Virtual Ethnography Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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- Digital Media, Authenticity, Autobiography, Virtual Ethnography

The article engages with trans male video blogs on YouTube, framing them as living archives that offer unique opportunities to access and share embodied trans knowledges—which have previously been limited or inaccessible—such as information about and visual accounts of medical transitioning processes. It is argued that archiving one's transition works through a kind of performative documentation, partly documenting and partly instantiating the transformation by tracking and tracing the bodily changes. Testosterone figures as the transformative technology, while the upper body becomes the privileged site of self-fashioning. YouTube hereby offers an alternative and empowering archive of how trans male bodies could look, while its cumulative effects also play a significant role in determining how they should look.

- by Tobias Raun
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- Media Studies, New Media, Digital Media, Social Media

‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlogging’ examines 37 Australian mummy vloggers on YouTube and explores how these women construct and present their automedial identities and narratives in the participatory, networked digital space. Using a method of virtual ethnography, consisting of long-term observation and participation in the space, the thesis tracks how these women use vlogging to negotiate their social role as mothers, and construct their own performance of the role, in dialogue with all participants in the network including viewers, vloggers, technology, media, products and brands. Situating the automedial practice of vlogging as an intimate yet public process of ‘becoming’ that resembles the published diary online, this thesis finds that the automedial identities and narratives of Australian mummy vloggers are shaped and managed by community, reliant upon authenticity, include intimate and vulnerable others (children), and are ephemeral, always changing, appearing and disappearing. ‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlogging’ contributes to scholarship in Communication and Media Studies, including Internet Research, particularly in the areas of Networked Digital Media and Identity, and to scholarship in Life Writing Studies, including Auto/Biography Studies, particularly in the area of contemporary digital life writing practices, and the emerging field of Automediality.

- by Ümit Kennedy
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- Autobiography, Virtual Ethnography, Youtube, Vlogging

L'objectif de cet article est celui d'illustrer quelques résultats obtenus au cours d’une recherche doctorale, réalisée entre 2008 et 2010 à l'Université de Turin, qui visait à décrire et analyser les comportements quotidiens, l'imaginaire et les attitudes liées à la construction du Soi corporel sexué, dans une phase de vie qui est constamment en évolution. Grace à une stratégie de recherche intégrée (Porrovecchio, 2011, 2012a), au centre de laquelle j’ai inséré une ethnographie appliquée aux communautés virtuelles, j’ai pu faire prendre la parole (De Certeau, 1994) aux ados, en essayant de surmonter le filtre du regard des adultes. Grâce à cette stratégie, j’ai pu reconstruire l’aspect évolutif de la construction du Soi corporel sexué, objet d’un livre (Porrovecchio, 2012b) dont je propose ici quelques conclusions.

- by Alessandro Porrovecchio
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- Gender Studies, Intersexuality, Youth Studies, Mixed Methods
- by Dražen Georgievski
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- Virtual Communities, Virtual Ethnography

En el presente informe se presentan los principales resultados del proyecto de investigación “Jóvenes, redes sociales virtuales y nuevas lógicas de funcionamiento del racismo: etnografía virtual sobre representaciones y discursos de alteridad e identidad”. En primer lugar aportamos una contextualización del problema de investigación abordado; en segundo lugar desarrollamos el marco teórico y describimos el objeto de estudio; a continuación relatamos el diseño metodológico seguido en la investigación; en cuarto lugar mostramos el análisis realizado y describimos los principales resultados a los que hemos llegado. Finalizamos este informe con un capítulo conclusivo de discusión donde esbozamos futuras líneas de trabajo.

- by Paula Martín-Godoy
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- Race and Racism, Identity (Culture), Virtual Ethnography, Racism
- by Owwei Chow
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- Media Studies, Internet Studies, Digital Media, Music Video

The emergence of new (digital) methods beyond the circumscribed limits of academia challenges scholars to reconsider how the social sciences may reinvent their methods. The process of redistribution offers the opportunity to expand their repertoire drawing inspiration from, or even incorporating, those methods developed by amateurs, non-experts and technology users. This chapter examines one of such method called prototyping, a socio-material device for the production of knowledge. I approach prototyping as an empirical object that forms part of the social worlds I have researched. My discussion is based on an ethnography undertaken in 2010 at the critical centre Medialab-Prado, an institution that works at the intersection of art, science and technology. The activity of Medialab-Prado is organized around the notion and practice of prototyping, which involves tinkering with technologies, recycling materials, and extensively documenting the process.

