Special Events
Special Events Reading Recommendations
This panel asks both how emotional processes can be studied ethnographically and what emotions come up in the course of doing fieldwork. We will look at the range of emotions which arise in fieldwork, from fear and despair to elation, from frustration with research participants to deep attachment. How do these emotional experiences shape our ability to endure in the field and do good work? How do we manage and record them? Given the interactional nature of emotion, how do we properly account for our own feelings while studying those of our research participants?
Panelists recommend readings to start the conversation (see description below.)
Arlie Russell Hochschild, is an emerita sociologist at UC Berkeley who has long been interested in the sociology of emotions. Her books include The Managed Heart, Strangers in Their Own Land, The Second Shift and a collection of essays called So How’s the Family. She’s currently finishing a book to becalled Left Behind: pride, shame and race in an Appalachian town.
Erika Summers-Effler is Associate Professor of Sociology at Notre-Dame. Her work focuses on the micro dynamics of persistence and social change. She is the author of Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups (2010). She has written methodological articles on how to attend to emotion in fieldwork and more recently on the implications of mirror neurons for ethnographic work (with Justin Van Ness). Her current book project is titled Fishing in Healing Waters: Engaging Emotions, Bodies, and Community in Fishing Programs for Healing from Trauma.
Ana Villarreal is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of emotions, urban inequality, violence, and drugs with a regional emphasis on Latin America. Her book The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Tim Black is professor of sociology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author three award winning books: When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets(Pantheon 2009); On Becoming a Teen Mom: Life Before Pregnancy, with Mary Erdmans, (California 2015), and It’s a Setup: Fathering from the Social and Economic Margins, with Sky Keyes (Oxford2021). Black is currently working on two books: a study of reenteering citizens from an alternative incarceration facility in Cleveland, and a follow up book to his first, now an ethnographic study of 33 years.
Access all recommended readings here.
Tim Black recommends:
Chapters 10 and 11 from his classic When a Heart Turns Rock Solid, an ethnography of three Puerto-Rican brothers over 18 years of fieldwork. While there are lots of examples of emotions in fieldwork in the chapters, it is the transition from Chapter 10 to Chapter 11 that dramatically illustrates the issue.
Erika Summers-Effler recommends:
1 - The Methods Appendix to her book Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes, which uncovers the hidden emotional rhythms that keep people engaged in social movements or on the contrary lead them to drop out.
2 - Summers-Effler, Erika, Justin Van Ness, and Christopher Hausmann. 2015. “Peeking in the Black Box: Studying, Theorizing, and Representing the Micro-Foundations of Day-to-Day Interactions.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44(4):450–79. doi: 10.1177/0891241614545880.
A methodological piece on the consequences of advances in cognitive science for ethnographers' investigations of perception and emotion
Ana Villareal recommends:
1 - Villarreal, Ana. 2022. “The Logistics of Fear: Violence and the Stratifying Power of Emotion.” Emotions and Society 4(3):290–306. doi: 10.1332/263169021X16518516966303.
Based on Ana's fieldwork conducted in the midst of criminal war in Mexico, the article shows that emotion is an engine of social action and inequality, turning coping strategies into stratification by means of the unequal resources that people can draw on to manage fear in everyday life.
2 - Gould, Deborah. 2015. “When Your Data Make You Cry.” Pp. 163–71 in Methods of exploring emotions, edited by H. Flam and J. Kleres. Routledge.
A short chapter on the experience of working with emotionally challenging data, useful for anyone who studies suffering, violence, and grief.
ETHNOGRAPHIC CAFÉ SPECIAL PANEL
Bit of a Mess & Bit of a Miracle:
Problems and Promises of Organizational Ethnography
Nov 11, 12 pm PST
Lindsey Cameron is an Assistant Professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, especially individuals’ behaviors at work. A field researcher, she conducted a five-year ethnography of the largest employer in the gig economy— the ride-hailing industry — based, in part, on her own experiences as a driver. Her research program is motivated by identifying and understanding how changes driven by algorithms are affecting how work is being organized and experienced by workers in a myriad of ways.
In her prior career, she spent over a decade in the U.S. intelligence and diplomatic communities as a digital and political analyst, received her PhD in management from the University of Michigan, MS from George Washington University and SB from Harvard University.
Stephen R. Barley is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Technology Management at the College of Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is also the Richard Weiland Emeritus Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Barley co-founded and co-directed the Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford's School of Engineering from 1994-2015. He was editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly from 1993 to 1997 and the founding editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review from 2002 to 2004. The Oxford University Press published his latest book, Work and Technological Change, in 2020.
Madeline Toubiana is Associate Professor and the Desmarais Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of Ottawa. Her research program has been focused broadly on what stalls and supports social change. More specifically, she examines the role of emotions, entrepreneurship, institutional processes, and stigmatization in influencing the dynamics of social change. While she explores change processes in large organizations and institutions, like in academia, most of her research examines how marginalized and/or stigmatized actors can be better included in change processes, and what might support them in doing so. As such, some of her previous and current work has studied social enterprises, the prison system, the sex trade, unemployment, non-profit organizations, and taxi-driving.
