Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Whatever works: digital ethnography as a flat methodology

About

This talk will be held at 1 St Giles with the option to join via Zoom.

In this talk I draw 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. I start with a brief overview of digital ethnography as a fuzzy, free-spirited form of qualitative research. I then compare two projects of mine 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. I argue 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.