The first webinar took place on Wednesday 20 January 2021. You can watch the recording here

The Antropologen Beroepsvereniging (ABv) (Dutch association of anthropologists) and Landelijke Samenwerking Studenten Antropologie (LaSSA) (Dutch network of anthropology students) jointly organize the webinar “Remote Ethnography: Doing Anthropology Digitally”, the first episode in the ABv Webinar Series.

The corona pandemic has changed anthropological fieldwork in many ways in the short term and possibly also in the times to come. How to conduct remote ethnography? How to do participant observation online? What are tips and tricks for gaining access to a digital field? In this webinar we explore these questions (and many more) with a panel of three experts on digital and remote ethnography: Elisabetta Costa (University of Groningen), John Boy (Leiden University) and Sonja Marzi (London School of Economics). Moderators: Elisabet Rasch (Wageningen University and Research, ABv chair) and Nikkie Wiegink (Utrecht University).

Dr. Elisabetta Costa is assistant professor at Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. Besides, she is honorary Research Fellow at UCL Department of Anthropology. She is a digital anthropologist specialized in the study of social media in Turkey and the Middle East, with a focus on how communication technologies are changing politics, love, kinship, intimacy and interpersonal relationships. She was part of the research project WhyWePost for which she conducted long-term ethnographic research on the uses and consequences of social media on people’s everyday life in a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey. More recently, she started a new research project on the uses of social media by Kurdish forced migrants in Milan, Italy.

Dr. Sonja Marzi is a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Methodology and the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research is interdisciplinary and she works on urban challenges in Colombia cutting across the fields of Geography, Sociology and International Development. Currently Sonja investigates gendered spatial inequalities within urban space particularly focusing on how insecurity, fear of crime, socio-spatial mobility and the build environment reinforce urban challenges for women in Colombia. Methodologically, Sonja is a participatory researcher and co-produces knowledge with her research participants. During the 2020 pandemic Sonja developed an innovative remote participatory video method in collaboration with women participants and London and Colombian based filmmakers.

Dr. John D. Boy (PhD, City University of New York) is an assistant professor of sociology in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he directs the research cluster on digitalization. He is also affiliated with the Centre for BOLD Cities at the LDE interuniversity consortium, where he heads a three-year mixed-methods research project on digital technologies and neighborhood transformation. His work has appeared in journals spanning several disciplines, including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Theory and Society, and the Journal of Open Source Software. He develops and maintains the textnets package for Python, and is writing a book about Instagram with Justus Uitermark.