- by Adolfo Estalella
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- Virtual Ethnography, STS (Anthropology), Digital Ethnography, Digital methods

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

- by Diego Villar
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- Religion, Cultural History, Ethnohistory, Sociology
- by Gisele Honscha
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- PR and Advertising, Blogs, Digital Media, Participatory Culture
- by Paula Batista
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- Gender and Sexuality, Virtual Ethnography, Sex Work, Online social networks

Ethnographers have long been concerned with how individuals and groups live out life in social spaces. As the Internet increasingly frames lived experiences, researchers need to consider how to integrate data from online spaces into “traditional” ethnographic research. Drawing from two ethnographic studies, we explain how online spaces were needed to more fully understand the physical environments and issues we studied. In addition to discussing how we were led online, we present ethnographic data to demonstrate the epistemological importance of considering online spaces. While traditional methods of ethnography (i.e., in-person observations and informal interviews) continue to be useful, researchers need to reconceptualize space as well as what counts as valuable interactions, and how existing (and new) tools can be used to collect data. We argue that studying a group of people in their “natural habitat” now includes their “online habitat.” We conclude with a call for ethnographers to consider how digital spaces inform the study of physical communities and social interactions.

- by Ronald Hallett and +1
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- Sociology, Anthropology, Education, Digital Humanities

In the West, and increasingly globally, individuals, particularly women, are fixated on weight loss, driven by the goal of achieving a culturally-desired, and aggressively marketed, "skinny" female physique. There are online forums where individuals refer to themselves or their eating disorders as "pro-ana" and "pro-mia". Individuals who post on these sites both align with, and challenge, what medical and mental health professionals define as serious mental health problems that result in severe, sometimes fatal, medical complications. This thesis specifically focuses on interactions with, and within, the proana/mia culture on the social media websites Tumblr and YouTube. Over sixteen months, and guided by a feminist postmodern perspective, I immersed myself within a "grounded
virtual liquid ethnography" that draws on contemporary methodologies that are suitable for the transitory and destabilized characteristics of blurred online and offline
interactions. Through embracing ethnographic sensibilities and being open to marginalized perspectives, I present analyses that are attentive to nuanced meanings produced by others. These critical, sociological analyses alternatively theorize the
motivations behind responses to pro-ana/mia communities. Through challenging the dominant responses of the medical model and similar societal discourses that pathologize pro-ana/mia supporters, I uncover serious implications for the socio-cultural, economic, physical and mental health of women and their communities. My analyses do not place blame on pro-ana/mia individual women. Instead of supporting the eradication of proana/mia from online spaces, my findings support the importance of learning about how online environments develop and extend critical consciousness about eating-disordered ideologies, practices and solutions to these.

- by Nicole Schott
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- Cultural Studies, Criminology, Cultural Sociology, Feminist Theory

Keywords: Internet, folkloristics, urban legends, internet-folklore, netlore, terms, theory, virtual reality, web 2.0, blogs, genres, jokes, methodology, overview

- by Mikhail Alekseevsky
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- Mythology And Folklore, Computer Science, Folklore, Social Anthropology
- by Julien Bonhomme
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- Anthropology, Virtual Ethnography, Anthropology of Communication, The Internet
- by Lucila Finkel and +1
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- Social Networks, Gender, Virtual Ethnography, Netnography

Alderfer, Katelyn and Kristy Kelly. (2019). "Teaching Online Participant Observation." Assignment published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington DC: American Sociological Association.... more

- by Kristy Kelly
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- Virtual Ethnography, Qualitative Research, Teaching Methods

This study looks into the life of a virtual gaming community, CTO Sims – a small slice of a wider community that engages in what Bruns (2006) has termed produsage, remediating videogame assets and content from a PC game, The Sims (2000) into custom or user-generated content – a practice also called ‘modding’. Through a virtual ethnographic methodology, this study explores the digital library at the heart of CTO Sims, and the participatory culture (Jenkins, 1992; 2006) which has grown up around it. This paper presents a narrative of an online videogaming produsage community, and through a process of immersion uncovers and probes into the everyday practices of commodification and produsage as they take place in the virtual field. The study begins to develop a theory of information culture by observing and exploring the CTO Sims community, its members, and their roles in knowledge and information economies.
It is concluded that digital information cultures within online gaming communities form around the collaborative creation and exchange of digital cultural artefacts, in heterarchical networks that develop their own unique organisational and classification conventions. Moreover, these communities form support networks for members, acting as repositories for shared knowledge, skills and experiences. Freedom of communication acts as a tool for the generation of social and knowledge capital, and enables the growth of strong ties of affiliation between members. Further research is encouraged in private, offline produsage spaces, and into the individual motivations that drive regular users to become produsers.

