Virtual Ethnographic Research Methods: “The Pandemic as Portal”
This summer, Virtual Ethnographic Research Methods was the only class offered at UChicago that prepares undergraduates to carry out qualitative research during a pandemic. Taught by Mansueto Institute Fellow and Sociology Postdoctoral Scholar Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela, a cultural anthropologist and photographer, the course is composed of undergraduate and graduate students from a multidisciplinary background and began as part of the Summer Institute for Social Research Methods and the Chicago Ethnography Incubator. The course will continue to be offered in subsequent summers to prepare students to undertake field-based senior thesis or dissertation research in and beyond urban spaces.
The class, which Dr. Fogarty-Valenzuela taught in 2019 as an in-person qualitative research practicum, emerged in its virtual form due to the coronavirus pandemic, but is very much aligned with his prior research interests in youth, digital media, and ethnographic methods.
“While at first remote ethnography seemed to be an oxymoron given the methodological emphasis on ‘being there,’ the final research projects students came up with convinced me of the need to find ways of coupling in-person research with virtual research (the pandemic notwithstanding),” said Dr. Fogarty-Valenzuela. “The virtual is increasingly embedded into our everyday life. In-person social life is deeply inflected by what goes on online, and inversely — today’s social movements are a case-in-point. Today, vast domains of social life now take place online, mediated by for-profit platforms, cultural norms, and government policy. Ethnographers are stepping up to the challenge to retool qualitative methodologies for this physical/virtual nexus.”
Théo Evans, a rising fourth-year undergraduate student and Sociology major and Media Arts and Design minor at UChicago, was drawn to the class because he was interested in the sociology of online communities. “I was excited to see a virtual ethnography class because that’s not something that is taught very often, but now is taught more by necessity due to people’s remote work and learning situations.”
In its current arrangement, Virtual Ethnographic Research Methods is a 5-week intensive practicum designed to introduce students to the conceptual and practical foundations of ethnographic research carried out in-person or over the internet. Pedagogically, it is designed as a “problem-based,” experimental course that tacks back and forth between practice and reflection. The course frames the “pandemic as portal,” following Arundhati Roy, inviting students to walk through this “portal” collaboratively — devising ways to retool urban ethnographic research for virtual worlds that are, in the words of Tom Boellstorf, “places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.”
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
— Arundhati Roy
The final project invites students to draw from weekly practicums in participant observation, interviewing, ethics, and fieldnotes to put together a “multimodal” research project, where students draw from the multiple communicative registers proliferating on the internet — sound, video, photo, text — in order to curate their ethnographic research in the form of an interactive, online exhibition. Their final projects, hosted in a class research portfolio, engage the broader research community, inviting social scientists to take a cue from their research participants — avid producers of multimedia — and push beyond text-based scholarly argumentation.
“Multimodal ethnography makes room to research and critique — from a people-centered perspective — the multiple platforms upon which social life has been funneled during the pandemic. My students seized this opportunity and put together some really impressive projects and avenues for inquiry,” said Dr. Fogarty-Valenzuela. “Multimodal research responds to the shift in how the next generation consumes information, makes arguments, and fashions its personhood.”
One example of an outstanding project was that of Peter Forberg, a first-year Master’s student, who devised Algorithmic Ethnography, a new methodology to investigate digital communities through user experience, including a case study on a political group often associated with far-right conspiracy theories. By following their social media accounts, watching videos and interacting with digital content, he analyzed the social media bubble that is constructed by algorithms and how the community thrives and proliferates, despite active efforts by Twitter and other platforms to ban and suppress the group.
Théo’s final project focused on studying the behavior of lurkers on social media, who observe posts but do not publicly engage. He interviewed his friends on their use of Twitter and their offline conversations about leftist tweets. “I was surprised by how much offline interaction they had regarding these tweets. This was something you would never see if you were just reading the replies, but they talked about sending tweets to each other and they would go for walks to discuss them. I was thinking of them as social objects.”
Throughout the course, Théo’s views of virtual ethnography evolved after experiencing class discussions and seeing people’s posts on the class blog each week, with each student’s different platforms, research methods and approach to presenting their work.
Another student, Alie Goldblatt, a rising third-year undergraduate student studying East Asian Languages and Civilizations, explored intergenerational relationships with public spaces in China for her final project, which became inspiration for her BA thesis. She culled footage gathered from her previous two summers in China of public spaces in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, messaged Chinese youth through WeChat, and interviewed fellow students from China in the class to create a multimodal ethnographic study of how older and younger generations interacted with public spaces.
Among her key findings was that “ultra-modernization of the city has increased digitalization,” and that Chinese youth gravitated towards congregating in more virtual settings, whereas older generations were more influenced by their “collective socialist past” and had a stronger proclivity to gathering in person in public parks and spaces. A UChicago classmate remarked that this could potentially be due to impacts of China’s one-child policy, while older generations grew up often in large families with multiple siblings.
“Moving forward with ethnography or research in general, what I’ve been prompted to think about most is really considering the ethical implications of the work. That was the focus of our first week — writing a code of ethics — and our readings emphasized empathetic immersion into our communities. That’s what really sticks with me,” said Alie.
Multiple students have remarked on the way studying the ethnographic craft put a human face to their research and writing this summer. During the time of a pandemic, Alie relished the features of the course that enabled her to connect with other budding ethnographers and transcend the isolation of remote learning through Zoom. Perhaps part of the appeal of the course was that it gave students — who are pained by racial injustice, social isolation, and a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of democracy — a space to come together and make sense of it all, by way of thinking, but also doing.
“What I enjoyed most about the class was the opportunity to get to know other people in the class. It was a nice way to foster community, especially in a time when we had to remain virtual. During the spring semester, I felt quite distant from my peers, and here — while you can’t fully simulate the in-person experience — this felt like the best attempt I’ve seen at creating a community among my classmates.” — Alie Goldblatt
For Dr. Fogarty-Valenzuela, part of the challenge of teaching this course during the summer of 2020 was balancing tried-and-true urban research methods with a sense of the world turned upside-down. Students were feeling a double-edged sense of isolation and indignation. His instinct was to translate that yearning for collaboration and the energy of the “streets” into the classroom by joining two elements: formal training in traditional ethnographic methods coupled with an invitation to get really creative with the possibilities afforded by digital media. In turn, students responded with work that marries rigorous ethnography with the most pressing urban and social issues of our day.
Grace Cheung is the Assistant Director of Communications for the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago.
