Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Understanding contemporary China through digital anthropology

All four speakers are contributing to a book called Understanding China through Digital Anthropology. The book claims to challenge the meaning of the term digital, create a path for the future of anthropology and show how China is changing as a result of digital technologies. The chapters range in topics from social media and period tracking apps, trade and networks, education and health services, to how algorithms are created within an IT corporation. The talk will summarise some of the content, discuss our collective approach to digital anthropology and expand on the idea that this changes our conception of the digital.

Daniel Miller currently runs the MSc in Digital Anthropology and is director of the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL. Over ten years he directed first the Why We Post project on the use and consequences of social media. Followed by the The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA). The project comprised 11 researchers who conducted simultaneous 16 month ethnographies across nine countries. The two projects have resulted in the publication of twenty volumes.