Constructing the Field Site (Multi-Sited and Virtual Ethnography)

1. INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods Constructing the Field Site (Multi-Sited and Virtual Ethnography)

2. Outline • The Field Site • Challenges to the Early Model • Multi-Sited Ethnography • Virtual Ethnography • Examples

3. Selecting a ‘Field Site’ Ask yourself two questions: • What about this research topic is spatial? • Where can you position yourself as participant-observer? (logistics)

4. Ethnography ala Malinowski 1922-1960s • Spatial Aspects of Field Work (in a traditional mode): • Field sites are discovered • One distinct, bounded site • the site = focus of ‘whole culture’ • Often possible to totally enumerate the population

5. Challenges: ambiguous spatial terrain • cyberspace • borderlands and transnational communities • global institutions (the UN) • the mass media • non-places (airports) [Augé]

6. Challenges: urban settings • complex, heterogeneous, overlapping cultures [Hannerz] • “the challenge of foregrounding”

7. Challenges: media and technology • ‘double articulation’ [Silverstone] -- one can study the television (as a consumed object, it’s place in the home, it’s shape/size/style) and the television program (as window into and education about contemporary culture) • Internet can been studied as both culture and as cultural artifact[Hine]

8. Approaches: Multi-Sited Ethnography • studying the local as embedded in the global [Marcus and Fischer] • studying the global system itself [Marcus] • fieldsites need not be static and bounded • “follow the object” “follow the people” “follow the metaphor” to create coherence

9. Approaches: Virtual Ethnography • Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) research vs. Online Ethnographers • Cyberspace – “profoundly anti-spatial…You cannot say where it is or describe its memorable shape and proportions…But you can find things in it without knowing where they are” [Mitchell 1996] • Questioning the nature of ‘dwelling’ and ‘participation’

10. Approaches: Online + Offline • Can you study someone online without studying them offline? (questions of authenticity) • Is cyberspace a bounded and detached space?

11. Studying a Part of the Whole • Selecting an ‘entry point’ • How does the part relate to the whole? • What position do you take within the whole and how do you justify that position? • Some strategies: • Where is the research topic most visible? • Where is the research topic contested?

12. Couldry’s strategy for studying Media Rituals • questions: • what is the role of media in the legitimation of wider power structures and inequalities? • how are media institutions and media people thought about? what are our beliefs about media power and how do they contribute to the legitimation of that power? • what position do you take within the whole and why? • moments where the process of legitimating media power was made explicit, visible • exceptional sites

13. Couldry’s strategy for studying Media Rituals • questions: • what is the role of media in the legitimation of wider power structures and inequalities? • how are media institutions and media people thought about? what are our beliefs about media power and how do they contribute to the legitimation of that power? • Method and data: • participant-observation • leisure sites (Granada Studios Tour) • protest sites • interviews • media clippings about the protest

14. Turkle studies ‘Life on the screen’ • questions: • how has the computer shaped our ways of thinking and feeling? • how does a nascent ‘culture of simulation’ affect our ideas about mind, body, self and machine? • how is the way we create and experience identity shifting? • What position do you take within the whole and why: • the culture of simulation as part of a larger cultural context • the eroding of boundaries between real and virtual

15. Turkle studies ‘Life on the screen’ • questions: • how has the computer shaped our ways of thinking and feeling? • how does a nascent ‘culture of simulation’ affect our ideas about mind, body, self and machine? • how is the way we create and experience identity shifting? • method: • ethnographic component • participation in a virtual world • clinical component • offline, in-person interviews with participants

16. Ethnography Without Borders • The field site is constructed (not discovered) • studying a ‘part’ of the whole • studying multiple sites • studying movement

17. The Fieldsite as a Network • Before: Ask yourself – where is the social process carried out? where is it especially visible? where is it contested? • To Start: Seeking entry-points (not sites) • Follow people, things, themes to other sites (iterative approach) • To Stop: With meaning saturation re-situate yourself or conclude the research

18. For Tuesday • Please send me your fieldnotes so I can post them on the website • Look over your classmates field notes – especially those on the same team.