Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

The Preservation of Embodied Masculinity in Rural Tech-Altered Workplaces

About

The occupational values of traditional rural industries in the western United States center on the laboring body. Rural work is celebrated and even mythologized as physical, perilous, embodied, and done in the outdoors. So what happens when high tech (perceived as an urban, white-collar, office-based industry) makes inroads into such rural places? How do communities respond when the livestock auction becomes internet connected, drones replace cowboys for monitoring cattle, and a Facebook data center becomes the newest employer in town? In this talk I will discuss a multi-year ethnographic project looking at rural places in the United States that host core infrastructure of the Internet.

Additionally, I hope to use this talk to reflect on two decades of conducting field-based research on digital technology in society. As network technologies have become more ordinary and diffused into everyday life, it has been necessary to devise new strategies to locate the phenomena I wish to study. Additionally, the creative and non-commercial qualities of the early Internet revolution have given way, as of late, to something more sneaky and extractive and (for me) much harder to endorse, particularly for marginalized groups. In addition to discussing one particular research project, I hope to spark a discussion of how researchers can adapt as the world around them (and especially the phenomena they study) changes as well.

Dr. Jenna Burrell was a faculty member at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley from 2007 until 2022. She was granted tenure in 2013 and promoted to full professor in 2021. While at UC-Berkeley she was co-director of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG) with law scholar Deirdre Mulligan, which brought together faculty and students from across campus to facilitate research on how algorithmic systems can be designed, used, or regulated to support more equitable and just societies. Seeking an opportunity to ensure research on technology in society has a broader impact in the world, she joined Data & Society as the Director of Research in 2021 serving in this role for two years. Her research focuses on how marginalized communities adapt digital technologies to meet their needs and to pursue their goals and ideals. She is the author of Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (MIT Press) as well as several widely cited articles including: “How the Machine Thinks: understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms” and “The Society of Algorithms” (with Sociologist Marion Fourcade). She has served on 26 PhD dissertation committees and has mentored students who have gone on to careers in Academia, Industry, Consulting, and at Research Non-Profits. She currently resides in Yokohama, Japan.

Join Meeting