You Can’t Do That!The Pragmatics and Ethics of Ethnographic Approaches To
New Media Research
Mary L. Gray
Indiana UniversityDepartment of Communication and Culture
Contact: [email protected]
Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics Colloquium, February 17, 2006
Overview of today’s talk
1. Pragmatics: • what did I ask and assume?• what did I do?• what did I find?
2. Ethics: • implications, dilemmas, and strategies
3. When pragmatics and ethics collide:• plasticity of vulnerability
(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
Part I: Pragmatics
What I asked:1. 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?
2. Case study: How young people do “queer identity work?” sites and technologies construction, negotiation, articulation of cultural meaning support agencies, peers, and new media
3. How is queer identity work placed, gendered, classed, and raced differently in the rural United States?
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)
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
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
Boundary publics for rural youth’s queer identity work
Exhibit A: new mediascapes such as websites 2 examples
•Highland Pride Alliance website• AJ’s FTM Journey
Highland Pride Alliance
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
AJ’s FTM Journey
AJ’s FTM Journey
Website features: Updates, about me Gallery of T-effects Surgery pics & doctors Links Guestbook Voiceclip from AJ’s site
Rural queer boundary publics
Exhibit B: privatized zones 2 examples:
•Queercore at the Methodist Church SkatePark •Drag at Wal-Mart
Queercore at the Methodist Church SkatePark
Alternative venue
“Open space” in principle
“Safe cover”
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
“boundary publics” are fragile
Hatemail sent to HPA AJ’s 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)
Interlocking integrity of “Boundary publics”
Collectively shape experiences of public-ness: HPA posts Wal-Mart adventures
AJ’s website documents F2F meetings
“Mosh Place” concerts are digitized and streamed
Wal-Mart drag coordinated via email/discussion boards
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
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 identity…and how to better serve their needs
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
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
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?
Ethical dilemmas--”You can’t do that!!”
1. 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
2. How to make ethical decisions when IRB expectations don’t follow you into an electronic fieldsite
– Are LiveJournals/Blogs texts or people?– Need for informed consent in multi-sited ethnographies– Citation/attribution concerns
3. The importance of hashing these issues out in an interdisciplinary public
– IRBs vary from campus-to-campus– Committees w/ ethnographic expertise vs. medical model
(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
Plasticity of vulnerability:
1. Construction of youth-as-vulnerable – San Diego vs. rural Kentucky– Reinscription of normative assumptions about the rural
2. Ad-hoc tailoring of ethics protocols in the field– Securing Waiver of parental consent– Dealing with online encounters
3. The IRB’s imagining of rural places and queer youth – “Special accommodations” affect sampling of participants and what
stories are told
4. 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
Part 3: When pragmatics and ethics collide
1. the “Common Rule” vulnerable populations: prisoners, economically or educationally disadvantaged persons, women, fetuses, children, or mentally disabled persons (who does this leave out?)
2. Genealogies of vulnerable populations begin with the international drafting of the Nuremberg Medical Code of Ethics
3. The U.S. Public Health Service’s 1932-1972 Tuskegee syphilis study fueled overhaul of regulations for research involving human subjects
4. The specters of ethical malpractice haunt present day evaluations of research proposals
5. Methodological past operationalizes who is included under the rubric of vulnerable populations
Defining “vulnerability”
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
Advise and consent2nd example of the production of vulnerability vis-à-vis IRBs:Online encounters
– IRB had few protocols re: working with youth-oriented online materials—particularly posted or produced by youth
– Little sense that these documents might be connected to “live” youthMy concerns?
– How do I attend to analyzing AJ’s website? – How can I ethically use this information and in what venues?
Online materials fell outside the attention span of my IRB…Why?– 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 IRB’s
directives
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
Acknowledgments:
Social Science Research Council’s Sexuality Research Fellowship funded by the Ford Foundation
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s (GLAAD) Center for the Study of Media and Society