- by Ludovica Price
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- Game studies, Digital Libraries, Online Communities, Participatory Culture
- by David Myles
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- Discourse Analysis, Internet research methods, Internet research, Virtual Ethnography

Georg Simmel [American Journal of Sociology 55:254–261 (1949)] is widely credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability – ‘‘the sheer pleasure of the company of others’’ and the central ingredient in many social forms of recreation and play. Later Ray Oldenburg [The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe & Company (1989)] extended Simmel’s work by focusing on a certain class of public settings, or ‘‘third places,’’ in which sociability tends to occur, such as, bars, coffee shops, general stores, etc. But while Simmel and Oldenburg describe activities and public spaces in the physical world, their concepts may apply as well to virtual or online worlds. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are extensive, persistent online 3D environments that are populated by hundreds of thousands of players at any given moment. The sociable nature of these online spaces is often used to explain their success: unlike previous video games, MMOGs require players to exchange information and collaborate in real-time to progress in the game. In order to shed light on this issue, we critically examine player-to-player interactions in a popular MMOG (Star Wars Galaxies). Based on several months of ethnographic observations and computerized data collection, we use Oldenburg’s notion of ‘‘third places’’ to evaluate whether or not the social spaces of this virtual world fit existing definitions of sociable environments. We discuss the role online games can play in the formation and maintenance of social capital, what they can teach us about the evolution of sociability in an increasingly digitally connected social world, and what could be done to make such games better social spaces.

In this paper, I examine how home is imagined and socially constructed in the life of " location-independent families " (LIF). Location-independence is a form of lifestyle mobility based on the possibility of running an online business from anywhere in the world and the choice to homeschool the children. Through an examination of families' stories based on in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography, the article explores the ways families-on-the-move negotiate their idea of home at the complicated intersections between security and freedom; material dispossession and need for attachment; isolation and sense of community. LIFs' imagination of home is not bound to a static, fixed, geographical place but takes a contextual and processual dimension, as social process and lived experience. Its core is the simultaneous physical presence of the family members and different home-making practices.

"Emergent Digital Ethnographic Methods for Social Research" aims to equip social researchers in academia and industry with the knowledge to understand five emergent technologies and their methodological applications to digital ethnography. The chapter defines digital ethnography, discusses the benefits and weaknesses of this method, and provides examples of digital ethnographies. The chapter also presents a thorough examination of five digital ethnographic technologies: fieldnotes with blogs/wikis, embedded ethnographic technologies, digital pens, CMS groupware, and Twitter. Despite the vast possibilities presented by emergent technologies, the chapter argues for multiple ethnographic methods (i.e., digital methods combined with traditional, face-to-face ethnography). The chapter also includes a discussion of the costs, benefits, ethical implications, and future directions of digital ethnographies. Ultimately, the chapter sees digital ethnographic methods for social inquiry continuing to expand with developments in ubiquitous computing.

- by Dhiraj Murthy
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- Wikis, Ethnography, Virtual Ethnography, Qualitative Research
- by Parisa Diba and +2
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- Criminology, Human Trafficking, Social Media, Virtual Ethnography

Recently, the Duterte Die-hard Supporters (DDS) phenomenon and the way they spread
and consume news became a trend in the social media, and a subject of scrutiny and a challenge
to the mainstream media. In fact, the DDS have their own online communities and groups in
Facebook, with thousands of members, wherein they exchange opinions on the news and posts
they share in these groups.
Upon observing this, the researcher was intrigued by their behavior of news consumption
and thus, she conducted an ethnographic and observant study so as to understand their wants and
needs and perception of a news, the factors that influences their news consumption behavior, by
having DDS who participates online as the main subject of the study. By fusing the tenets of the
circuit of culture, uses and gratification, and Husserl’s phenomenology, and by using virtual
ethnography to gather data in their community, the researcher aims to discover the context of the
DDS news consumption, observe and record it, and analyze their motivations that influence their
behavior and perception on the news they do and do not consume through analyzing the
interrelations of the stages in the circuit of culture.

- by Marie Uy
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- Audience Studies, Audience and Reception Studies, Social Media, Virtual Ethnography

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 counseling 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.

