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To Tango or to Disentangle? Making Ethnography Public in the Digital Age

Daniel Mwesigwa, Cyan DeVeaux, Palashi Vaghela

TL;DR

Addresses how ethnography can be practiced ethically and rigorously in hybrid online-offline spaces, where platforms like VRChat and WhatsApp mediate publics and social concerns such as race and caste. Introduces emergent relationality, an analytic that treats the ethnographer, platforms, and publics as mutually constitutive, and uses two case studies to illustrate how access, affect, and governance shape fieldwork. Argues that publics are relational, emergent, and shaped by infrastructural participation, requiring reflexive, context-sensitive methods that blend computational and qualitative approaches. Contributes a theoretical lens and methodological guidance for CSCW and design researchers studying platform-mediated publics in the digital age, including considerations of consent, representation, and power in digital ethnography.

Abstract

Ethnography attends to relations among people, practices, and the technologies that mediate them. Central to this method is the duality of roles ethnographers navigate as researchers and participants and as outsiders and insiders. However, the rise of digital platforms has introduced new opportunities as well as practical and ethical challenges that reshape these dualities across hybrid media environments spanning both online and offline contexts. Drawing on two case studies of VRChat and WhatsApp, we examine how ethnographers employ diverse tactics to study both enduring and emerging socio-cultural issues of race and caste, particularly those that form what are often called publics. We propose emergent relationality as a key analytic for understanding the mutual shaping of ethnographers, platforms, and publics. In this work, emergent relationality offers registers for analyzing how positionality and hybrid media environments constitute and condition what can be accessed, articulated, and made public.

To Tango or to Disentangle? Making Ethnography Public in the Digital Age

TL;DR

Addresses how ethnography can be practiced ethically and rigorously in hybrid online-offline spaces, where platforms like VRChat and WhatsApp mediate publics and social concerns such as race and caste. Introduces emergent relationality, an analytic that treats the ethnographer, platforms, and publics as mutually constitutive, and uses two case studies to illustrate how access, affect, and governance shape fieldwork. Argues that publics are relational, emergent, and shaped by infrastructural participation, requiring reflexive, context-sensitive methods that blend computational and qualitative approaches. Contributes a theoretical lens and methodological guidance for CSCW and design researchers studying platform-mediated publics in the digital age, including considerations of consent, representation, and power in digital ethnography.

Abstract

Ethnography attends to relations among people, practices, and the technologies that mediate them. Central to this method is the duality of roles ethnographers navigate as researchers and participants and as outsiders and insiders. However, the rise of digital platforms has introduced new opportunities as well as practical and ethical challenges that reshape these dualities across hybrid media environments spanning both online and offline contexts. Drawing on two case studies of VRChat and WhatsApp, we examine how ethnographers employ diverse tactics to study both enduring and emerging socio-cultural issues of race and caste, particularly those that form what are often called publics. We propose emergent relationality as a key analytic for understanding the mutual shaping of ethnographers, platforms, and publics. In this work, emergent relationality offers registers for analyzing how positionality and hybrid media environments constitute and condition what can be accessed, articulated, and made public.
Paper Structure (14 sections, 2 figures)

This paper contains 14 sections, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Performativity of (digital) ethnography
  3. Infrastructural participation
  4. Platforms as infrastructures
  5. Publics and their interpretations
  6. Ethnographic bridge between platforms and publics
  7. Emergent relationality
  8. Case studies
  9. Discussion
  10. How emergent relationality works
  11. Emergent relationality as platform and publics comprehension
  12. Emergent relationality as affective and ethical praxis
  13. Implications for methods
  14. Conclusion

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: The entanglement of ethnographers, platforms, and publics (in hybrid media environments)
  • Figure 2: Echo (left) cycling through different avatars during the interview next to Author 1 (right).