Notes on Technology Devices in Research: Negotiating Field Boundaries and Relationships

Mainsah, Henry; Prøitz, Lin

doi:10.1177/1077800418806597

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…They were asked to use the app to explore how they were experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic-its impacts on their work, living and financial situations-and broader impacts on their day-to-day lives. The use of this digital method allowed for an experience of intimacy or closeness (see Mainsah & Prøitz, 2019) that was otherwise difficult to achieve at this time due to lockdown restrictions and aided in building rapport with the participants prior to the interviews. Participants were recruited via advertisements on social media and through an existing qualitative sample exploring the experience of affective labour of hospitality workers in the target sites for this study, Newcastle and Melbourne, Australia.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth, Precarious Work and the Pandemic

Cook

Threadgold

Farrugia

et al. 2021

YOUNG

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While Australia has experienced low COVID-19 case numbers relative to other countries, it has witnessed severe economic consequences in the wake of the pandemic. The hospitality industry, in which young adults are overrepresented, has been among the most affected industries. In this article, we present findings from an interview and a digital methods-based study of young hospitality workers in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Newcastle who lost shifts or employment due to the pandemic. We argue that the participants’ ability to cope with the loss of work was mediated by the degree of family support that they could access, with some experiencing the pandemic as an inconvenience, while others suffered extreme financial hardship. Findings from this study show that the most severe impacts of the pandemic play out along pre-existing lines of inequality and marginality, causing the most severe consequences for those who were already most vulnerable to them.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth, Precarious Work and the Pandemic

Cook

Threadgold

Farrugia

et al. 2021

YOUNG

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“…Whereas the accounts discussed in this article took place over 20 years ago (in 2000–2001), such issues are likely even more pronounced in today’s socially mediated world. Henry Mainsah and Lin Prøitz (2019:276) insist that contemporary researchers should attend to the ways that social and mobile media can muddle distinctions between personal and research relationships, “producing new and complex forms of intimacy.” In our current publically networked era, the development of such research relationships can be accelerated and fraught with misinterpretations—particularly when thresholds of personal contact are as accessible as a friend’s friends list.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spending Time Together Outside of the Clubs: Cross‐gender Rapport Building and Interview Recruitment in Music Scene Ethnography

Harrison

2021

Sociological Inquiry

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This article examines the politics of cross‐gender interview recruitment in popular music scene ethnography. It specifically focuses on how complexities surrounding gender, race, and presumed intention impact efforts to build rapport and recruit interviewees. To do this, I present a series of accounts from my dissertation research—conducted twenty years ago—and reflect on the challenges I faced as a straight, cisgender, Black male researcher interacting with (non‐Black) women within various hip‐hop nightlife settings. In the process, I introduce the concepts of intimate counterpublics and aggregate counterpublics as means to spatially mapping different degrees of subcultural investment (based on levels of familiarity, intimacy, and trust) and the types of connections they enable. I conclude by offering suggestions, for researchers working within popular music scenes or other youth‐oriented spaces, on how to negotiate such challenges. I also propose that ethnographers should be more attentive to nuances of interview requests and how embodied situational research transactions can serve as bases for ethnographic understanding.

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“…Less attention has been given to methodological considerations of smartphone use by ethnographers/researchers themselves, although research has provided growing insights into innovative ways of using the smartphone as a valuable tool, with all its beneficial and problematic sides, for relationship building, data collection, and teaching (Favero & Theunissen, 2018;Kaufmann, 2018;Verstappen, 2021). Few scholars, however, have scrutinized how the emergence of digital technologies in ethnographic encounters affects emerging relationships and the affective labor of ethnographers engaging with spatially and temporally dispersed interlocutors who slip in and out of online-offline environments (Bengtsson, 2014;Mainsah & Prøitz, 2019;van Doorn, 2013). This neglect of affective entanglements in research is symptomatic of historical and some-times gendered research practices in which emotions have been viewed as disturbances that contaminate scientific data (Davies & Spencer, 2010;Stodulka et al, 2019).…”

Section: Smartphones and Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Affective Triad: Smartphone in the Ethnographic Encounter

Jovicic

2022

MaC

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“Hanging out” and establishing “rapport” is an essential part of the ethnographic encounter in anthropology. But what happens when the smartphone, seemingly a distraction from the relationship in the making, creates a wall between the anthropologist and the interlocutor? While smartphones have been widely explored as a media technology used by the interlocutors, or as research tools, their affective grip on the researchers themselves has received less attention to date. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with visitors of two youth centers in Vienna, Austria, in 2019, I argue that the moment when the smartphone becomes part of the affective triad, alongside the researcher and the interlocutor, also presents a window on the entanglement of digital technologies with everyday life. Moreover, affective ripples emerging from such irritations also expose underlying assumptions about how ethnographic encounters should ideally proceed and what constitutes rapport and “good” ethnographic relationships, seemingly a prerequisite for successful ethnographies. Hence, affective entanglements and irritations that arise in this context are not disturbances to be discarded or smoothed over in the ethnographic narratives. While the smartphone appears to impair the ethnographic encounter at first, its designed porosity allows the researcher to develop a particular sensitivity to issues of rapport, consent, and privacy, and to negotiate the space of potentiality of ambiguous, door-like situations, thus becoming a methodological blessing rather than a curse.

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Notes on Technology Devices in Research: Negotiating Field Boundaries and Relationships

Cited by 11 publications

References 25 publications

Youth, Precarious Work and the Pandemic

Youth, Precarious Work and the Pandemic

Spending Time Together Outside of the Clubs: Cross‐gender Rapport Building and Interview Recruitment in Music Scene Ethnography

The Affective Triad: Smartphone in the Ethnographic Encounter

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