- by Gabriele de Seta
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- Participatory Research, Research Methodology, Ethnography, Digital Media
- by Mélanie David
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- Online Communities, Virtual Ethnography, Reggio Emilia, Online social networks

The ethnographic field guide was a short-lived genre in the annals of anthropology. In this chapter I experimentally attempt to revive it. The original guides provided the ethnographer with a set of practical pointers on how to organise fieldwork, set up camp, maintain relations, and negotiate access in a particular geographical region of the world. The present field guide attempts to do so while entertaining (and eventually discarding) the idea that the World Wide Web has similar areal qualities and constitutes a field in which the techno-anthropologist can go to do work. It is not a straightforward analogy, and although a guide turns out to be somewhat impossible the attempt at writing it casts of all kinds of interesting contradictions. What is highlighted in the process is that the Web is distinctly spatial in ways that must be taken seriously, that it is home to a very special breed of digital natives, and that maintaining relations with these natives presents a challenge of its own. I argue that these challenges must be taken seriously, and that techno-anthropology could be ideally suited to do just that.

The rise of digital technologies has the potential to open new directions in ethnography. Despite the ubiquity of these technologies, their infiltration into popular sociological research methods is still limited compared to the insatiable uptake of online scholarly research portals. This article argues that social researchers cannot afford to continue this trend. Building upon pioneering work in `digital ethnography', I critically examine the possibilities and problems of four new technologies — online questionnaires, digital video, social networking websites, and blogs — and their potential impacts on the research relationship. The article concludes that a balanced combination of physical and digital ethnography not only gives researchers a larger and more exciting array of methods, but also enables them to demarginalize the voice of respondents. However, access to these technologies remains stratified by class, race, and gender of both researchers and respondents.

- by Dhiraj Murthy
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- Web 2.0, Social Networking, Internet research, Virtual Ethnography

This article advances the " doing gender " framework by highlighting some unique interactive challenges that nonbinary individuals encounter within the binary gender system. In order to access testimony about these experiences from a large group of people, this study turns to a genderqueer community on the social media site Reddit. Discourse analysis of discussion threads and content analysis of selfies reveal various symbolic mechanisms through which nonbinary people do, redo, and undo gender. These findings illuminate a range of strategies that people utilize to negotiate gender attribution within the gender binary system. A video abstract is available at http://tinyurl .com/y7odrxbd.

- by Helana Darwin
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- Sociology, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Ethnography

Ashis Nandy, in his book, 'The Tao of Cricket', claimed that cricket was an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English; after reading Daniel Miller’s 'Tales from Facebook', I would suggest that Facebook is a Trinidadian application accidentally invented by Mark Zuckerberg of the USA. A prolific social anthropologist, Miller has written a book about Facebook use in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, having previously published studies of capitalism, modernity, and Internet use based on fieldwork in the same location.

- by Brian Alleyne
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- Virtual Ethnography, Facebook Studies, Trinidad and Tobago

This essay consists of two parts. First is an in-depth introduction to Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a condition where people experience pleasurable sensations from specific visual and aural materials on the Internet. Second is an analysis of various theories on material culture that may help us to understand and contextualize this hitherto unexplainable but burgeoning phenomenon.

- by Melinda Lauw
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- Material Culture Studies, Phenomenology, Virtual Ethnography, Object Relations

This thesis uses the philosophy of deep ecology as a theoretical framework to explore ecospiritual themes as a key feature of increasing discourse around the ayahuasca phenomenon. The broad objective of the research is to use contemporary ayahuasca discourse to reveal the way cross-cultural seekers engage with and discuss shamanic practices that inform a postmodern ecosophical ontology and deep ecological praxis. Three convergent discourses inform this research; the transcultural ayahuasca phenomenon, nature-based spiritualities of the New Age and the philosophy of deep ecology. Threading through these discourses are ecological and spiritual themes that capture a web of meanings for contextualising the transcultural emergence of ayahuasca spirituality. A key paradigmatic shift suggested by contemporary ayahuasca discourse is a shift in human consciousness toward a non-dualistic ontology regarding humanity’s place in nature. An ecocultural studies approach provides theoretical support for interpreting how the elements of this paradigmatic shift are discussed, understood and practised. As the internet functions as a superlative site for discursive formations of ayahuasca, a thematic content analysis of selected discussion forums within the Ayahuasca.com website was conducted using a multiparadigmatic, deductive and inductive approach. Naess and Sessions’ (1984) eight platform principles of deep ecology were used as a framework to deductively locate textual articulations of the philosophy. Further inductive analysis revealed not only embedded deep ecological themes but also articulations of an ecocentric praxis arising from experiences of unitary consciousness and plant sentience. The deep ecology articulated in contemporary ayahuasca discourse further raised an explicit challenge to hegemonic anthropocentricism through expressions of an expanded sense of self that accentuates the countercultural bearings of entheogenic informed ecospirituality.

