Mobile Phone Visual Ethnography (MpVE): Bridging Transformative Photography and Mobile Phone Ethnography

Abstract

Mobile phone proliferation in developing economies has arguably affected the everyday lives of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs like no other technology in recent times. This impact is evidenced by mobile phones' embeddedness in everyday consumption and business practices. Surprisingly, mobile phones have only minimally been incorporated into bottom-up research approaches in subsistence marketplaces and/or ethnographic transformative research methodologies and methods. To begin addressing this important gap, the authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on mobile phones and ethnography and then gained practical experience with a new bottom-up methodology called mobile phone visual ethnography (MpVE). Using research experiences as data, the authors share micro-level details about African microentrepreneurial everyday life and highlight important methodological issues associated with conducting MpVE in subsistence marketplaces. They find that MpVE affords methodological naturalism, unpacks informant perspectives of everyday life, captures human mobility within marketplaces, and begins to democratize the research process. In doing so, this article offers a new way of giving voice to subsistence marketplace populations through more active and visible participation in research.

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“…In addition, two JPP&M articles were recognized as finalists (Hill and Martin 2014; Walker 2016). In 2021, two additional JPP&M articles were recognized as winners: DeBerry-Spence, Ekpo, and Hogan (2019), which examined mobile technology usage among subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs; and Berry et al (2019), which helps explain the calorie labeling paradox in restaurants. Other journals with recognized articles include Journal of Marketing , Journal of Marketing Research , Journal of Consumer Research , Journal of Service Research , Journal of the Association of Consumer Research , Journal of Consumer Affairs , AMS Review , and Nature .…”

Envisioning a community‐centric approach to impact assessments in subsistence marketplaces

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