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It was great to take part in a grad student panel organized by @BuBaykurt + Ethnography Collective @UMassAmherst yesterday alongside @gozdebocu, @ellenplatts, @ValSampethai, and Ethan Tupelo. The event and chat weren't recorded, but I wanted to share some of our takeaways. 
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. @gozdebocu talked about the challenges of translating her multisited fieldwork (in Germany and Switzerland) online, but realized that multisited fieldwork is *always* messy (especially when researching sensitive topics) and social media platforms are in themselves fieldsites
She took months to rethink and resubmit her ethics protocol and has centered the procedure for getting consent and conducting interviews on trust + research partners' preferences. What platforms do they feel comfortable talking on?
. @ellenplatts and @ValSampethai and Ethan Tupelo are all living in their fieldsites, but city lockdowns and university rules about in-person research have required different strategies for making connections and conducting research
Ethan – who's working with Pedal People, a co-op that is one of his city's main waste haulers, had to file for an exception from his university to keep doing his job, which is also his research.
. @ValSampethai researches illegalized labor in Athen's sex industry, and during the pandemic has helped interlocutors navigate logistical matters re: lockdown, applying for state aid. She's noticed the physical contours of the field change as labor processes change.
She's realized that the conceptual bounds between crisis and normalcy are not neatly cleaved, just as we know the digital/analog and formal/informal rules are blurred and mutually constituted.
Both Ethan and Valentini have taken on assistance/advisory roles with their interlocutors. Ethan uses his university's library to get access to medical journals and the latest research on covid, Valentini has done translation work and explained the rules on lockdown + residence
Ethan's analysis of covid research on surface transmission informed the co-op's policies on handling trash and recycling, though the reality of biking in the elements while lugging 300lbs of refuse in a mask outweighs the best practices informed by research
. @ellenplatts moved across the country for fieldwork; her uni's IRB is not allowing in-person research, but it's hard to divide "being a real person" from research. She volunteers at a community garden + food bank, which relate to her work on sustainable development
Food access questions driven by the pandemic overlap with her research, and just being on Instagram and following local groups have opened doors to community meetings happening digitally. Methods classes don't talk about Instagram as a tool for research like this.
I agreed that methods classes don't mention Instagram as a tool for snowball sampling or building relationships in the field, but argued that 20-somethings can draw on their "digital nativeness" to inform their ethnographic practice
There's a tension between our humility as graduate students/researchers in training looking for "how to's" when it comes to ethnography + recognizing how skills and perspectives that come with our age can serve us in transitioning to digital ethnography
At the end of the day, digital ethnography is built on the same pillars of "traditional" ethnography: immersion, reflexivity, and elucidating meaning. We can do all these things through screens/devices, and being trained to think reflexively serves us well in framing our findings
Without "how to" guides in polisci, there's gonna be a lot of mucking around, playing with platforms, mixing strategies (scraping v ad hoc screenshots, ie), but that's always been the case with ethnography, a method that "thrives on flexibility" (in Timothy Pachirat's words)
COVID has made it more difficult to do in-person research, emphasizing the limitations/downsides of ethnography...but in challenging moments, being forced to think about the limitations can also be a strength. Don't forget how serendipity and reflection make ethnography powerful.
So do your thing, keep meticulous notes on the process, lean on the network of other grad students working their way through this for help**, and the finished product will end up being a guide for others in the future.
