Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Field Events: Re-Conceptualizing the Field through Research with Digital Technologies

About

Over recent years, remote fieldwork through various digital technologies has become increasingly common for conducting fieldwork. These technologies are often referred to as ‘tools’ that researchers can use to reach their study participants across geographic distances. In this presentation, I suggest that the technologies are more than just tools that can be used to achieve a particular means. Rather, these devices and platforms impact on fieldwork, too. For example, they shape the relationship between researchers and their interlocutors as well as the kind and quality of ethnographic data. Based on my experience with fieldwork by phone, webcams and through various communication applications, I present a few ways in which the technologies that we, as researchers, engage with influence our field that cannot be clearly defined in spatial terms anymore. Besides practical issues, a theoretical question arises: when no longer determined through particular spatial and temporal criteria, what are the new norms through which ‘good fieldwork’ is established?

Tanja Ahlin is an Anthropologist of Health and Technology, and a Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar with a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. She is affiliated with ‘Human Factor in New Technologies’ at Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, UvA, and with the Center for Digital Anthropology, UCL. Tanja’s book Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives (Rutgers University Press, 2023) explores how digital technologies shape family care at a distance when living in the same place is not the most feasible option.