Questioning “digital ethnography” in an era of ubiquitous computing

Duggan, Michael W.

doi:10.1111/gec3.12313

Cited by 21 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…Once the app had been developed, ethical approval was granted to conduct a study with students recruited from the Geography department to examine how participants engaged with the app's interface, the locations (and routes between them) and content. We chose participant observation over other virtual/video ethnographies (see Duggan, ; Laurier et al., ) as we were unable to secure permission to film in some of the private locations along the tour. Yet, by observing how our participants engaged with the technology, each other and the environment, we ensured that our research remained “in place” for the duration of the tours.…”

Section: Researching With Personal Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“You don't want to peer over people's shoulders, it feels too rude!” The moral geographies of using participants’ personal smartphones in research

Holton

Harmer

2018

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This paper examines the moralities of using participants' personal mobile technologies in research. While smartphones bring novel benefits to research in terms of their labour-saving, innovative, intuitive and low-cost virtues, they also raise unique spatial, ethical and moral issues that can have implications for how research is conducted. Using morality as a conceptual tool, this paper explores the smartphone as a geographical space that is simultaneously private/public, personal/shared and material/imagined. By examining the observations made during a study which tested a mobile walking tour app, this paper questions the moral implications for, and the consequences of, researching using participants' personal technologies and how researchers might access and interpret behaviours within these private digital "spaces." This paper advocates the importance of recognising the complexities of moving into participants' private digital spaces and how a diverse range of behaviours may become part of the research encounter through the ways in which participants form interactions with technologies, the environment and with each other. Finally, this paper contributes to discussions of moral geographies by examining the asymmetric power relations that are evident when examining moral behaviours that are performed simultaneously in digital and geographical spaces, and questions whether these may be functions of hegemonic systems of "acceptable" behaviour. K E Y W O R D S methods, moral geographies, practice, qualitative research, smartphones, virtual space | INTRODUCTIONThere has been a recent drive to adopt emergent mobile technologies, such as smartphones and tablets, into contemporary geographical research practice (DeLyser & Sui, 2013;Gorman, 2017), both in terms of self-directed research (Neff & Nafus, 2016) and research[ing] with others (Brown et al., 2013;Laurier et al., 2016). Yet while advocates argue for the benefits of mobile technologies in generating understandings of, among other things, how people relate to technology, how technology might affect relationships with places and how researchers might capture "new" data in real time, the ethics and moralities of adopting technologies into research remain unclear. While technologies add unique spatial dimensions to the qualitative methodological canon, this paper will demonstrate how technologies bring equally unique spatial, ethical and moral issues to research practice in ways that can seem innocuous at first but may have implications for how research ---

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Section: Researching With Personal Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“You don't want to peer over people's shoulders, it feels too rude!” The moral geographies of using participants’ personal smartphones in research

Holton

Harmer

2018

Area

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“…In fact, acknowledging that the “materiality of the digital (…) should be at the forefront of theories attempting to understand contemporary practices” ( Duggan, 2017 ) can only play to this research agenda’s advantage, more so if taking for granted the quasi teleological proneness of the PDW for digital engagements ( Leonardi et al., 2019 ). All this rendered digital ethnography an indisputably valuable methodological approach.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lose-lose dilemmas of Barcelona’s platform delivery workers in the age of COVID-19

Vieira¹

2020

Social Sciences & Humanities Open

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The abrupt lockdown experienced by a big part of the world population due to the COVID-19 pandemic has bestowed upon home delivery services an unexpected importance. Officially considered amongst “essential services”, their workers circulate freely while most people are advised (when not forced) to stay in their homes. The present paper explores how this context helps to shed light on the precarious situation of the majority of the platform delivery workers (PDW). This is done through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography of the interactions within a WhatsApp group. The main finding is that the COVID-19 context deepened the precarization of the PDW confronting them with four dilemmas from which there is no way out.

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“…Answering this may involve figuring out what methodologies, particularly collaborative ones, might draw together political ecology’s emphasis on site-specific ethnography and digital geography’s approach to data as an object of inquiry (cf. Duggan, 2017; Leszczynski, 2017). Another important point of contact is the political economy of data collection and analysis.…”

Section: Horizonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A political ecology of data

Nost

Goldstein

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental governance without understanding the platforms, devices, and institutions that comprise environmental data infrastructures. The papers draw together scholarship from political ecology and science and technology studies to demonstrate how data has become a significant site in which contemporary environmental politics are waged and socionatures are materialized. We address: (1) the contested practices of utilizing and maintaining data infrastructures; (2) the ways they are governed and the territorial statecraft they enable; (3) the socionatural materiality they arise within but also produce. The papers in this special issue show that, against its dominant representation, data is material, governed, practiced, and requires praxis. Political ecologists could adopt such an approach to make sense of the emerging ways in which data technologies shape environments and their politics.

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Questioning “digital ethnography” in an era of ubiquitous computing

Cited by 21 publications

References 71 publications

“You don't want to peer over people's shoulders, it feels too rude!” The moral geographies of using participants’ personal smartphones in research

“You don't want to peer over people's shoulders, it feels too rude!” The moral geographies of using participants’ personal smartphones in research

The lose-lose dilemmas of Barcelona’s platform delivery workers in the age of COVID-19

A political ecology of data

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