Critical Proximity as a Methodological Move in Techno-Anthropology

Abstract

Techno-Anthropology is a new field, operating with a broad range of methodologies and approaches. This gives rise to the question: What does it mean for Techno-Anthropological research to be critical? In this paper, we discuss this question by developing and specifying the notion of ‘critical proximity.’ Critical proximity offers an alternative to critical distance, especially with respect to avoiding premature references to abstract panoramas such as democratization and capitalist exploitation in the quest to conduct ‘critical’ analysis. Critical proximity implies, instead, granting the beings, fields, and objects we study their own rights and abilities to problematize grand scale claims. Critical proximity further entails that we as researchers are implicated in issues and their formation in ways that allow us to register these critiques and methods, and to emphasize or supplement them. We work through two cases—one on the involvement of users in innovation projects and another on commercial web technologies for tracing issues—to show how critical proximity may be practiced. We sum up the lessons derived in four methodological guidelines for doing research with critical proximity.

Data Sprint Learning. Exercising Proximity to Data in Teaching Situations

“…Proximity invites the material to present some of its own, inherent troubles. Facing the temptations, passions and excitements is part of engaging the Zuckerbergian "move fast and break things" experience in a critical proximity (Latour, 2005: 253;Birkbak et al, 2015;Herbrechter, 2017). Learning to manoeuvre between proximity and distance is necessary for reflection, and zooming in and zooming out is productive for critique and understanding not only data as such, but also its conditions.…”

“…This article reports on a one-day data sprint we conducted online as part of a PhD course in digital methods and data critique at the University of Klagenfurt. We address the educational potential of data sprints, particularly their ability to bring students into "critical proximity" with digital data (Latour, 2005: 253;Birkbak et al, 2015) Our data sprint induced feelings of being overwhelmed in students, when they looked at a digital data set for the first time; encountering its sheer volume or being `wooed´ by colourful visualisations. On the other hand, students also expressed feeling underwhelmed by a lack of relevant questions the data could answer, feeling suspicious of the data and its reductionist nature.…”

“Hands On”: incorporación de data sprints y digital methods en la docencia de marketing digital

“…Pese a que la conexión de los hackathons y los data sprints es clara y reconocida, estos últimos se caracterizan por una serie de rasgos distintivos, tales como la participación de "stakeholders" (personas con conocimiento, experiencia práctica en las materias investigadas), que aportan contexto y cercanía en las distintas fases del sprint y ayudan a enfocar la investigación en los resultados más relevantes (Madsen y Munk, 2019). En definitiva, los data sprints consisten en pasar de la abstracción a la concreción y a dotar a los actores implicados en los ámbitos de estudio de voz propia y capacidad de incidir en el desarrollo de investigación (Birkbak, Petersen y Elgaard Jensen, 2015).…”

Messy realities and collaborative knowledge production in tourism

“…Instead of attempting to construct critical distance, we, rather, need to tend to critical proximity . Critical proximity can take many forms but implies staying empirically close to the subject matter, opening up ‘matters of fact’ and acknowledging the creative potential of a distributed research process by ‘reappropriating methods used by other actors’ (Birkbak et al, 2015: 24). In those entanglements do we find the researcher.…”