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

TL;DR

This paper explores how ethnographers adapt their methods and navigate ethical challenges when making ethnographic research public in digital environments, using case studies from VRChat and WhatsApp.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of emergent relationality to analyze the mutual shaping of ethnographers, platforms, and publics in hybrid media contexts.

Findings

Ethnographers employ diverse tactics to study online and offline publics.

Emergent relationality helps understand how positionality influences access and articulation.

Digital platforms reshape traditional ethnographic roles and ethical considerations.

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.