From Participant Observation to the Observation of Social Distancing: Teaching Ethnography, Blogging and University Education during the Pandemic

Abstract

This article draws from a collaborative blog Our Quarantine Diaries created during the first COVID-19 confinement in Greece in 2020. In a context of sharing, participation, and solidarity, the blog aimed to facilitate an online/synchronous shared space between students and educators during this period of social distancing. The blog was a way to experiment and reflect through an ethnography of the ‘every day’ to capture aspects of our experiences in quarantine and communicate them to one another. Through the blog we attempted to trace how participant observation can help us understand this new condition of social distancing, using (self)observation, memory and imagination to grasp experience. The result was eighteen multimodal recordings consisting of visual, sonic, musical and verbal information. By the end of the process, we realized that the experiment helped us, if not to overcome, then to engage and to a degree, ‘exercise’ the fear of this new type of ‘evil’ through digital communication, ethnographic observation and anthropological analysis. In this article, we reflect on the digital aspects of the affective and emotional modalities of teaching/doing ethnography via the use of Our Quarantine Diaries blog during this unusual time.

Decolonising Teaching and Learning in Anthropology, A Holistic Approach.

“…During fieldwork exercises, I motivate the students to test collaborative methods, having as a motto that "ethnographic knowledge is charged in that it is produced out of real-life encounters between people" (McGranahan, 2014, p. 33) and "ethnographic research can be troubled and it requires care and commitment, humility and cooperation, vulnerability and trust, but it is one of the most poignant ways of knowing another and thus, knowing the self" (ibid., p. 33-34). Even now, in times of social distancing, social media allows students to experience engaged anthropology when approaching these digital areas as another kind of "ethnographic place" (Karampampas, 2020b;Postill & Pink, 2012;Sideri & Kapetanaki, 2022). However, supervision and mentoring are crucial if field exercises are to produce fruitful learning outcomes for the students.…”