Hangout infancia_c #7, Shumar
Channel: Infancia contemporánea
Date: 2013-05-08

Title / Título: Ethnography in a Virtual World.
Host / Anfitrión: Wesley Shumar and Nora Madison (Drexel University, Philadelphia).
Board / Participantes: Cristina Aliagas, Anne E. Turner and Ridvan Ata (Sheffield University), Briana Ronan (Columbia University) David Poveda, Javier González-Patiño y Marta Morgade (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).
Date / Fecha: 8.5.2013
Abstract / Resumen: Referring to a paper from the hosts to be published, situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the larger political/economic changes of 21st century consumer capitalism to suggest that increasingly our entire social world is a virtual world and that there were very particular utopian and dystopian framings of virtual community to grow out of that history. The paper also situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the anthropological "crisis of representation" discussion to suggest there are many parallels between the two discussions. The paper suggests that while ethnographers have recognized that all societies, except maybe the smallest, are virtual, new information technologies and particularly the Internet create a persistent virtual space that transforms earlier notions of the imagined society. Finally the paper suggests that educational ethnographers are in a position to discuss the new pedagogical issues that arise when attempting to do ethnography in our contemporary virtual world.