Due October 16, 2001

The purpose of this assignment is to use the internet to extend your learning about a previously unfamiliar social world by using methods drawn from cross-cultural social research.

Requirements  

1250-1800 words, in two parts:

• Fieldnotes describing your experience exploring websites related to your topic (see tips on taking fieldnotes, below).  One complex site may be sufficient if you explore it in depth; five sites is about the maximum.  Please include full citations of each site you explore:  name of site owner, title of site, URL, and date of your exploration. 
• An essay analyzing your discoveries as a participant-observer in the culture of the internet.  Describe the perspectives you've discovered.  What matters most in this world?  What is most meaningful?  How does the Web as a medium shape, enable, restrict, or distort your access to knowledge about and participation in the world of difference? (See Frameworks for Analysis, below.)  If you wish, you may cite any readings for the class to support your analysis (it's not required).

Where to begin

Choose a topic that will extend learning and research that you have already begun.  For example:

• A participant in the 1995 NGO Conference in Beijing, or an organization represented at the conference
• Follow-up to the UN Beijing Platform or CEDAW:  an area of progress or lack of progress in women's status
• A topic discussed in a chapter of Global Feminisms Since 1945 (e.g., you could extend research you began in the role of Investigator)
• A topic you encounter in The Globalized Woman (e.g., you could start with the International Labor Organization's website, www.ilo.org to explore women's labor issues, or with Emory University's website on globalization, http://www.cc.emory.edu/SOC/globalization/issues.html)
• A topic related to the 9/11/01 crisis (e.g., begin with the website of the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women, www.rawa.org )

Before beginning your research, think about what more you want to learn about the topic; frame a question that will serve as a guide for your research (although you may revise it as you go along).  I've listed below some general areas of analysis that may help you frame a guiding question.  

Here are some online resources in Global Feminisms; feel free also to use a search engine.

Basic Ideas 

Common uses of the web for research involve gathering information on a topic, evaluating the reliability of an online source, or critiquing its graphic construction.  These skills matter as background for this assignment, but they are not the focus.

Instead of looking for "objectivity" (which almost always involves a skillfully disguised bias), look for representations that give you access to perspectives different from the one you started with.  

Imagine your web ethnography is a virtual journey to a strange place.  You've undertaken this journey in order to learn about people whose lives are different from yours.  Your goal is to immerse yourself in those lives as fully as you can, to understand what is at stake from the point of view of the people you've traveled to meet. 

Frameworks for analysis

In framing your guiding question and writing your analysis essay, consider one (or more) of the following areas of meaning and action:     

1.  Identity:  self-generated or systemically imposed meaningfulness of religion, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or nation 

2.  Agency, capability:  how people act on behalf of their own well-being and live together across differences; what restricts their ability to do so  

3.  Building communities, bringing social change to communities

4.  Building and influencing national and transnational relationships

5.  Influencing politics and economics, creating alternative or resistant systems of power and money

About the Web:

Although commerce dominates the Web and the vast majority of internet users are still relatively affluent people in the developed world, activist organizations and NGOs worldwide are rapidly expanding their effective use of the Web.

The World Wide Web is not simply a source of "information."  It's a complex culture which mediates people's access to heterogeneous cultural sites.  A culture—a pattern of human behavior--shapes, enables, and constrains its participants’ behavior. Mediation is a process of selection and shaping of information which directs the user’s access to knowledge and action. The selection, shaping, and direction that occurs through mediation capture the meanings, purposes, interests, and practices of the ‘virtual culture’ itself.

About ethnography:

An ethnographic researcher is a participant-observer. That is, she/he does two things at once: immerses herself in a previously unfamiliar social world, and writes descriptions of that world drawing on her participation.

Field research involves "subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or their work situation, or their ethnic situation" (Goffman 1989).

". . . the task of the ethnographer is not to determine ‘the truth’ but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others’ lives" (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw 1995).

Ethnography is "the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the analysis of one’s own experience in the world of these others" (Van Maanen 1988).

Designed as a method for conducting research across cultures, ethnography historically has reinforced an "us-them" mentality--with the researcher regarding himself as in some way superior to the people he is studying.  As a corrective, feminist social researchers propose that the researcher needs to reflect critically on his/her work with the following guidelines in mind:

• a sacred conception of the search for knowledge that honors the ecological as well as the human.
• an ethically involved research approach stressing dignity, justice, and respect between people, and committed to community, caring, empowerment, and social transformation.
• participatory consciousness rather than participatory observation; that is, knowledge is based on dialogue, solidarity, and shared emotional experience rather than on a split between observing self and observed other.

Here's more on ethnographic method from a web ethnography by Devin Dino, a former student of Global Feminisms.

Taking field notes

Writing ethnographic descriptions begins with field notes. While there is no one right way to keep field notes, four principles are basic to the process:

1. What is observed and treated as "data" is inseparable from the observation process. (This means it’s crucial for the researcher to document his own actions, circumstances, instantaneous interpretations, and emotional responses because all of these contribute to shaping not only the process of observation but also the findings.)
2. In writing fieldnotes, the researcher should pay close attention to what the experiences and activities of this unfamiliar world mean to the people whom it represents (although the fieldnotes will always reflect the researcher's own meanings and concerns as well).
3. The researcher should take fieldnotes while she is immersed in the experience in order to capture fleeting, strange impressions (rather than generalizing in retrospect). 
4. The researcher’s fieldnotes should concentrate on social interactions.  When researching Web culture, for instance, explore opportunities for virtual interaction (where can you go from here?) as well as actual contact with people that a website provides.