(Why) Does It Matter That I’m Also Here If We’re Both On Zoom?

• In Event: Diminished Mobility, Reciprocity, Deepening Ties to Place

Abstract

In this paper I reflect on the locational and methodological shifts in my dissertation research necessitated by the pandemic. Instead of continuing an ethnographic project in Kenya, I shifted to a remotely conducted interview study in Oakland, California (where I currently live). The switch from site-based ethnographic methods to online and remote approaches forced me to consider more closely how I had addressed my positionality as a researcher with my initial methodological choices, and to acknowledge how daily life practices constituted acts of research and reciprocity that needed to be replicated or substituted with online and remote action. Despite these differences, this forced shift also illuminated how many of my commitments as a researcher have not changed, and in fact, that bringing in decolonial practices from my previous work can help me regain what I felt I had lost in moving away from ethnographic methods. Given that both projects relate to how understandings of place are expressed in online activity and information, there is also a secondary meditation on how place is expressed during online interactions – including those between researcher and research participant.

Author

• Elizabeth Resor, UC Berkeley School of Information