- by Jef Baker
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- New Religious Movements, Digital Humanities, Ecopsychology, Online Communities

This research was developed in qualitative research methodology with virtual ethnography approach and the data were obtained through observation and in depth interviews. The observations were addressed to all members who belong to Miamo Pencak Silat, PAS, Garis Paksi and PPSI, then the interviews were addressed to ten practitioners that belong to those communities

- by Dindin Dimyati
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- Psychology, New Media, Social Networking, Political Science

O presente artigo trata de uma etnografia virtual (HINE, 2000) e análise das narrativas de uma comunidade online destinada a adeptos/as de pegging, uma prática sexual na qual uma mulher penetra um homem heterossexual pelo ânus usando um cintaralho (strap-on dildo). Por causa de ideologias heteronormativas que não diferenciam identidade sexual e práticas sexuais, e que vinculam o prazer anal dos homens à homossexualidade masculina (SÁEZ e CARRASCOSA, 2011), os homens heterossexuais que praticam o pegging frequentemente sofrem ou temem sofrer preconceitos (e.g. são rotulados de “gays enrustidos” ou vistos como “não masculinos”). Através de um posicionamento queer (BUTLER, 1993; PRECIADO, 2000; LOURO, 2004) e considerando as narrativas como uma maneira de intervir no social para mudar ideologias normatizantes e estigmatizantes (THREADGOLD, 2005; MOITA LOPES, 2008), analisamos as performances identitárias de masculinidade e heterossexualidade na comunidade online, com o objetivo de ver como narrativas digitais podem contribuir para mudar roteiros sociais de gênero e sexualidade. Concentramo-nos sobre como os adeptos de pegging desestabilizam a associação ideológica entre prazer anal e homossexualidade e sobre a “linha tênue” entre a subversão e a reafirmação da heteronormatividade e masculinidade hegemônica nas performances narrativas.

- by Charisse Yumul
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- Cultural Studies, Virtual Ethnography

This research project uses ethnographic methods to study the way in which people engage with the past in role playing videogames. It draws on archaeological and anthropological theories and engages with current debates in game studies. The data presented show that the vast majority of players of Skyrim – a videogame belonging to the medieval fantasy genre – are aware of and engage critically with the past in their gaming experiences. I recommend the use of gaming technologies for archaeological dissemination and emphasise the role that gaming companies play in the creation of cultural identities built on views of the past.

- by Emily Johnson
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- Archaeology, Game Theory, Game studies, Public Archaeology

This report addresses this gap by investigating the role of the Internet and digital technologies in the processes of human smuggling and trafficking in the United Kingdom (UK). The research presented here consists in an extensive examination of how the Internet and digital technologies facilitates i. the (a) recruitment and (b) transportation/entry phases of people smuggling towards and/or into the UK, and; ii. the (a) recruitment (b) transportation and (c) exploitation phases of the trafficking process in the UK sex and labour markets. Our research relies primarily on a UK-based virtual ethnography to acquire primary data, conducted between November 2015 and February 2017. As a research method, virtual ethnography extends the ethnographic field and situated observation from the examination of face-to-face researcher-informant interactions. Furthermore, the research has involved an “off-line” component, namely, 16 semistructured interviews that took place with a variety of key actors in the UK, including non-governmental organisation representatives (NGOs), law enforcement agents (LEAs), smugglers, and experts on cybercrime and/or human trafficking and smuggling.

- by Parisa Diba and +2
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- Criminology, Human Trafficking, Virtual Ethnography, Digital Ethnography

Salah satu teknik pengumpulan data sekaligus metode analisis terbaik untuk meneliti masyarakat adalah etnografi. Berbagai karya tulis yang terbit mengenai etnografi, seringkali memunculkan perdebatan mengenai definisi etnografi.Pandangan yang paling umum mengatakan bahwa etnografi sebagai salah satu metode penelitian dalam ilmu antropologi. Sedangkan pandangan lain menyebut etnografi sebagai seperangkat metode, strategi penelitian, paradigma, atau bahkan kerangka pikiran. Namun ada kesamaan dari semua pendapat itu, bahwa jika kita bicara etnografi, maka kita membicarakan sejumlah catatan dan cara menulis catatan tentang masyarakat.Studi pustaka ini bertujuan memberikan kemudahan kepada khalayak untuk memahami persamaan dan perbedaan antara etnografi konvensional, etnografi internet dan etnografi virtual. Serta memahami bagaimana prosedur melakukan penelitian etnografi virtual

