You Cant Do That The Pragmatics and Ethics of Ethnographic Approaches To New Media Research

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You Cant Do That!The Pragmatics and Ethics of
Ethnographic Approaches To New Media Research

• Mary L. Gray
• Indiana University
• Department of Communication and Culture
• Contact mLg_at_indiana.edu

Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics
Colloquium, February 17, 2006
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Overview of todays talk

• Pragmatics
• what did I ask and assume?
• what did I do?
• what did I find?
• Ethics
• implications, dilemmas, and strategies
• When pragmatics and ethics collide
• plasticity of vulnerability

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(not-so) Hidden agenda

• De-center new media as default unit of analysis
• Focus on the medium can obscure the key element
  in ethnography the people
• Call for interdisciplinary conversations
• Call for intradisciplinary conversations (this is
  the hardest part)
• Fault lines/political economies of ethics in
  sciencific research

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Part I Pragmatics

• What I asked
• Difference the Internet makes to youth
  negotiating a queer sense of sexuality and
  gender in the rural U.S.?
• Broader concern How are intimate identities
  organized vis-à-vis media in a modern era?
• Case study How young people do queer identity
  work?
• sites and technologies
• construction, negotiation, articulation of
  cultural meaning
• support agencies, peers, and new media
• How is queer identity work placed, gendered,
  classed, and raced differently in the rural
  United States?

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Basic research assumptions

• Genders and sexualities are constructed
• No finite number of LGBTQ folks to be found in
  rural places
• Online interviewing and data as authentic as
  face-to-face interactions/participant-observation
• New media as tools and locations for cultural
  production
• Grounded theory of action/acting informs my
  analysis and methods
• Focus interactions, infrastructures, and
  processes not specific technologies (rethinking
  media effects)

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What did I do? (my ethnographic work in a
nutshell)

• 2001-2004 (19 months) in the field with rural
  youth in KY and border states
• Multi-sited ethnography
• Participant/observation among youth agencies,
  peer networks, and LGBTQ youth advocates
• In-depth, open-ended interviews with 34 youth
  ages 14-24 informal interviews with over 20
  youth/LGBTQ advocates
• Content analyses of websites, blogs, message
  boards for/produced by rural LGBTQ youth and
  allies
• Analytical tools media studies, symbolic
  interactionism, STS, anthropology and queer
  studies of sexualities and genders, postcolonial
  studies

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Boundary publics integrating rural queer youth
publics and social worlds

• Responses to economic and infrastructural
  conditions
• lack of an established spectrum of public spaces
• dominance of cornerstone rural publics (e.g.,
  churches and schools)
• Moments of occupation for queer identity work and
  praxis
• Challenges to local/universal expectations of
  queer invisibility in rural America

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Boundary publics for rural youths queer identity
work

• Exhibit A new mediascapes such as websites
• 2 examples
• Highland Pride Alliance website
• AJs FTM Journey

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Highland Pride Alliance
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HPA Website features

• Prominence of the link to local sites
• Dominance of links to other LGBT groups beyond
  the area
• Reflections of interests in political work
• Documentation of local political work

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AJs FTM Journey
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AJs FTM Journey

• Website features
• Updates, about me
• Gallery of T-effects
• Surgery pics doctors
• Links
• Guestbook
• Voiceclip from AJs site

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Rural queer boundary publics

• Exhibit B privatized zones
• 2 examples
• Queercore at the Methodist Church SkatePark
• Drag at Wal-Mart

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Queercore at the Methodist Church SkatePark

• Alternative venue
• Open space in principle
• Safe cover

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Drag at Wal-Mart

• Private space with a nationally set of guidelines
  (DP benefits, treatment of guests)
• De-facto public space in rural communities
• Fabulous place to do drag for local/regional
  queer youth

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boundary publics are fragile

• Hatemail sent to HPA
• AJs self-editing
• Closing down of the Mosh Place
• Verbal harassment at the Wal-Mart
• Overall reliance on privatized net services
  (i.e., tripod, AOL, PNO)

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Interlocking integrity of Boundary publics

• Collectively shape experiences of public-ness
• HPA posts Wal-Mart adventures
• AJs website documents F2F meetings
• Mosh Place concerts are digitized and streamed
• Wal-Mart drag coordinated via email/discussion
  boards

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Overview of major findings

• New media not for escape but for local belonging
• Boundary publics as both productive and fragile
  sites for queer identity work
• Boundary publics as models for mapping
  entanglements of new media and local space
• New media as rich sites for examining nexus
  between other boundary publics and broader
  contexts for identity work

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Implications of findings

• Complicates the argument that new media
  liberate our bodies from locations
• Contributes to materially grounded studies of
  both new media use and sexual and gender
  experience
• Challenges queer theorists on uncritical use of
  urban paradigms
• Highlights what rural queer youth new media use
  can teach us about the politics of identityand
  how to better serve their needs

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Part 2 Ethics

• Troubling access
• Hard to find rural queer and questioning youth?
• Internet finds some youth but makes it easier to
  ignore others
• Marginalizing those beyond access (or with
  troubling access) makes ethnographic work less
  rich

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Representative sampling in new media ethnographies

• No way to be sure of who is missed if your only
  method is via the computer (this matters
  depending on your research question)
• Groups online can reproduce closed circles of
  peer networks distorting data (again, depending
  on your research question)
• Ethical responsibility to create a representative
  sample

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Access and representation issues bring up

• How can we think about anonymity as data rather
  than an technological artifact (and how to get at
  it methodologically)?
• How do we investigate/unpack the privacy and
  anonymity that seems to infuse online
  environments with a special-ness?
• What are other search strategies for finding
  participants on the edges of with my research
  focus?

