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The Futures of Qualitative Research in the COVID-19 Era: Experimenting with Creative and Digital Methods
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With its rapid uptake among young people around the world, it is no surprise that TikTok is buzzing with cultures and practices of internet celebrity. Most notably, the platform is becoming more commercial and professionalized with the rise of TikTok Influencers, advertising networks, and agencies dedicated to monetizing content and embedding advertising on TikTok, and top TikTok Influencers raking in millions in income annually. However, little is known about the constitution of internet celebrity on TikTok yet, and existing models of internet celebrity on predecessor apps like Instagram and YouTube do not neatly apply to the distinctive terrain of TikTok. As such, this paper is an exploratory study into the makings of internet celebrity cultures on TikTok, focused on how attention economy and visibility labour practices have emerged as a result of the app’s features. With empirical data drawn from an extended period in-depth digital ethnography, and analyses and insights informed and supported by traditional anthropological participant observation and personal interviews with TikTok Influencers and agencies, this scoping paper offers a foundation for how celebrity, attention, and visibility are constituted across TikTok’s platform norms and features.
Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the
capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. Paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in increased use of technology and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. It has thereby intensified humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place. This combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the Fourth Industrial revolution and the Sixth Extinction is the trademark of the posthuman condition. This essay explores this condition further, offering both critical and affirmative propositions for moving forward.
Since the onset of COVID-19, incidents of racism and xenophobia have been occurring globally, especially toward people of East Asian appearance and descent. In response, this article investigates how an online Asian community has utilized social media to engage in cathartic expressions, mutual care, and discursive activism amid the rise of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia during COVID-19. Specifically, we focus on the 1.7-million-strong Facebook group “Subtle Asian Traits” (SAT). Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the 1,200 new posts it publishes daily have swiftly pivoted to the everyday lived experiences of (diaspora) East Asians around the world. In this article, we reflect on our experiences as East Asian diaspora members on SAT and share our observations of meaning-making, identity-making, and community-making as East Asians collectively coping with COVID-19 aggression between January and May 2020.
This piece explores the work and entanglements of our research collective, formed in 2016. First, we collectively articulate the ethos and the motivations that inform the ways in which we labor to engage with complex, plural, multi-vocal experiences of extinction, “the Anthropocene,” and earth violence as they are felt and known across the diverse communities we represent. Then, drawing on more than three years of work across relations that tie us to Australia, Canada, Malaysian Borneo, the Philippines, and the United States of America, we share reflections on some of the vital relationships, methods, and “creatures” that animate our collaboration. This collection of “manifestings” aims to show how we work, very consciously, to foster more-than-human capacities for confronting the multi-scalar, cross-cosmological forms of violence that drive extinction and other forms of ecological harm in the world today.
The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article draws upon the insights of feminist new materialism as intellectual resource for considering what the coronavirus “does” as a gendered phenomenon. We turn to this body of feminist scholarship as it enables us to attune to what is happening, what remains unspoken and to pay attention to “the little things” that may be lost in a big crisis. Writing through the complexity of embodied affects (fear, loss, hope), we focus on the challenge to humanist notions of “agency” posed by these shifting timespace relations of home confinement, restricted movement and altered work-leisure routines. We explore the tensions arising from “home” as an historical site of gendered inequality and a new site of enhanced capacity.
The capacity to understand and control one’s personal data is now a crucial part of living in contemporary society. In this sense, traditional concerns over supporting the development of ‘digital literacy’ are now being usurped by concerns over citizens’ ‘data literacies’. In contrast to recent data safety and data science approaches, this article argues for a more critical form of ‘personal data literacies’ where digital data are understood as socially situated and context dependent. Drawing on the critical literacies tradition, the article outlines a range of salient socio-technical understandings of personal data generation and processing. Specifically, the article proposes a framework of ‘Personal Data Literacies’ that distinguishes five significant domains: (1) Data Identification, (2) Data Understandings, (3) Data Reflexivity, (4) Data Uses, and (5) Data Tactics. The article concludes by outlining the implications of this framework for future education and research around the area of individuals’ understandings of personal data.
The ever-developing arena of social media blurs lines separating public and private spheres. Voluntary usage of social media platforms transforms users’ personal and sometimes private imaginings into publicly accessible artifacts. The entanglement of these two domains demands society’s consideration as policy makers, employers, and qualitative inquirers contend with making meaning of messages initiated within the social media sphere in a world extending beyond it. In this article, I reflect on interplay with a subset of data from my dissertation featuring transcripts pulled from YouTube videos posted by self-identified biracial individuals. As I attempted to instill dialogic properties into what could have been unidirectional interactions, I confronted several challenges. I managed pressures of simultaneous allegiances to my research goals and to the integrities of my informants who were not aware that they were informing me. This article provides insight into navigating these tensions, which are necessary and, to date, too scarcely available.
Introduction
Visual methodologies are a collection of methods used to understand and interpret images. These methods have been used for a long time in anthropology and sociology; however, they are a relatively new way to research for the majority of disciplines, especially health research. Two effective visual methodologies that could be used in health research are autophotography and photo elicitation.
Autophotography
Autophotography is asking participants to take photographs of their environment and then using the photographs as actual data. Autophotography captures the world through the participant’s eyes with subsequent knowledge production.
Photo Elicitation
Photo elicitation is using photographs or other visual mediums in an interview to generate verbal discussion to create data and knowledge. Different layers of meaning can be discovered as this method evokes deep emotions, memories, and ideas. Photo elicitation interviews contribute to trustworthiness and rigor of the findings through member checking.
