book Launch: All the News that’s Fit to Click: How Metrics are Transforming the Work of Journalist
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Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares. These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch wielded by a factory boss, worsening newsroom working conditions and journalism quality? In All the News That’s Fit to Click, Caitlin Petre takes readers behind the scenes at the New York Times, Gawker, and the prominent news analytics company Chartbeat to explore how performance metrics are transforming the work of journalism.
Drawing on months of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews, Petre describes how digital metrics are a powerful but insidious new form of managerial surveillance and discipline. Yet this is not a simple story of managerial domination. Contrary to the typical perception of metrics as inevitably disempowering, Petre shows how some journalists leverage metrics to their advantage, using them to advocate for their professional worth and autonomy.
An eye-opening account of data-driven journalism, All the News That’s Fit to Click is also an important preview of how the metrics revolution may transform other professions.