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Ethical dilemmas--You cant do that!!

• IRB expectations meet real world fieldwork
  challenges
• Dealing with youth in a setting hostile to their
  identities
• Ethnographies here
• Presumptions of tech ubiquity
• Politics of working with stigma
• How to make ethical decisions when IRB
  expectations dont follow you into an electronic
  fieldsite
• Are LiveJournals/Blogs texts or people?
• Need for informed consent in multi-sited
  ethnographies
• Citation/attribution concerns
• The importance of hashing these issues out in an
  interdisciplinary public
• IRBs vary from campus-to-campus
• Committees w/ ethnographic expertise vs. medical
  model

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(some) Possible solutions

• Online materials as voices of participants
  (informed consent)
• Triangulation (boundary publics model)
• Ess et. al open-ended/minded pluralistic
  approach (ethics as praxis)
• Professional expectations of explicit and
  intentional disclosure of ethical and
  methodological approaches
• Coordination of guidelines at Association level
• Join your local IRB?
• STS approach to ethics/science

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Part 3 When pragmatics and ethics collide

• Plasticity of vulnerability
• Construction of youth-as-vulnerable
• San Diego vs. rural Kentucky
• Reinscription of normative assumptions about the
  rural
• Ad-hoc tailoring of ethics protocols in the field
• Securing Waiver of parental consent
• Dealing with online encounters
• The IRBs imagining of rural places and queer
  youth
• Special accommodations affect sampling of
  participants and what stories are told
• The IRB process for this research calls for
  reflection on
• Role negotiations of methods, ethics, and
  politics play in constructing scientific
  knowledge about queer and questioning youth
• How methodological crises serve as productive,
  reflexive opportunities

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Defining vulnerability

• the Common Rule vulnerable populations
  prisoners, economically or educationally
  disadvantaged persons, women, fetuses, children,
  or mentally disabled persons (who does this leave
  out?)
• Genealogies of vulnerable populations begin with
  the international drafting of the Nuremberg
  Medical Code of Ethics
• The U.S. Public Health Services 1932-1972
  Tuskegee syphilis study fueled overhaul of
  regulations for research involving human subjects
• The specters of ethical malpractice haunt present
  day evaluations of research proposals
• Methodological past operationalizes who is
  included under the rubric of vulnerable
  populations

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Advise and consent

• 1st example of the production of vulnerability
  vis-à-vis IRBs
• Securing waiver of parental consent
• I did secure waiver of parental consent from
  people under 18 (afforded under the Common
  Rule)
• Revoked 1 year in with change in IRB hierarchy
• Permitted to talk with youth
• at participating youth agency offices
• over a public
• agency phone via a toll free number
• IRB mandated methodological remedies that could
  not address the complexities of new media
  fieldsites
• rural communities overwhelmingly lack local youth
  agency offices and public telephones
• New media access mitigated by class status

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Advise and consent

• 2nd example of the production of vulnerability
  vis-à-vis IRBs
• Online encounters
• IRB had few protocols re working with
  youth-oriented online materialsparticularly
  posted or produced by youth
• Little sense that these documents might be
  connected to live youth
• My concerns?
• How do I attend to analyzing AJs website?
• How can I ethically use this information and in
  what venues?
• Online materials fell outside the attention span
  of my IRBWhy?
• Data were simply read passively as web content
• Data seemed to keep me safely distanced from
  interacting with youth.
• IRB saw websurfing as innocuous, detached from
  human subjects
• My solutions
• Skirted edge of what IRB deemed permissible
  contact with youth in my fieldsite
• Prompted by disciplinary ethical code of
  anthropology than IRBs directives

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In conclusion

• Politics and fragility of knowledge
• 2 examples (consent and online encounters) show
• Nothing static about vulnerable populations
• Category always open to expansion
• IRBs strategically distance institutions from the
  contagion of stigmatized identities
• researchers often collude in these maneuvers to
  gain approval for their projects
• the plasticity of vulnerability illustrates
  politics and fragility that comprise scientific
  knowledge
• Ethnography of new media an important
  site/faultline

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Acknowledgments

• Social Science Research Councils Sexuality
  Research Fellowship funded by the Ford Foundation
• Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamations
  (GLAAD) Center for the Study of Media and Society