To Tango or to Disentangle? Making Ethnography Public in the Digital Age

2026-02-09

AI Summary

This study examines how the rise of digital platforms reconfigures the boundaries between researchers and participants, as well as insiders and outsiders, in ethnographic inquiry, thereby generating novel practical and ethical challenges. Through digital ethnographic methods and participant observation in two case studies—VRChat and WhatsApp—the project investigates the articulation of sociocultural categories such as race and caste within hybrid media environments. It proposes “emergent relationality” as a central analytical framework to illuminate the dynamic co-constitution among researchers, platform technologies, and publics. The research further demonstrates how positionality and media ecologies jointly shape what can be accessed, expressed, and made public, offering deeper insights into the mechanisms through which publicity is constituted in the digital age.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Privacy & Security

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Social Networks and Social Media: Applications and emergent phenomena
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Ethnography attends to relations among people, practices, and the technologies that mediate them. Central to this method is the duality of roles ethnographers navigate as researchers and participants and as outsiders and insiders. However, the rise of digital platforms has introduced new opportunities as well as practical and ethical challenges that reshape these dualities across hybrid media environments spanning both online and offline contexts. Drawing on two case studies of VRChat and WhatsApp, we examine how ethnographers employ diverse tactics to study both enduring and emerging socio-cultural issues of race and caste, particularly those that form what are often called publics. We propose emergent relationality as a key analytic for understanding the mutual shaping of ethnographers, platforms, and publics. In this work, emergent relationality offers registers for analyzing how positionality and hybrid media environments constitute and condition what can be accessed, articulated, and made public.

Problem

• ethnography
• digital platforms
• emergent relationality
• publics
• hybrid media environments

Innovation

• emergent relationality
• digital ethnography
• hybrid media environments
• positionality
• publics