Ģ��ֱ��

On the 10th of December 2024, approximately 25 researchers from the Ģ��ֱ�� gathered to discuss ethnography on the Seminaarinmäki Campus. The event, Interdisciplinary inquiries: Ethnographic methods, Spatiality and Spaces, Positionality, and Power, included a panel discussion and a workshop, and it was supported by the. The aim of the event was to bring together ethnographers in JYU to share views and inspire each other. The participants represented a wide range of disciplines from game studies to applied linguistics, social sciences, education and literature.

Next, the organizers of the event, Venla Rantanen (Department of Language and Communication) and Maria Ruotsalainen (Department of Music, Art, and Culture Studies) and the panelists of the event Mayara Araujo Caetano and Maiju Strömmer will discuss their own experiences with the event and reflect on that.

Venla

In June 2024, Ģ��ֱ�� hosted an interdisciplinary conference on Imagining possible futures. Maria and I, two researchers from different fields, ended up chatting and found immediately a broad common ground: ethnography, with its possibilities and challenges. After the conference we decided to continue the conversation, and the idea of an interdisciplinary workshop for ethnographers - a possible future - was born.

In universities, staff members are typically divided into "subjects" based on the topic of study.  Although this division is often practical, sometimes a researcher needs a discussion group specialising in the same methodology. The "success" of ethnographic work is largely based on interpersonal relationships, and sometimes it is challenging to wrestle with them alone. For that reason, we had both been looking for like-minded researchers outside our university, but meeting at the conference made us realise that collegial support could also be found in the other departments of our own university. As such, we wanted to create a space for facilitating encounters and the aim of the event was to inspire: to spark conversations and cooperation between researchers from all faculties of JYU.

When we designed the learning stations, I really wanted to include presenting ethnographic knowledge as one topic. Ethnographers commonly ponder on how to present nuanced knowledge on real lived lives generated in ethnographic projects with integrity: how to make justice to the participants and their stories. Many researchers, including me, have found the article format too limiting, and thus, they aspire to experiment with other ways of presenting. In this learning station, the participants first got acquainted with examples of different ethnographic reports. These included for example Adrian Blackledge’s and Angel Creese’s play and Sally Campbell Galman’s comic .  Then, the groups were asked to design a creative output themselves. The results were great, especially considering the time limit. Most of the groups chose to reflect on the workshop itself. The outputs included two poems, a drawing and a spoken word performance, which all were presented at the end of the event. I was genuinely impressed by the works that had been created in such a short time, and I think the learning station demonstrates that  researchers are both capable and willing to extend their output-repertoire and play with imagination, if given an opportunity.

Maria

Maria: I am really happy we put together this event. Not only did I greatly enjoy the event itself (huge thanks for our panelists and participants!) but also planning it was a great experience. During the planning, we had these very serious conversations about ethnography, but also great fun - especially when designing the Discord and its characters!. So Discord was an integral part of one of our workstations, the one focusing on navigating spatiality.  With this workstation, we wanted in particular to draw attention to the way space is always layered and how we as researchers as well as our interlocutors occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. To achieve this, we created a Discord (instant messaging and VoIP social platform) server focused on gaming. To this server, we created six characters the workshop participants then “played as” in different social situations unfolding in Discord. 

We wanted this learning station also to highlight the ways in which technologies and their affordances mold the field in ethnographic research. The interface of Discord also becomes one that can mitigate researcher’s access to the field.

What this event really highlights to me is that we need to step off the path sometimes. Or change the paths, create new ones. There are so many people in JYU interested in ethnography, in different departments and faculties, and they can be, physically, passing each other everyday, but not talking to each other. So we need to create new paths. Sometimes this means slowing down, maybe not being so productive. In Queer phenomenology Sara Ahmed (2006) discusses how in landscape architecture the unofficial paths people take across the grass, for instance, are called desire lines. Because, I think, there people abandon the official paths and create new ones. So, I think for me this event was a desire line, a faint path in the grass - something perhaps more people can now use too?

Mayara

Receiving the invitation to this workshop made me feel much joy because I could have an opportunity to share with others about my research (sexual play in a multiplayer online sex game that has been working for more than a decade), this time not as polished publication, but the potential challenges from working with, in my case, online ethnography.

