Media Ethnography Research Articles

Shared anthropology of the Middle East: Essays on media in honor of Faye Ginsburg

AbstractThe articles in this special issue are the outcome of the panel: “Papers in Honor of Faye Ginsburg: Visual and Media Anthropology in the Middle East,” which was held virtually for the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings of November 2021. The reach of Ginsburg's work as well as her mentorship through the creation of NYU's Graduate Program in Culture & Media has shaped the ethnography of media and visual anthropology across a diversity of geographic regions. In this particular issue, we bring together scholars of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa, a term that more broadly encompasses what is often referred to as the Middle East) whose projects are deeply influenced by Ginsburg's scholarship on shared anthropology, collaborative media practices and cultural activism. This introduction includes excerpts from a conversation with Ginsburg.

Intangible cultural heritage versus tourism: residents’ reactions to temporal overtourism during the Day of the Dead in Mixquic, Mexico

ABSTRACT Globalisation opens small communities and their traditions to temporal overtourism, causing adaptations in the local dynamics. This study investigates responses to overtourism during the Day of the Dead in Mixquic, a semi-rural community located in Mexico City. Employing rapid ethnography, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and content analysis of social media, it delves into local perceptions and actions regarding temporary overtourism dynamics in a global patrimonialisation context. Results reveal a complex interplay between traditional practices, community resilience, and tourist dynamics. Despite challenges, residents show a positive attitude towards tourists, often incorporating them into ancient traditions while preserving cultural authenticity. Notably, symbolic representations of tradition persist amidst external pressures, showcasing the resilience of community identity. The study underscores the importance of embracing community-centric approaches – observing and considering the community – and innovative tourism strategies to mitigate negative impacts for a better preservation of cultural heritage. By prioritising resident values and needs, tourism can lead to practices that are beneficial to both communities and visitors. Furthermore, the research highlights the importance of observing and listening to local communities.

From online to offline: Getting ready for in-person fieldwork through social media ethnography

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on finding solutions to continue academic research in light of closed borders. The inability to travel has prompted academic researchers to reconsider their approaches to fieldwork, with a particular focus on utilizing modern technology effectively to conduct accurate ethnographic research even while working remotely. This has entailed navigating the vast expanse of the internet carefully and acquiring additional tools in the field of ethnography. The primary concerns surrounding conducting remote fieldwork and ensuring the proper selection of data can be summarized by exploring strategies to overcome the challenges imposed by restrictions, as well as leveraging modern technology to study distant cultures without compromising comprehension. Taking into consideration my research on the Japanese experimental noise music scene and the necessity to collect information about the response and activities of these artists at the brink of the pandemic, I challenged my need to collect data by practising through the internet and modern technologies new ways to undertake ethnographic research through distance. In this sense, social networks demonstrated how modern ethnographic methods can be effectively applied to conduct functional social media ethnography, mitigating the challenges brought about by physical distance constraints. Specifically for my research, Reddit’s feature of organizing communities into subtopics named “subreddits” provides me with the possibility to keep in touch with reliable users and information by selecting specific subreddits related to Japan and music topics (e.g. “r/japaneseunderground”, “r/noisemusic”). Along with the existing literature and the constant online research for news related to my project, social media ethnography played a functional role not only in collecting relevant data but also in providing me with more clarity about how to further move my fieldwork once I can travel to Japan. By emphasizing the potential of social media as a valuable avenue to enhance research strategies in times of crisis, this paper aims to consider how online fieldwork created to overcome the impossibility of fieldwork travel can result in a profitable social media ethnography not only to collect data by distance but also to gain appropriate preparation for following in-person fieldwork by relying on our primary findings. By retracing step by step my research project on Japanese noise music, I will explain how undertaking online research provided me with further ideas to achieve more findings and add clarities to my research intent once I had to switch to offline fieldwork.

