Conflict chatnography: Instant messaging apps, social media and conflict ethnography in Ukraine

Abstract

Social media and instant messaging are fast becoming an integral part of contemporary life, and subsequently of ethnographic research. As ethnography is essentially a process defined by relations between people, this article investigates how online interaction influenced my relationships with the people I studied: Ukrainian volunteer battalions. Framed in a broader context of conflict ethnography, the resulting chatnography made access to informants tremendously easier, and allowed for remote data collection. Chatnography nevertheless exacerbated ethical challenges posed by study of armed conflict. The blending of offline and online also led to despatialization, and the blurring of personal and professional. This questions the traditional notion of the ‘field’, while more immediately threatening to limit my private life. While not a magic bullet, the convenience of chatnography means that it will be here for years to come. This article offers an attempt to investigate what this entails in practice.

Reflexivity and Temporality in Researching Violent Settings: Problems with the Replicability and Transparency Regime

“…New dilemmas may arise as scholars are increasingly encouraged to conduct experiments and collect original quantitative data in conflict zones and other dangerous settings (Denny and Driscoll 2019;Haer and Becher 2012). Those conducting surveys or especially field experiments in violent settings (and beyond) must be extremely careful in their consideration of ethics and potential risks to populations under study (Teele 2014); the ease of recruiting population samples digitally (Käihkö 2018) or that 'others are doing it or going to' is no excuse for willful ignorance of ethical concerns.…”

Innovations in Ethnographic Methods

“…Scholars (Ito, 1997; Reid, 1991; Rheingold, 1993, 1995; Turkle, 1995) began studying online engagements—Internet relay chats, text-based multiuser dungeons, early online communities, and so on—that emerged from Web 1.0 in the 1980s and 1990s, and the number of studies, and specifically ethnographies, has only grown since that time. Ethnographers can now draw on a rich and expanding body of work that explores how to translate ethnographic practice to online spaces, including cyberethnography (Hakken, 1999), connective ethnography (Dirksen, Huizing, & Smit, 2010; Leander & McKim, 2003), virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000), ethnography for the Internet (Hine, 2015), digital ethnography (Pink et al, 2016), ethnography of virtual worlds (Boellstorff, 2008), netnography (Kozinets, 2010), chatnography (Kӓihkӧ, 2018), and others. While digital fieldwork can require one to be flexible and adapt to shifting technologies, the core tenets of ethnographic methods still apply.…”

“…Kӓihkӧ (2018), in her study of Ukrainian volunteer battalions who mobilized to combat separatists following the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia, provides an example of how a platform’s architecture and the context in which it exists can influence users. Her interlocutors rarely portrayed themselves as volunteers or discussed their conflict on Twitter, which is an open network where all tweets are either public (by default) and visible to anyone or all tweets are private and only visible to one’s approved followers.…”

On Brokers, Commodification of Information and Liberian Former Combatants

“…This is especially the case with sensitive topics, such as armed conflict and civil war. There are three issues that permeate war, and hence influence attempts to study it: use of violence, polarising interaction between belligerents and instrumentality in the sense that organised violence equals to continuation of politics between these belligerents (Käihkö 2018). It is these three that ultimately explain much of the insecurity highlighted in the introduction to this special issue, as well as contributed to the difficulty of accessing former combatants in Liberia.…”

“…Conflict settings further exacerbate these processes as access to information becomes curtailed, and 'truth' a polarised thing. (Jenkins 2015, Käihkö 2018 This article investigates research brokerage from the perspective of commodification of information, and departs from the encouragement to reflexive thinking regarding fieldwork assistants found in a special issue edited by Middleton and Cons, and the questions posed by them (2014, p. 285): 'what are we not seeing by not talking about these workers of the field? In what ways might reintroducing fieldworkers back into the discussion of fieldwork not only expose uncomfortable truths but also open up new and productive possibilities?'…”