Invitation for Roundtable: Doing Ethnography in and of Digital and Datafied Worlds – roundtable with Professor Emerita Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London

In a time shaped by pervasive digitalization and datafication, ethnographers are tasked with navigating worlds that often seem both ephemeral and ever-present, localized in situated encounters between humans and non-human entities, yet inexorably expanding across global infrastructures. This roundtable explores the challenges of conducting ethnographic research in and of datafied and digitally mediated environments. How do digital and datafied worlds challenge a tradition rooted in bounded field sites, face-to-face interactions and physical co-presence with interlocutors? And how does the advent of new digital and datafied sites and spaces open up new areas for ethnographic investigation and thinking? And last but not least, how do these challenges and opportunities help us reflect on ‘the social life of methods’  (Law & Ruppert, 2013)?, i.e., how the methods we use for knowing the world have their own social life, reflecting the situated historical and political moments of their creation as well as the contexts in which they are mobilized to “collect data”?

Conversation between Professor Emerita Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London and associate professor Helene Friis Ratner, Aarhus University

Short presentations by PhD stipend Annika Isfeldt, Aarhus University, Assistant Professor Sunniva Sandbukt, ITU, Assistant Professor Laura Kocksch, Aalborg University and Professor Anders Koed Madsen, Aalborg University

Organized by: Helene Friis Ratner, on behalf of the research projects “Data Visions: Teaching in the age of digital data visualizations” and “Algorithms, Data & Democracy”.

Date & time: February 20^th, 13.00-15.00

Location: Tuborgvej 164 (room A405), 2400 Copenhagen NV. Danish School of Education, Aarhus University  

Sign up here: https://events.au.dk/roundtabledoingethnographyinandofdigitalanddatafiedworlds