Across the spectrum of legality: The market activities of influencers specialized in steroids and other performance and image enhancing drugs

BackgroundLike many other goods and services, performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), and particularly androgenic anabolic steroids (AAS), are increasingly discussed and promoted by social media influencers. Little, however, is known about the influencers specialized in PIEDs and which drugs and services they promote and sell. AimsAgainst this background, the study has been intended to identify prominent influencers specialized in PIEDs, examine the market activities they engage in, and assess the latter's legality. MethodsWe first searched the clean internet to identify prominent PIED influencers. Second, we conducted a six-month-long, non-reactive digital ethnography of the social media accounts of 20 influencers and, via a content analysis, identified the market activities they engage in. Third, we assessed the latter's legality, primarily using the EU legislation as a benchmark. FindingsThe selected influencers are all current or former bodybuilders, predominantly male and from the United States. Many of them have developed a considerable number of followers, in three cases exceeding one million. They engage in various market activities that span the whole spectrum of legality, from legal to illegal, with many activities having an uncertain, but often dubious, legal status. ConclusionsThough they may promote harm reduction for some users, PIED influencers also promote the public acceptance of PIED use beyond the bodybuilding community and enhance access to PIEDs for millions of people. Multifaceted policy interventions are required, aiming at preventing influencers from becoming a major source of information on, and route of access to, PIEDs.

#TheAfricaTheMediaNever ShowsYou: An Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic

Media representations of African underdevelopment are central to the communicative potential and reach of international development in the mainstream public sphere, but they are not without sustained critique and confrontation. By conceptualising the humanitarian-themed campaign – #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou on Twitter, as an Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic, this article considers how UK African diasporic communities have utilised this digitalised environment to oppose the popular but problematic ‘face of development’. Applying Nancy Fraser’s counterpublics theorisation and drawing on social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, it shows how oppositional counter-discourses among these online diasporic communities challenge problematic African representation within ‘white media’. This is realised in three distinct but interrelated discursive practices: (1) Afrodiasporic solidaristic orientations; (2) Diasporic solidarism as an assemblage(d) response to development’s institutionalised whiteness; and (3) Countering Africa(n) misrepresentations.

Gus Baha's online preaching culture in Islam and media ethnography perspectives

Islam in media communication, examining its representation on platforms such as Instagram. The emergence of media ethnography, particularly in the context of digital media, and its relevance in studying diverse cultural artifacts, including Islamic content. The purpose of this study is to explain in general the principles and relationship between ethnographic media and Islamic cultural phenomena portrayed. As a research methodology, media ethnographic views all elements that are important in the digital world. Because communication can be interpreted with various symbols or symbols. Symbols can be in verbal and non-verbal forms, including Islamic ones. K.H. Ahmad Bahauddin Nursalim's ngaji online program is the case focused on in this study. The results first show that the principles of media ethnography in the online world can facilitate the interaction process. Second, in the context of virtual communication, media ethnography methods encourage the creation of effects on society, so that it can influence people’s culture and communication behavior in the virtual world. Third, Gus Baha, through his ngaji online, exemplifies the attitudes and behaviors of pesantren and Javanese culture, through the kitab kuning and Javanese language represented in his lectures. Fourth, the characteristics of his da'wah represent exactly the soul of Ki Ageng Suryomentaram.

Tracing the rise of video halls and transient media forms in Bengal: an archaeology of the non-archived

ABSTRACT The lack of archival materials and objects appears as a primary challenge in conducting research on the history of media and communications in India, specifically while writing a comprehensive historical account of Bengali cinema. This paper will try to look at video halls and video tapes as the transient media spaces and objects. In the case of West Bengal, video tapes and video halls are an important part of media history about which little has been written or researched. This paper will try to look into the process of writing media history of scarcely archived media forms following the method of media archaeology and question how the method becomes important in cases of absence of archival materials. This paper will also try to enquire how media ethnography unfolds a different narrative of media history which is otherwise absent in the material archives or institutional records. Using the theoretical framework of the study of archives, this paper tries to explore new archives which present a different history of intermedia transactions in the history of Bengali cinema.

