Global Ethnography Programs & Resources

Methods of Protest: Engaging Global Black Lives Matter Movements

Violence against Black people is far from confined to the U.S. Neither are the social movements currently protesting anti-Black violence. The goal of this event and video series is to broaden our awareness and understanding of these movements in different areas of the world. This quarter we are hosting two live online events and producing two pre-recorded videos to build conversations around the Black Lives Matter movement in the Bay Area, Australia, and Italy. Our aim is to think collectively about how ethnographers can study #BLM abroad and in the United States by reflecting both on their methods of protest and the ethnographic methods employed to study them.

Doing Ethnography Remotely

In a series of pre-recorded videos, available here for viewing, Sharika Thiranagama (Anthropology) and Sylvia Yanagisako (Anthropology) speak with experienced ethnographers on how they have used digital and analog methods for remote ethnographic research. The conversations reflect on how these methods have shaped each practitioner’s research questions and findings. All conversations conclude with practical advice for graduate students adapting their projects in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reading List

Below is a list of  works referenced in the interviews, as well as select texts by the authors, related to remote ethnography.

• Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C., & Taylor, T. L. (2013). Ethnography and Virtual World: A Handbook of Method. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. LINK.
• Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). "#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States." American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4–17. LINK.
• Braverman, I. (2018). Coral whisperers: Scientists on the brink. Oakland, California: University of California Press. LINK. 
• ---. (2017). "Captive: Zoometric Operations in Gaza." Public Culture, 29(1 81), 191–215. LINK.
• ---. "Renouncing Citizenship as Protest: Reflections by a Jewish Israeli Ethnographer." Critical Inquiry, 44(2), 379–386. LINK.
• Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, embodied and everyday.  New York: Bloomsbury Academic. LINK.
• Jackson, John L. “An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object.” American Anthropologist 106, no. 1 (2004): 32–42. LINK.
• Keeling, Kara. “Passing for Human: Bamboozled and Digital Humanism.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 237–50. LINK.
• Pink, S., Horst, H. A., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. Sage. LINK. 
• Rufas, A., & Hine, C. (2018). "Everyday connections between online and offline: Imagining others and constructing community through local online initiatives." New Media & Society, 20(10), 3879–3897. LINK.
• Sanjek, R., & Tratner, S. W. (Eds.). (2016). eFieldnotes: The makings of anthropology in the digital world. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. LINK.