Communication 690E - Ethnography of the Digital

This course is a practice-intensive seminar to rethink ethnographic methods as our social lives are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. What does fieldwork entail when we center digital technologies in our research? How should ethnographers negotiate access, trust, and proximity as they vacillate between the online and the offline? How should we retool ethnographic tools and techniques (e.g., fieldnotes, participant observation, interviewing, and multimodal ethnography) as we navigate the materiality and politics of digital media? We will explore these questions while paying attention to the ways digital technologies complicate dilemmas that arise due to gender, race, class and other power relations in the field. Readings draw on an interdisciplinary corpus from communication and media studies, sociology, anthropology, and information science. Participants will craft and conduct a digital ethnographic project related to their areas of interest. This seminar is ideal for students planning to conduct independent fieldwork for their Ph.D. research, but those interested in the epistemological and political consequences of studying digital media ethnographically are also welcome.