The lab, the space and the meetup: locating technological experimentation in everyday life

This article analyzes the role digital pioneer communities play in the localization of everyday technological experimentation based on three sites of practice: the lab, the space, and the meetup. Taking a historical view, it begins with a reconstruction of Stewart Brand’s popularization of the lab discourse. On this basis, the space in the Maker movement as well as the meetup in the Quantified Self and Hacks/Hackers movements is investigated, finally arriving at a reflection on the dynamics that come and go between them. While the article is primarily a conceptual contribution, its arguments are grounded in an extensive media ethnography.

“You have raised me between two worlds”: Mothers, daughters, and emotions in the Sahrawi digital diaspora in Spain

The theoretical development of the concept of diaspora accounts for almost any transnational population that maintains strong emotional ties based on nostalgia and memory with their territories of origin, but also affects and ties with their territories of destination. These processes are generated through intrinsically diverse experiences that are constructed in-between both social realities. The emergence of digital technologies has provided these populations with a new scenario wherein the past and present homes are connected by immediate communication, which currently reduces distances, and uprootedness. However, few investigations have analyzed the frequent communication paradoxes that occur within these communities based on not only the need to be connected but also the failure to meet family expectations. Most studies have focused on the experience of mothers and the role they play in maintaining traditions linked to their places of origin, leaving behind the experience of daughters and their mutual relationship. This article addresses this gap while exploring the challenges that these contradictions present for the Sahrawi digital diaspora in Spain. Specifically, it investigates relationships between mothers and daughters and their impact on the social media practices of the latter. Through a social media ethnography that was developed between 2016 and 2018 together with Sahrawi refugees in Spain, this research examines how aspects such as the maintenance of family honor and the need to build one’s own life plan constantly clash in relationships between mothers and daughters with respect to cultural preservation, the emergence of new forms of belonging, emotional relations, and community expectations.

Reflexivity and Relationality in Media Ethnography from the Perspective of Transcendental Realism and Pragmatic Philosophy: Roy Bhaskar and George Herbert Mead

Bireylerin ve toplumların dijitalleşme süreçleri sebebiyle hem oluşturdukları hem dahil oldukları dijital kültür, sosyal bilimlerde farklı araştırma yöntem ve tekniklerine olan ihtiyacı ortaya çıkarmıştır. Bu ihtiyacı karşılamak için kullanılmaya başlanan araştırma tekniklerinden bir tanesi ise medya etnografisi olmuştur. Bu çalışmanın amacı ise “Öznelerarası süreçler, gündelik hayat pratikleri, dijital kültür, medya kültürü yani genel anlamda medya etnografisinin ilgilendiği araştırma nesnesi nasıl bir paradigma ile işlemelidir?” sorusunu tartışmaktır. Bu amaçla, özellikle kültür temelli çalışmalarda, araştırma nesnesinin nasıl ele alınacağının artık pozitivist paradigma hakimiyetinden çıkarak, fenomenoloji temelli etnometodoloji yani genel anlamda hermeneutik ile şekillenerek ilişkiselliğe doğru bir yol izlemesine dikkat çekilmektedir. Bu vurguyu yapabilmek, düşünümselliğin ve ilişkiselliğin medya etnografisindeki rolü üzerine tartışmak amacıyla, eleştirel-realizmin öncü isimlerinden biri olan Roy Bhaskar ile sembolik etkileşimcilik ve pragmatik felsefenin önemli isimlerinden biri olan fakat genellikle yorumsamacı gelenek ile ele alınan George Herbert Mead’in kuramlarının eleştirel-realizme nasıl katkıları olabileceği açıklanmaktadır. Bu iki önemli ismin özellikle ilişkisel etnografi temelinde, Davies’in önerdiği gibi, nasıl birlikte kullanılabileceği düşünülmekte ve dijital toplumlarda medya etnografisinin anlamı, riskleri ve sınırları ile ilgili yeni sorular ortaya konmaktadır.