We were free to present our research experiences according to the pre-selected themes. And as an inexperienced presenter, I struggled to plan my oral and visual presentation. In the end, the context I was living in helped me. I was working on the introduction of my dissertation; thus, it was a moment for reorganisation, and not long before, I drafted a publication for a blog. Some of the points I wanted to discuss were related to different positionalities, such as being a student/staff from another country and playful interactions with research subjects (in my research, also referred to as players).

I participated in the entire workshop day and was paired with people who attended the event and worked/studied at Jyväskylä. We went through different stations, and the activities reminded me of other workshops I attended and contributed to developing my thoughts. The most challenging was the first station, which required a different presentation of our research, and some very skilled colleagues made a nice draw to represent our process. Working with Discord, however, felt much like my fieldwork. This platform was new to some of the people in my group and not as relevant to projects not built around online communities and mediated experiences.

When editing my talking points, I left out some quotes from Melissa Febos that I would like to recover here as a conclusion to my contribution. Her publications were based on personal stories, but she has experiences and skills as a writer that could resemble ethnographic texts (highlights are mine): “I don’t mean to argue that writing personally is for everyone. What I’m saying is: don’t avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something.” (Febos, 2022: 26)

Maiju

It was a great pleasure, but also challenging, to plan a talk about ethnographic methodologies for an interdisciplinary audience. I have worked on four research projects: in two of them, we conducted team ethnography, and in the others, I gathered the data individually. I decided to focus on my experiences and lessons learned while doing ethnography in these projects. To provide the audience with some background knowledge for the panel discussion, I briefly introduced my background: my research interests include language and work, multilingualism, migration and mobilities, and digital (platform) work. Theoretically, my current research draws on critical sociolinguistics, which studies languages interwoven with, affected by, and potentially changing social structures and the political economy (see Heller, Pietikäinen & Pujolar 2018; Del Percio & Flubacher 2024). I apply ethnography in my research to understand what is meaningful to my participants and to observe (and record) actual language and work practices. This approach allows me to discover interesting phenomena and questions that are sometimes hard to predict when preparing the research plan. I agree with Monica Heller (2008: 150): “Fundamentally, ethnographies allow us to get at things we would otherwise never be able to discover.” For me, it has been crucial to spend time with my participants, such as and , during their workdays to truly understand their work, structures, and language practices. It is often easier to plan and interpret interviews after getting to know participants’ perspectives in more informal contexts.

I have gathered ethnographic data on language and work in different organizations (cleaning organizations, a multinational mining corporation, hotels, and a vocational institute) where I followed my participants and observed their work practices, meetings, and lessons, in addition to using other methods. Most of the observations took place in physical locations such as locker rooms, restaurants, hotel rooms, kitchens, coffee rooms, mining tunnels, meeting rooms, and classrooms. My current project focuses on digital work sold via online labor platforms. It differs from my previous experiences, as my participants work from home or while traveling. I have developed other methods to gather data on their work instead of traditional ethnographic observations: I have navigated the labor platform with a client account and asked my participants to write work diaries or reflections, or to take screen capture videos or photos while working. I have a lot to learn about online ethnography, and events like this are meaningful for sharing ideas with others who are dealing with similar questions. I attended the workshop stations and enjoyed the discussions and activities we had together. Thank you to Venla and Maria for putting so much effort and thought into organizing such an inspiring event!

Venla Rantanen is a project researcher at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at JYU.

Maria Ruotsalainen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies at JYU.

Mayara Araujo Caetano is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Art History, Musicology and Media Studies at UTU.

Maiju Strömmer is a researcher at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at JYU.

References

Ahmed, S. 2006.  Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.

Del Percio, A. & Flubacher, M.-C. 2024 (Eds). Critical sociolinguistics: Dialogues, Dissonances, Developments. Bloomsbury.

Febos, M. 2022. Body Work: the radical power of personal narrative. New York: Catapult.

Heller, M. 2008. Doing ethnography. In L. Wei & M. Moyer (Eds.) Blackwell guide to research methods in bilingualism and multilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell, 249–262.

Heller, M., Pietikäinen, S., & Pujolar, J. 2017. Critical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter. Routledge.