Mental Health Research
This article aims to describe the use of autophotography and photo elicitation to compare people with clinically diagnosed depression and people without depression and their ideas about sources of meaning in life and beliefs about the meaning of life. The analytical approach incorporates eight steps. Firstly, data analysis began during the interviews, then came organizing the data, coding the data, structured analysis, detailed analysis, interpretative analysis, creating themes, and the write-up. The steps taken to ensure trustworthiness were Shenton’s credibility, transferability, confirmability, and dependability. This method is a new, innovative, and viable method for mental health researchers.
Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram and Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos, and more, sociocultural research into the visual as a central component of online communication has lagged behind the analysis of popular, predominantly text-driven social media. This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content. In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms.
This article, which introduces this special issue on new empiricisms and new materialisms, focuses on two of the many conditions that enable this new work: first, an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought and, second, a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation in the becoming of existence. The article includes a brief description of how matter matters differently in this new work, of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of philosophy as the laying out of a plane that enables new concepts, a discussion of the “new,” and how/if methodology can be thought in the “new.”
In this chapter, I reflect on a series of photographs of windows taken in different cities around the world before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use these photographs to prompt an analysis of urban flows at a time when our cities have come to a halt. Windows are caught up in a series of dichotomies that posit what is inside against the outside, the intimate against the public, home against street, stability against unpredictability, among others. The chapter explores some of the ways in which windows not only mediate our interactions with the world around but also actively participate in our everyday lives, especially at the current moment. Given the restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, windows have taken on an even more important role in supporting dwellers’ quality of life and wellbeing. Working with and against the digital archive I have compiled, the chapter considers how these photographs gesture towards the layered experiences of space and place, as well as the presence and absence of affect and memory. I conclude by discussing how this type of photographic inquiry benefits qualitative research focused on the lived experience of place at a time when in-person methods are no longer an option.
This book offers the first critical examination of the contributions of feminist new materialist thought to the study of sport, fitness, and physical culture.
Bringing feminist new materialist theory into a lively dialogue with sport studies, it highlights the possibilities and challenges of engaging with posthumanist and new materialist theories. With empirical examples and pedagogical offerings woven throughout, the book makes complex new materialist concepts and theories highly accessible. It vividly illustrates sporting matter as lively, vital, and agentic. Engaging specifically with the methodological, theoretical, ethical and political challenges of feminist new materialisms, it elaborates understandings of moving bodies and their entanglements with human, non-human, technological, biological, cultural, and environmental forces in contemporary society.
This book extends humanist, representationalist, and discursive approaches that have characterized the landscape of critical research on active bodies, and invites new imaginings and articulations for sport and moving bodies in uncertain times and unknown futures.
With 72% of the public participating in at least one social media platform, technology has become influential in allowing online communities to interact and share information surrounding similar problems, solutions, and insights.1 Social media platforms represent some of the most recent community‐oriented applications allowing Lave and Wegner’s original concept of “communities of practice” (CoP) to be expanded beyond the walls of an institution.
As the number of digital technologies expands, entering more domains of everyday life, people’s activities, bodies and preferences are rendered into constantly changing flows of digitised information. The interdisciplinary field of critical data studies has emerged in response. In this article, we outline the design and development of methods employed in our new project ‘Living with Personal Data’ as a move towards expanding the knowledge base and methodological approaches of critical data studies. Our approach takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives and research-creation methods to elicit the affective and multisensory contexts of people’s feelings, practices and imaginaries concerning their digital data. We describe a set of workshops established to experiment with some new methods we have devised for our project’s fieldwork. The article ends with some reflections on what these theories and methods can offer for a reimagined digital data studies that can acknowledge and surface more-than-human dimensions.
In December 2019, a new severe respiratory coronavirus infection (COVID-19) was detected and has since spread across the globe to be ultimately declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. For physicians and allied medical professionals, the period since has been marked by an increased and rapidly changing flow of information from multiple regional, national and international health authorities, regulating bodies and professional associations. Although social media platforms have an active presence in the instant dissemination of information and medical professionals display active participation in them, traditional channels such as email are still being emphasized as a means of communication. This article discusses the opportunities offered by social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and TikTok to disseminate medical information both for the use of physicians and as a means to communicate essential information to the public at large.
Critical pedagogy is a vital part of building data literacy. It moves beyond the level of data critique to social action in response to datafication. This article contends that academics can do more to teach those in the public sphere as well as classroom to become critical interpretive researchers of their own lived experience, an action/participatory research framework that identifies critical thinking as the purpose of research and improved digital or data literacy as the outcome of research. This article suggests three strategic modes through which the strengths of critical approaches and qualitative epistemologies can be blended to serve as pedagogical tools for understanding and critically analyzing data, datafication, and other aspects of the digital era.
This paper is a definition of photo elicitation and a history of its development in anthropology and sociology. The view of photo elicitation in these disciplines, where the greatest number of photo elicitation studies have taken place, organizes photo elicitation studies by topic and by form. The paper also presents practical considerations from a frequent photo elicitation researcher and concludes that photo elicitation enlarges the possibilities of conventional empirical research. In addition, the paper argues that photo elicitation also produces a different kind of information. Photo elicitation evokes information, feelings, and memories that are due to the photograph's particular form of representation.
Photovoice is a process by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique. As a practice based in the production of knowledge, photovoice has three main goals: (1) to enable people to record and reflect their community's strengths and concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers. Applying photovoice to public health promotion, the authors describe the methodology and analyze its value for participatory needs assessment. They discuss the development of the photovoice concept, advantages and disadvantages, key elements, participatory analysis, materials and resources, and implications for practice.
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