[Air-L] [CANCELLED] LSE Digital Ethnography Collective AoIR Satellite Event

Mon May 4 08:28:20 PDT 2020

Hello all,

Not sure why but it appears that this email ended up in the spam folders for a lot of people, so I'm resending without hyperlinks:

It is with sadness that the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective announces the cancellation of our symposium 'Looking forward, looking back: Digital ethnography in 2020', due to take place on 26th October 2020. As the AoIR annual conference is now a virtual event, and this symposium was designed specifically as an AoIR satellite event, it does not make sense to hold this symposium in person. We have also decided not to turn this into a virtual event, as the main AoIR conference will now be spread over a period of two weeks and we felt it would be too much to add this as well. We wanted to announce this ASAP ahead of the submission deadline of 29th May so that people do not waste their time writing abstracts.

We are very sorry that this event will not be going ahead, as we were really looking forward to it. But in this time of uncertainty it makes little sense to be organising IRL events. We hope that in the future when the dust has settled we will be able to hold this symposium.

Wishing you all the best,
Zoë
________________________
Zoë Glatt
www.zoeglatt.com
ESRC PhD Researcher in Media & Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Managing Editor: Communication, Culture & Critique
Co-Founder: LSE Digital Ethnography Collective @DigEthnogLSE 
Graduate Student Rep: Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)
Associate Lecturer in Media & Communications (2019/20): Goldsmiths University

    On 02/03/2020, 12:50, "Air-L on behalf of Glatt,ZA (pgr)" <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of Z.A.Glatt at lse.ac.uk> wrote:

        Hello AoIRists,

        I hope you all met yesterday’s deadline without too much blood, sweat and tears. Now that it has passed, I am delighted to share with you the below call for papers for the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective’s one-day AoIR satellite event in London! As the Graduate Student Representative for AoIR, I’m really happy to be able to bring together these two groups, and I strongly encourage early careers researchers to submit as well as more senior researchers. We hope that we will get to meet lots of you who have only been able to participate so far via the livestream, as you'll be travelling to this part of the world for AoIR.

        When: Monday 26th October (3 days before AoIR)
        Where: London School of Economics (LSE)
        Submission deadline: Friday 29th May

        ***
        Digital ethnography is by no means a new methodology. In the 1990s researchers begun grappling with issues regarding the cultural impacts of the Internet and how to go about conducting ethnographic research in/on ‘virtual’ spaces. Since then, we have seen significant technological and cultural shifts, most notably the fact that in 2020 smartphones are commonplace and social media platforms have become a ubiquitous part of everyday life in many parts of the world. Whilst holding on to the valuable insights of earlier research, digital ethnographers are required to remain methodologically agile in order to keep up with rapidly changing socio-technological contexts. This one-day symposium hosted by the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective invites participants to discuss the state of digital ethnographic research in 2020, by both reaching back into its rich history and thinking about future directions. We are inviting submissions spanning from ‘finished product’ empirical work to presentations addressing common concerns in the practise of carrying out digital ethnographic research (methods, ethics, self-reflexivity etc.) in the hopes that the day will generate both interesting and useful conversations amongst attendees.

        The LSE Digital Ethnography Collective is an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods, with the aim to establish a global community of scholars of digital ethnography and to work through challenges in this growing subdiscipline. Researchers passionate about digital ethnography are dispersed around the globe, and whilst we foster international collaboration via our livestreams and mailing list, it’s always a pleasure to get together IRL! With this in mind, we are hosting this symposium at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) on Monday 26th October 2020. There is a sizeable overlap of membership between the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective and the Association of Internet Researchers and so we have arranged this as a ‘satellite event’ to the AoIR Annual Conference in the hopes that AoIR attendees interested in attending will be able to stop over in London before heading on the main conference in Dublin.

        The symposium welcomes digital ethnographers at all levels from PhD upwards to submit proposals for 20-minute presentations relating to any of the following areas (this is a non-exhaustive list):

          *   bridging the old and the new: innovative but historically-grounded approaches to digital ethnographic methodologies
          *   digital culture and everyday life
          *   empirical work relating to the Internet/platforms/social media/gaming cultures
          *   digital transformations in work and labour – the gig economy, creative industries, datafication, algorithms etc.
          *   critical intersectional feminist ethnography in digital contexts
          *   approaches from the Global South that challenge Western-centric digital ethnographic research
          *   self-reflexive accounts of challenges and opportunities in digital ethnographic research
          *   inside/outside: entering and exiting the digital ‘field’, navigating or moving beyond the online/offline binary, accessing private online spaces, local/global and the role of geography in digital ethnography, etc.
          *   conducting ethical digital ethnographic research

        Please send proposals of 300 words (word document or PDF) to Media.DigEthnog at lse.ac.uk by 29th May 2020. This deadline is designed to be after the notification of acceptances for presenters to AoIR, so that applicants will be certain that they are going to Dublin beforehand. Selected participants will be notified by 1st June 2020 so that they will have plenty of time to make travel and accommodation arrangements. Please note that, while the symposium is free to attend, we cannot provide funding for travel or accommodation.

        All the best,
        Zoë and Branwen
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