#Nodebox urban ethnography full#

#Nodebox urban ethnography full#

In contrast, Baldor’s work on queer men’s dating lives began in bars and clubs, but could only succeed as a full accounting of queer urban nightlife by recognizing the role of online dating platforms within the community. Similarly, Ferrari’s paper on the role of social media within mutual aid work of activist groups begins with the online communications of activists while pulling in the ways that local geography and politics still retain a crucial impact on digital practices. Within this collection, Ross Arguedas’ work on orthorexia is focused on a phenomenon that arguably requires online interaction to take shape. One way of characterizing the range of approaches to digital ethnography in this special issue (and more broadly) is to situate some papers as proactively focused on the digital, while others are more reactive. The papers in this collection demonstrate this spectrum of where to locate the digital within ethnographic work. While Jeff’s ethnographic praxis typically starts in the streets and ventures towards the digital to study neighborhood and digital life together, Jessa’s work often traverses the reverse course, beginning with online communities and asking how those practices reshape in-person networks and relationships. We both share a commitment to seeing the digital as a core component of how the communities we study make sense of themselves and the world around them. With a PhD in library science and firm ties to internet studies, Jessa’s expertise in digital ethnography comes from an investment in unearthing the technological distributions of power (Lingel 2017a, b).

With a PhD in sociology and interest in urban ethnography, Jeff came to digital ethnography through adapting neighborhood fieldwork to the digital networks that were shaping the social life he studied in Harlem (Lane 2019). As editors of this special issue, we came to this collection with aligned but distinct relationships to ethnography, digital culture, and sociology.