This text focuses on investigating the relation between physical space and cyberspace, as well as electronic space on communicational processes in the present cyberculture. The relation between those two spaces became more intense with technological wireless artifacts, as well as allowed a bigger freedom among communication processes in a time that social interaction and bonding can be done from any place on earth at any moment of the day.
The investigations’ empirical field was Facebook, which has been gathering millions of people from around the world on the same interface with great communication potential. Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic approach was used as a perspective of interaction with web surfers. According to Bakhtin the idea of superiority from the researcher over the person who’s being researched is broken, when it is commonly understood that they are co-authors on scientific knowledge production. The authors argue that far from being dichotomous, cyber and physical space are inseparable. This allows cyberspace to be thought of not as something apart from reality, but as a space that is supported by the relations between the city and its citizens. And that puts a question mark on the idea of the internet as being a separate virtual world.

- by Dilton Couto Junior
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- Education, Web 2.0, Digital Media, Social Media

Music related to Buddhism, or Buddhist music in general, gains attention only in the recent decades. Mahāyāna Buddhism substantially registers the importance of music, despite a restriction on the monastic involvement in music performance. While Vajrayāna Buddhism and ‘engaged Buddhism’ have emerged as a global trend that increasingly applies a musical context in many religious movements, Buddhist music is rather deemed problematic to Theravādins. To gaze this music with a philosophical perspective, phenomenality is employed as one of the typical Buddhist emphasises that promotes a detachment from the delusion of worldly existence. In this context, music is merely reflected as a perceived phenomenon. The virtual perspective is another access point to the concept of phenomenality since the internet has created a new dimension that transcends the boundaries across time and space. Subsequently, music enthusiasts, knowledge seekers, and Buddhist practitioners in 21st-century Malaysia, who no longer need to overcome the problems of distance and unscheduled absence at a specific location, are allowed to access relevant data conveniently according to various needs.
Malaysians embrace an innovatory ‘tech’ life that drastically transforms urban lifestyle with a newly developed ‘mobile-only’ culture in the 21st century, a time widely regarded as the digital era. However, the adaptation of a ‘tech’ lifestyle brings about a question of existence in virtuality, which is also connected to the online experience of Buddhist music. Spreading fast through a virtual platform, Buddhist music somehow appears in diverse styles but it also perpetuates a possibility for its musical attributes to remain questionable.
This qualitative research explores possible connections of music related to Buddhism with parallel ideas of phenomenality and virtuality, and investigates the emphasis of the contexts of ‘Buddhism’ and ‘music’ as well as aspects that makes music ‘Buddhist’ by considering music seen from multiple perspectives. Employing a contemporary view of virtual ethnography by Hine, this musicology on Buddhist music in 21st-century Malaysia undertakes a combination of qualitative analytical methods in which discourse analysis, hermeneutic phenomenology, metaphorical analysis, ethnostatistics and music analysis significantly operate on data sources as a way of knowing.
This study consciously regards all music related to Buddhism as an all-inclusive genre called ‘Buddhism-related music’, while the term ‘Buddhist music’, which is adopted to classify or describe this typical music, is employed interchangeably though both terms are not entirely the same in contexts. As the outcomes, it is found out that Buddhism-related music hardly constitutes significant typological criteria based on its sonic and stylistic attributes. Though variously defined, this music can be identified simply through a conceptualised content that interpretatively represents an idea related to Buddhism. With the understanding of ‘emptiness’, a more universal view can be projected in the ethics of the making of Buddhist music. Virtuality as an integral part of reality affects the making of the object in parallel with the causation of phenomenality. Buddhist music can be considered as both a phenomenal and virtual being, therefore suggesting an insight to consider separable contexts of ‘Buddhism’ and ‘music’, as music is deemed secondary to the goal of Buddhist practice. The notion of ‘emptiness’ advocates an undertaking of the ‘middle path’ for composers, musicians and audiences to access Buddhist music. Finally, this leads the study to formulate an idea of the ‘Buddhist being’ in music.

- by Owwei Chow
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- Discourse Analysis, Buddhism, Musicology, Buddhist Philosophy
- by Owwei Chow
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- New Media, Internet Studies, Digital Media, Music Video