‘African kids can’: challenging the African gangs narrative on social media

In 2016, following the ‘Moomba riots’ in Melbourne, the powerful and damaging narrative of ‘African gangs’ reemerged in Australian media and political discourse. The hyper-criminalisation and problematisation of Black African young people as violent and engaging in gang activity, created moral panics that exacerbated already existing anti-Black African sentiment in Australia. This racist ‘majoritarian narrative’ of Black Africans resulted in far-reaching consequences for the African community in Australia, particularly for African young people. Significantly, it has been noted that in the face of these overwhelmingly negative portrayals, African young people felt invisible, disempowered and psychologically defeated by the media. This paper employs the use of the critical race methodology ‘counternarratives’ to explore the use of social media by African young people in Australia to challenge the ‘majoritarian narrative’ of African gangs. Drawing on six months of social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews with African youth participants ( n = 15), this paper argues that social media is a significant site where African young people (re)claim their narratives as African kids who ‘can’.

Boycott eurovision singing to the song of its own tune: Global boycotts as sites of hybridity

ABSTRACT Following (Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2003). Media ethnography: Local, global, or translocal? In P. D. Murphy & M. M. Kraidy (Eds.), Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives (pp. 299–307). Routledge; Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2008). Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies. Communication Theory, 18(3), 335–355. 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00325.x) call to look at global communication through lenses of translocalism and hybridity, I find that global boycotts are hybridized sites that facilitate translocal recognition. Using Boycott Eurovision as a case study, two locales are investigated: petitions and Globalvision. By uncovering the translocal recognition in each locale, global boycotts become crucial avenues of inquiry to understand how global social movements grapple with globalization. The essay describes the importance of understanding the vulnerabilities of international boycotts’ hybridized status, calling forward analysis of structure, specific initiatives, and the enactments of hegemonic ideologies found in locales.

Black bodies, Black queens, and the Black sisterhood on social media: perspectives from young African women in Australia

ABSTRACT African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the highly racialised experiences that Black African women encounter living in bodies that are raced as Black in Australia. Within their (in)visibility and ‘otherness’ – they are looked upon in suspicion and yet also ignored, silenced and excluded. Their bodies are involuntarily marked as ‘deficit’ and ‘deviant’, resulting in disadvantage, alienation, and non-belonging. Through the theoretical lens of (in)visibility, we centre the racialisation of the Black African body as crucial to the digital practices that young Black African women in Australia engage in on social media. In drawing on a multi-method approach involving social media ethnography, the ‘scroll-back’ interview method, and sustained, ongoing dialogues on social media, this article explores the everyday social media practices of nine young Black African women in Australia. The findings indicate that social media is used to visibilise and (re)claim contemporary Black African womanhood, amongst a global digitally mediated community of Black African women. These, Black female-centred empowerment digital communities are important spaces in which young Black African women in Australia can unlearn, resist, and reject the harmful racialised ideologies that they have endured (and continue to endure) in white Australia.

Bargaining with Virginity: Regulating Practices in Post-socialist Kyrgyzstan

Abstract This article explores systems of social control over women’s bodies demonstrated by discourses and practices which regulate women’s virginity in Kyrgyzstan. Emergence of these discourses are shaped by Kyrgyzstan’s continued post-independence nation-building processes and economic instability. In this context, women’s bodies are at the center of political contestation, ethnic nationalism, and collective power. Findings suggest that women have learned to use their bodies in economic struggles as sources of individual resistance. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnography of social media, we identify how young Kyrgyz women relate to the issue and its associated practices. We investigate their strategizing mechanisms and analyze how, in the attempts to undermine patriarchal oppression and optimize their opportunities, their coping strategies may actually contribute to perpetuate them.

