Digital ethnography as a flat methodology: how to research and write a project from start to finish

This is a hybrid event. John Postill’s lecture will be given online, but participants in the workshop will participate on site, in room Ed132a. 

I will draw from two decades practising digital ethnography in the UK, Malaysia, Indonesia, Spain, and Australia to assess the strengths and limitations of this approach. I start with an overview of digital ethnography as an open-ended, fuzzy, and creative approach to qualitative research. I then focus on two projects of mine separated by a decade: a hybrid (online/offline) study of Spain’s indignados movement in the early 2010s (Postill 2018) and a recently completed online study of the anti-woke movement in the Anglosphere (Postill 2024), recounting the process of carrying them out from start to finish. I argue for the versatility of digital ethnography as a ‘flat methodology’ that does not privilege any prior method. This agnosticism gives researchers a license to do ‘whatever works’ – so long as they can overcome the epistemic and institutional angst that often goes with this ‘messy’ way of doing things.

Biography

John Postill is Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, and Digital Anthropology Fellow at University College London (UCL). He is a core member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University and has published extensively on the topic, including “Imagining mundane futures” (in Anthropology in Action, 2019), The Rise of Nerd Politics: Digital Activism and Political Change (2018), and Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice.”

• Register here no later than 15 January

Organisers

Mia Liinason, Professor at the Department of Gender Studies 
Sunny Gurumayum, Doctoral student at the Department of Gender Studies

Practicalities

Coffee/tea will be served in the break.

Welcome on January 22^nd - and do not forget to register!

Arranged by: Lund Social Science Methods Centre