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Ryder, Craig (2024) 'Becoming augmented: The latent possibilities of ethnography in a pandemic.' Possibility Studies and Society. (Forthcoming)

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Abstract

For all its wretched ways, COVID:19 has installed new possibilities to the way we do ethnographic research. Due to pandemic restrictions, my research on how digital activists in Sri Lanka acquire influence on social media fell into three distinct phases: (i) digital ethnography from London, (ii) datafied approaches in Helsinki and (iii) traditional fieldwork in Colombo. The article’s objective is not to provincialise the three cases, but to demonstrate how each phase is tightly bound together and serve to imagine new possibilities in research design. Vlad Glăveanu contents that ‘human beings live “amphibious” lives – at once in the realm of the actual and the possible’ to emphasis the misty line between what is real and what can be manifested by innovation and action. Not dissimilar to this amphibiousness, I argue that human beings also live ‘augmented’ lives, at once in the realm of in real life (IRL) and online spaces and experiences mediated by digital technologies. My fingers, ears and eyes, while in London, Helsinki or Colombo, were always partly submerged in digital worlds, and it was this augmentation that enabled the long-term engagement that good ethnography demands.

Item Type: Journal Article
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Anthropology & Sociology
ISSN: 27538699
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699241264608
SWORD Depositor: JISC Publications Router
Date Deposited: 11 Aug 2024 09:28
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/42365
Funders: Other

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