This past winter session NSSR and Lang Professor of Anthropology Shannon Mattern taught Digital Ethnography, a project-based course utilizing research and ethnographic techniques to explore various technologies and digital environments. During the January intensive period, students met from three to five hours a day over a three-day period. Along with meeting their peers at The New School, they also met with students attending the University of Toronto and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Following the January session of the course, students met with Professor Mattern on a weekly or biweekly basis through March 8 to discuss their course projects. Before starting on their projects, students had to provide a preliminary bibliography, which they supplemented with more readings during their meetings.
Professor Mattern built the course as a 2000-level elective without presuming any prior knowledge. Since The New School remained online for the spring semester, she designed the class to take full advantage of teaching in a virtual environment. Additionally, the pandemic has placed a pause on field work for a year, thus necessitating new methods to help reorient anthropology studies. “Digital Ethnography is practicing participant observation in an online environment,” says Professor Mattern.
Olivia Dick ‘24, an Anthropology student, registered for the course because of her interest in the ethnographic methodology. Her project examined what nostalgic music means to Gen Z, specifically asking the question: What is nostalgic music in a digital space? Through a discussion with a University of Toronto student, the pair learned they had a shared nostalgia for Hannah Montana and music from High School Musical 2, two pieces of media part of their elementary and middle school lives. For Dick, a highlight of the class was being able to talk to students outside of the U.S., an experience she didn’t think she’d get at The New School.
Other project topics ranged from how Instagram has changed the public persona of photographers to examining the critical role of deeply encrypted platforms like Telegram and Signal in facilitating sex trafficking in South Korea. From the course Professor Mattern says that she hopes that students take away that “research, especially if self-directed, can be personally meaningful.” She underscored the fact that the Digital Ethnography students brought a tremendous amount of expertise to their projects and she learned from many of them.
When asked if she would teach this course during the regular academic year, Professor Mattern said she would “probably teach [Digital Ethnography] as a hybrid class” initially starting in-person to build camaraderie and integrating virtual-only sessions; similar to the latter part of the winter session, Professor Mattern would meet individually with students to discuss their projects. Professor Mattern notes that the course was developed under the high pressure of the pandemic and there are some logistical facets of the course that she would do differently.
Resource sharing is a “core political and ethical commitment” of Professor Mattern’s and she regularly shares her syllabi online. Throughout the duration of the course, she shared her excitement about her students’ work as well as the course itself on Twitter where graduate students around the world inquired if the course and its resources could be available to them. Professor Mattern wants to see what’s possible with inter-institutional collaboration and says, “Maybe making [collaboration] more formal through classes is logistically difficult to do, but it can be really exciting.”