Becoming a networked public: digital ethnography, youth and global research collectives

Abstract

The following article describes a research context that has privileged both virtual and placed-based ethnographic fieldwork, using a hybrid methodology of live and digital communications across school sites in Toronto, Canada; Lucknow, India; Taipei, Taiwan; and Boston, USA. The multi-site ethnographic study is concerned with questions of school (dis)engagement, as experienced by young people often marked as ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘marginal’ to the traditional practices of schooling. Throughout the paper we illustrate, and argue for, the productive use of such methods that combine the live and the digital while also advocating for more methodological experimentation in the processes of fieldwork and analysis. To substantiate our argument for hypertextual and multimodal modes of ethnographic engagement, we offer, in the first section of the paper, examples from face-to-face meetings that generatively combine live discussion and digital video methods. At the same time, we problematise the limits of such exchanges, acknowledging the challenges of trying to map one another's contexts and living conditions through the aesthetic prism of digital video, drama performance and ethnographic interviews. In the second section of the paper, we shift our focus to three illustrative episodes from our Toronto and Lucknow sites. Drawing on theorists Sarah Pink and Patti Lather and Chris Smithies, we bring reflexive analyses to bear on participant-created video texts and Verbatim theatre performances, reading these data as narrative constructions that reveal multiple perspectives rather than literal, representative truths. We further argue that as student participants take control of their drama performances and digital video creations, focusing on the contours of their daily lives, they become co-constructors of an emerging youth knowledge base across these global sites. Drawing on the work of Wendy Morgan, who observes the changing power relations made possible through hypertextual digital media, we maintain that as these students create both live and digital performances and make meaning through discussion and ethnographic interviews, they shift relations of power, inviting researchers into a ‘networked community’ premised upon a fluctuating virtual, live, and digitally mediated culture.

Keywords:

• digital multi-sited ethnography
• youth
• drama
• India
• hybrid methodology
• girls

Notes

1. We gratefully acknowledge the work of our collaborators, Dr Urvashi Sahni, founder and executive director of Aashwaasan school, Lucknow India; Dr Chien-ling Su, Associate Professor, General Education Center Ming-chuan University, Taiwan; Dr Yu-Hsuan Lin, Graduate Institute of Sociology of Education; Nahua University, Taiwan; Betsy Lan, Artist in the Classroom Taipei, Taiwan and Dr Christina Marin, Emerson College, Boston, USA.

2. In this paper, we use the terms ‘student participants’, ‘young people’ and ‘youth’ interchangeably. We are aware that ‘youth’ can have politically negative connotations in some contexts, but in Canada, the term ‘youth’ usually denotes agency and strength, which we favour over ‘young people’, a term often read as paternalistic in North American contexts. We acknowledge here the challenge of attempting to create a shared global discourse, where local meanings are predominant and hold greater nuance.

3. All schools and proper names of research participants are pseudonyms.

4. South American educationalist Augusto Boal developed a series of participatory, pedagogical theatre techniques to help learners engage with and overcome circumstances of oppression.

5. Students selected their own pseudonym and social identity markers.

6. We are aware that Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) have long valued the research perspectives of research participants. Our collaborative experience here grew instead from digital and artistic experimentation, not necessarily driven by an agenda of change as is the case with PAR/YPAR projects, but rather more by a youth desire for authorship, to name and frame issues of relevance that ultimately had the tremendous benefit of interacting with our own digital and live ethnographic data and ultimately stimulating important questions about how to enact collaborative and multi-perspectival forms of analysis.