Convenors
Virginia Leavell is Assistant Professor in Organisational Theory and Information Systems at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Before returning to academia to study technology, work and organisations, Virginia worked for more than a decade as a political organiser, educator, fundraiser, and consultant for non-profits and labour organizations in the US and Thailand. In her previous career she founded several organisations, including a popular education and retreat centre in rural Virginia and Washington DC-based political consultancy. Virginia studies the relationship between organisational anticipation and digital technologies. In her research she asks two questions: 1) How do organisations use digital technologies to predict and plan for the future? and 2) How do ideas and information about the future influence organisational structure and action in advance of technological change? She has explored these questions in the context of organizations that manage infrastructure, including in a 3-year ethnography with two water agencies.
Mark de Rond is Professor of Organizational Ethnography at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is interested in how people experience the world and act in it, typically in (relatively) extreme contexts. His fieldwork has involved extended periods with doctors and nurses at war, Boat Race crews, a ragtag band rowing the Amazon, peace activists, and pedophile hunters. Join him and others at the Bohemian Writers Club (bohemianwritersclub.org).
ETHNOGRAPHIC CAFÉ SPECIAL PANEL
Ethnography in/of the Global South: Critical Reflections
May 20, 10 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST (note the earlier time!)
https://bostonu.zoom.us/j/96991657826 Passcode: 289577
A half century ago, Manuel Castells posed an existential question for urban sociologists: does the subfield constitute sociology in the city, or does urban space play a defining role, producing a sociology of the city? This panel poses a comparable question to ethnographers carrying out fieldwork in the global South: do they study sociological phenomena that just happen to occur beyond Euro-America, or is there something distinctive about the majority of the world’s surface that we call “the global South,” home to more than 85 percent of the global population? Scholars working on Africa, Asia, and Latin America discuss the meaning and limits of the concept and its significance for their work. Should southern ethnography be considered a distinct enterprise, or does this contribute to self-marginalization within an already notoriously parochial discipline?
Moderator: Zachary Levenson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Levenson studies the politics of eviction in postapartheid South Africa. His work is based on a decade of fieldwork in land occupations and informal settlements in Cape Town, and his book Delivery as Dispossession was released in April 2022 on Oxford University Press.
Presenter: Elena Shih, Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University
Trained as a sociologist, Shih studies the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking in China, Thailand, and the US. She works at the intersection of ethnography and critical humanitarianism studies. Her book Manufacturing Freedom is under contract with UC Press.
Presenter: Oluwakemi Balogun, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Oregon
Balogun’s research focuses on gender, globalization, and nationalism in the context of the Nigerian beauty pageant industry. Based on years of fieldwork, her book Beauty Diplomacy was released by Stanford University Press in 2020.
Presenter: Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Professor of Individualized Studies and Sociology, New York University
Baiocchi is interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He has cultivated a distinctly political ethnography, which he has deployed in his fieldwork in Brazil, the US, and elsewhere. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which, co-authored with Jake Carlson, is Housing Is a Social Good, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
ETHNOGRAPHIC CAFÉ SPECIAL PANEL
Doing Digital Ethnography
April 8, 10 am PT / 1 pm ET
(co-hosted with Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group)
Watch the video of the event here
The significance of the digital world and online technologies have come into focus in the wake of the pandemic. As they transform many facets of social life—work, play, finance, relationships—online spaces also invite a rethinking of social science methodologies and theories. This panel examines the craft of digital ethnography, or participant observation of online social spaces. We consider the promises and challenges of fieldwork in online social life, hybrid combinations of data in-real-life and online, and the future and limitations of participant observation in an increasingly digitized world.
Moderated by Melissa Aronczyk (Rutgers University); co-founder of Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group
Melissa Aronczyk is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University.
She is interested in how ideas, things and practices become valuable; and the technologies that render them that way. Her latest book is A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism (co-authored with Maria I. Espinoza), with Oxford University Press, a critical look at the intertwined history of environmental inaction in the United States and the rise of the PR industry in the twentieth century.
***Click here to see Melissa Aronczyk's recommended readings
Blok, A., Nakazora, M., & Winthereik, B. R. (2016). Infrastructuring Environments. Science as Culture 25(1): 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2015.1081500
How can we use ethnography to apprehend human and non-human relations in (so-called) natural environments? It involves, as the authors write, “attending to how ‘the environment’ is managed and known, through what material and conceptual means, and to what effects” (3). This article, an introduction to a special issue, describes how conceptual resources from a number of overlapping research traditions (STS, sociology, anthropology, human geography, organizational studies, and human ecology, among others) can be mobilized toward ethnographic sensibilities around global environments. I especially like the article’s reminder to think of infrastructures and networks as dynamic and fluid (though not frictionless) and how ethnographic methods are therefore well suited to highlighting the “contextual dynamics of situated practices and agencies” (11).
