Engaging the Social Texture of Internet Cancer Support Groups

Abstract

Engaging issues of affectivity and embodiment in ethnographic fieldwork in mediated environments on the Internet, I will examine how ethnographic presence and affectivity is crucial to the production of ethnographic knowledge of the digitally mediated experience. Exploring social relations and negotiations in an extensive ethnographic fieldwork in several Internet cancer support groups, I discuss central epistemological challenges of ethnographic practice; of accessing and positioning oneself in the world we study. It is, I shall argue, our ethnographic presence in the field that mediates the production of ethnographic knowledge as the only viable way to do justice to our field.