This is the zoom recording of the event 'Behind the Scenes of a Digital Ethnography Dissertation' on 1st December 2023, co-organised by the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group and the Digital Ethnography Collective. We start with an introduction from Melissa Aronczyk (Rutgers). Then panellists Yena Lee (Northwestern), Zoe Glatt (Microsoft Research) and Michelle Cera (NYU) are interviewed by Cailtin Petre (Rutgers), followed by audience Q&A. Enjoy!
EVENT INFO:
As every ethnographer knows, there’s often a gap between our best-laid research plans and our research realities - whether because of time/mobility constraints, funding issues, access challenges, or any number of other roadblocks we may encounter. And for PhD students, this gap can be especially tricky to navigate. This panel brought together advanced and recently graduated PhD students for a conversation about the gritty reality of doing a digital ethnography dissertation. Panellists speak candidly about their experiences with digital ethnographic data collection, analysis, and writing, while also teaching, RAing, navigating the job market, and living lives outside of work.
SPEAKER BIOS:
Michelle Cera is a doctoral candidate in the sociology department at New York University where she studies politics, gender, inequality, and social media. She has studied and written about the pandemic and gender inequality, the ethics of digital ethnography, young adult dating practices, and the gendered nature of hookup culture. Her dissertation focuses on far-right extremism on social media platforms.
Dr. Zoe Glatt is a feminist media scholar with interests in platformised creative industries and labour, social media and influencer cultures, and digital ethnographic methods. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where she is working on her first book manuscript, Demonetised: Inequality, Co-Option and Resistance in the Influencer Industry, as well as new research into the intersections of AI and the creator economy. She is the co-founder of The Digital Ethnography Collective, an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods. She is also currently in the process of setting up the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN), for researchers studying influencer industries and creator culture.
Yena Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern School of Communication. Her research interweaves political communication, the sociology of social movements, and political economy of new media to study the mediated forms and processes of democratic participatory politics with a focus on relationships. Her dissertation advances grassroots models of democratic citizenship that account for the ways content creators have translated conventional notions of good citizenships to form civic relationships. She has authored publications in leading outlets theorizing about relationships in networked grassroots activism. In a study published in Information, Communication & Society, she compares two case studies of feminist networked movement leadership from Korea-SchoolMeToo and Telegram Sextortion Ring Protest-to develop an understanding of brokerage as the type of communication that goes beyond the neutral act of connecting to reshaping the relationship between grassroots and institutional actors. Her research published in the International Journal of Communication adopts concepts of relational scripts and schemas to theorize networked relationships, illustrating the importance of studying relationships as integral building blocks of networked publics and instruments for resisting harmful technocultures.
25 авг 2024
