OxDEG: The performance of (many) selves in everyday digital life: immersive cohabitation and self-portraiture as a viable ethnographic method
Using Instagram as a fieldsite is both challenging and rewarding in equal measure, posing unique challenges to the anthropologist’s method and practice. This paper will examine how self-portraiture and high intensity interaction with the digital platform, through observing, learning and doing as one’s informants do can resituate the digital field, not as an adjunct to the offline but as a landscape in its own right. With this established, vignettes will be drawn from fieldwork conducted with sartorially inclined men on Instagram to suggest how traditional ethnographic methods can be reframed, remoulded and refocused to engage anthropologically with a changing digital landscape.
Date: 8 February 2021, 15:30 (Monday, 4th week, Hilary 2021)
Venue: Venue to be announced
Speaker: Dr Joshua Bluteau (Coventry University)
Organising department: Oxford Internet Institute
Organiser contact email address: events@oii.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://oii.zoom.us/webinar/register/4216101203453/WN_s-UJphhJRWWVaBWiG4jMdA
Cost: FREE
Audience: Public
Editors: Isabelle Malcolm, Flora Seddon