Digital Ethnography

Researching Digital Sociality: Using WhatsApp to Study Educational Change

ABSTRACT

Digital technologies have become deeply implicated in and constitutive of contemporary social life. They are reshaping who we are and how we associate with one another, and are profoundly reconfiguring social relations, processes, and practices in a host of social spheres, particularly education. With Covid-19 further entrenching this implication and accelerating those changes, we are forced to rethink what research is and how it is done. This article presents a step towards researching a changing sociality using social media. Drawing on fieldwork on the digital transformation of Egyptian education, it argues that and showcases how WhatsApp can be systematically used as a qualitative data collection instrument to examine educational change. This article also situates WhatsApp research within digital ethnographic traditions, unpacks emergent methodological challenges and ethical quandaries, and presents potential ways to manage them. In so doing, it problematizes extant methodological categories (such as participation), entrenched dichotomies (such as private/public space), and epistemological questions (such as research temporality). Using a unique case from the Global South at an exceptional time of (educational) change, this article can help researchers as they think about their questions, design their research, conduct their fieldwork, and maneuver an elusive digital landscape. It informs broader methodological discussions within digital sociology and anthropology (of education), digital ethnography, and social media research. It also informs research in other domains like healthcare, geographies beyond the Global South, and platforms with similar affordances like Telegram.

Private Messages from the Field: Confessions on Digital Ethnography and its Discomforts

ABSTRACT

This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counselling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”. On the other, they evidence how doing ethnographic research about, on, and through digital media is most often a messy, personal, highly contextual enterprise fraught with anxieties and discomforts. Through the four “private messages from the field” collected in this issue, we acknowledge the messiness, open-endedness and coarseness of ethnographic research in-the-making. In order to do this, and as a precise editorial choice made in order to sidestep the lexical turf wars and branding exercises of ‘how to’ methodological literature, we propose to recuperate two forms of ethnographic writing: Confessional ethnography (Van Maanen 2011) and self-reflection about the dilemmas of ethnographic work (Fine 1993). Laying bare our fieldwork failures, confessing our troubling epistemological choices and sharing our ways of coping with these issues becomes a precious occasion to remind ourselves of how much digital media, and the ways of researching them, are constantly in the making.