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Ethnography is a set of participatory, observational, and communicative methods to study people. It has been widely applied in anthropology, sociology, public health, communication, education, history, arts, and other disciplines. Ethnographers rely on immersive fieldwork online and offline to collect first-hand data.

While the COVID-19 situation poses ongoing challenges for ethnographers, it is also producing opportunities to reimagine fieldwork itself. PhD student Yichen Rao in the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) has teamed up with fellow PhD students in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, University of Queensland, and University of California, Davis and designed a project that aims to advance digital ethnography not simply as ‘fieldwork online’ but as a broad system of mindsets, toolkits, and strategies to understand human interconnectedness beyond a narrow boundary of empiricism. The team wishes to set up a platform for mutual support and collaborative ethnography. The project has been awarded through the Universitas 21 (U21) Researcher Resilience Fund, which aims to help develop the capability and capacity of PhD and early career researchers in the U21 network to work digitally in order to adapt to life as a researcher post-COVID-19.   

During 2020, the team carried out biweekly reading groups on digital ethnography and COVID challenges through Slack, inviting young scholars from all over the world to participate. Through the reading groups, they realised that the core challenge for ethnographic research today is not how researchers can overcome the physical distance from the informants’ locality, but how they can make sense of the shared everyday ethnographic moments of ‘digital’ under COVID – people are ‘Zoom-ing’ in and out every day to build up connections without a chance to reflect. Therefore, the team launched an experimental workshop with the support of the U21 Researcher Resilience Fund to form a deeper understanding of body politics and the critical phenomenology of living a ‘forced’ digital life. 

Yichen and his counterparts have designed a workshop titled ‘Feeling Digital and Reimagining Fieldwork during COVID Time’, with Anna Cruz Benavidez, an anthropologist and theatre director, as their coach. Selected participants will conduct a set of experimental and auto-ethnographic fieldwork sessions in groups by using digital devices to perform critical ‘body-theatres’ designed and coordinated by Anna.

The experimental fieldwork will be recorded and ethnographic diaries will be produced to reflect upon these experiences. These recordings/diaries will be shared and discussed by outstanding scholars in anthropology, sociology, media, and performance studies through a virtual workshop in May 2021, hosted by the HKIHSS, the HKU Anthropology Network, and the Department of Sociology. The workshop’s outputs will be co-authored articles and other creative works based on the recordings and ethnographic diaries, followed by the discussants’ commentaries.