Media context: a literature review and research agenda

ABSTRACT This paper takes the relationship between media context and advertising reception into renewed consideration. We build our argument on a literature review that analyses and classifies existing literature on media context into three different streams of research: editorial media context, total media context and experienced media context. The literature review shows there is a lack of qualitative research within media context studies. Therefore, the second part of the paper outlines the potential gain of method plurality in media context studies by adopting qualitative methods and suggests that reception analysis and media ethnography can provide new insights. The paper contributes to theory and practice by offering an overview of the existing knowledge of media contexts’ contextual influence on advertising processing and by offering a way forward that allows for method plurality.

Media Ethnography in China – Ethics, Access and Interviews in a Non-Western Context

Media Ethnography in China – Ethics, Access and Interviews in a Non-Western Context

Television as a Symbolic Culture: A Study of Media Ethnography in Bogor

Television has become a part of everyday life for people in the world. Television is an electronic mass media that is greatly enjoyed by the public. This media has become part of everyday life for the community, besides that television also has a great influence on attitudes and behavior for its audience, which has positive and negative effects. The program presented by television is a program that can provide quick information for the audience. This journal aims to analyze the meaning of television construction given by the people of Ciluar Village, Bogor. The role of television as a source of information and a means of entertainment has developed into a cultural symbol in a society. Television shifted to become a cultural symbol between a society. This study uses a qualitative approach with ethnographic media. The data collection technique used is observation with three informants involved in this interview, because they meet the criteria (requirements). This study uses selective coding to classify several findings that can describe how the people of Ciluar Village apply television as their symbolic culture. Based on the results of the interview, there are three selective coding, namely interest, watching habit, and television as a symbolic culture. The results show that television has a high influence on measuring the level of equality, especially class and social status, as well as being a source of information and can be a means of entertainment. The people of Ciluar Village, Bogor interpret television according to their socio-cultural context. For those in Ciluar Village, television can be a source of information and as a means of entertainment.

#BlackLivesMatter: Exploring the digital practises of African Australian youth on social media

African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the anti-Black racism Black African young people endure in everyday Australia. By drawing on a multi-method approach consisting of social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, this paper explores the use of social media by Black African young people (n=15) to visibilise their experiences of racism. We situate the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, as a significant ‘turning point’ when the social media practises of our participants radically transformed. Our findings indicate that prior to the murder of George Floyd, participants evoked careful boundaries around the type of racial content they posted for fear of the punishments or backlash that could occur if they disrupted the white racial comfort of their friends and followers. After the murder of Floyd, participants used the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement to visibilise their own experiences of anti-Black racism and racial violence in Australia, sharing content on social media that marked whiteness, demanded safety and challenged white silence and performative allyship.

Contributors

Other| February 01 2022 Contributors boundary 2 (2022) 49 (1): 293–294. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-615501 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. boundary 2 1 February 2022; 49 (1): 293–294. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-615501 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsboundary 2 Search Advanced Search Weihong Bao is associate professor of film and media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Films: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 and is currently working on a new book, “Background Matters: The Art of Environment in Modern China.” She coedits the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and the Film Theory in Media History book series published by Amsterdam University Press.Jennifer Blaylock is visiting assistant professor in cinema studies at Oberlin College. Her research has appeared in the Journal of African Cinemas and Screen.Hannah Frank (1984–2017) was assistant professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her book, Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons, was published in 2019.Laura-Zoë Humphreys is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Her research focuses on cinema and censorship, media piracy and urban place-making, media ethnography,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Situated Talk: A method for a reflexive encounter with #donorconceived on TikTok

There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which uses TikToks to facilitate a reflexive encounter, drawing on three areas of scholarship: media ethnography and elicitation, researcher reflexivity and duoethnography/collaborative autoethnography. We describe how we, as a donor-conceived adult (Giselle) and a queer woman who would need donor sperm to have a child (Clare), employed TikToks from #donorconceived as prompts to facilitate a sensitive conversation and elicit situated insights. We explore three central insights from applying our method: (1) discomfort as a productive tension; (2) unresolved dilemmas; and (3) discovering parallels in experience. Using TikToks as stimuli, ‘Situated Talk’ contributes an innovative method for generating grounded social media insights.