Jaffrennou, M., Coduys, T. (2005). Mission Impossible: Giving Flesh to the Phantom Public. Pp. 218-223 in Latour, B. & Weibel, P., eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. ZKM. here
This essay describes an art project designed by the authors for the exhibit Making Things Public, curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel in 2005 in Berlin. The art project is in fact an immersive installation that builds on the concerns expressed by Walter Lippmann for the future of communication in a democracy in his book, The Phantom Public (1925). The essay describes how visitors move through the installation as bodies and as data selves, captured by digital technologies such as RFID codes and sensors. While the essay is not about digital ethnography per se, I love how it invites us to consider what and how to capture a “public” or “public opinion” in a digitally mediated context.
Sophie Bishop, is a Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at the Management School of Sheffield University.
Bishop researches promotional culture and creative work on platforms. A feminist scholar, she examines the labor of beauty and fashion influencers, as well as algorithms as they are understood by users. She has published in Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies and more. She is currently the Specialist Advisor on the UK’s Parliamentary Inquiry into Influencer Culture.
***Click here to see Sophie Bishop's recommended readings
Skeggs, B. (1994). Situating the production of feminist ethnography. Researching women’s lives from a feminist perspective, 72-92. http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/13699
I’m trained in the field of Cultural Studies, which is actually very methodologically rich, although it’s not always viewed that way. In this piece, Bev Skeggs reflects on some of her experiences researching working class women in the UK with refreshing honesty. She discusses how messy research can actually be, and how many of the boundaries that we draw within the research process can be quite arbitrary. Although this is not a piece on ‘digital ethnography’, yet it deals with many of the issues that I experienced when researching young women online.
Bishop, S. (2019). Managing visibility on YouTube through algorithmic gossip. New media & society, 21(11-12), 2589-2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731
As part of my research, I wanted to find out how theories about what the YouTube algorithm ‘wanted’ shaped beauty influencers’ cultural production.. I found it useful to conceptualize influencers as ‘professional users’, who were running tests on social media platforms every day, and documenting the results of these tests in Facebook groups, Twitter and Instagram pages. I am a huge fan of gossip and I wanted to discuss the casual musings, theories and forms of strategic talk that I found in these online spaces as an important record of the link between perceptions around algorithmic visibility. These theories may not be right, but they end up influencing culture that is visible and available to us on platforms (which are probably less likely to be YouTube now!).
André Brock, Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies in the Department of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology
Trained in Library and Information Sciences, Brock is a leading scholar of race and social media with groundbreaking work on Black Twitter. His research in digital humanities and media studies documents racial representations online. His book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020, NYU Press) received the 2021 Nancy Baym Book Award in Internet Studies, among other recognitions.
Bonilla, Y and Rosa, J. “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States”. American Ethnologist 42, 1. P. 4-17 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12112
An important clarification on the complexities of studying hashtags as “discursive communities”
Brock, A. (2018). Critical technocultural discourse analysis. New Media & Society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532
Although I’d been writing about CTDA for nearly a decade before this article, this is the first full-fat treatment of the method. For the first time i was able to articulate why my positionality as a Black male academic helped to inform this approach to meaning making, race, and community in online spaces, apps, and commenting sections.
Jeff Lane, Associate Professor of Communication at Rutgers University
Lane studies how living in poor neighborhoods is being transformed via social media. His work combines digital and in-person ethnography to rethink sociological notions of neighborhood crime, violence, policing, and gentrification. His book, The Digital Street (Oxford University Press, 2019), has received awards from the American Sociological Association and Association of Internet Researchers.
***Click here to see Jeff Lane's recommended readings
Christin, A. “The Ethnographer and the Algorithm: Beyond the Black Box.” Theory & Society, 1-22. here
I love this piece because it shows how an algorithmic system can be a way into the field and an opportunity to initiate or build on ethnographic relationships.
Lane, J. (2020). A smartphone case method: Reimagining social relationships with smartphone data in the U.S. context of Harlem. Journal of Children and Media, 14(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2019.1710718
This piece is about experimenting with how to integrate a smartphone and its traces into the traditional method of shadowing someone. It’s also a reflection on the boundaries of a relationship.
Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University
Seaver is an anthropologist at Tufts, where he also teaches in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. His ethnographic research on the developers of algorithmic music recommendation has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Big Data & Society. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and author of the forthcoming Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. His current research explores the use of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds.
***Click here to see Nick Seaver's recommended readings
Beaulieu, A. 2010. “Research Note: From Co-Location to Co-Presence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge.”Social Studies of Science 40 (3): 453–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709359219.
Anne Beaulieu is an outstanding methodologist, and the basic argument of this article is one I’ve really internalized: When doing fieldwork with digitally mediated groups, it just isn’t that useful to worry about physical co-location as the sine qua non of ethnographic research! There are many ways people are present with each other, and the ethnographer’s task is to trace these out and experience them.
Seaver, Nick. 2017. “Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems.” Big Data & Society 4 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104.
I recommend my own piece not because I think it’s particularly novel (it’s not!), but because this article was my effort to pull together a variety of sources that proved useful to me in composing an ethnographic study of algorithmic systems. In general, these sources are not distinctly digital: many tips and tricks from ethnographers who study elites, distributed phenomena, and organizations prove useful for “digital” ethnography. I often hear from graduate students who find the collection of resources I gathered together here useful for convincing themselves (or their committees) that they are indeed doing “real” ethnography, despite what it might feel like at times.