Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Whatever works: digital ethnography as a flat methodology

In this talk Dr John Postill draws from twenty years practising digital ethnography in the UK, Malaysia, Indonesia, Spain and Australia to appraise this methodology, with social movement research as the focus. John starts with a brief overview of digital ethnography as a fuzzy, free-spirited form of qualitative research. Dr Postill then compares two projects of his separated by a decade: a hybrid (online/offline) study of Spain’s indignados movement in the early 2010s and a recently completed online ‘lurking’ study of the anti-woke movement. He argues for the versatility of digital ethnography as a ‘flat methodology’ that need not elevate any one method, not even participant observation. This agnosticism gives researchers a license to do ‘whatever works’ – if they can overcome, that is, the epistemological and institutional anxieties that often go with this seemingly anarchic way of doing things.

Dr John Postill is an anthropologist who specialises in the study of media, culture and sociopolitical change.