Breaching Digital Media: Respecifying Ethnomethodology

Mixing Methods Summer School I

Siegen, 26 – 30 September 2021 (online)

 


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About

How to disrupt the routines of digital media practices in an uncanny — yet heuristic — way? How to interpret and try to cope with provocative events breaking usual flows of digital interactions? What does it mean to interrupt the „backend systems“ of our day-to-day computational infrastructures? The first Mixing Methods Summer School of the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation” invited graduate students to a series of methodological experimentations and creative explorations in the study of digital media practices. Following the established media-theoretical insight that the work of media becomes visible when they break down, our instructors will lead the participants through a number of productive ruptures, crossovers, and reconfigurations, in the encounter with digital technologies. To this end, resources from the ethnomethodological toolkit will be revisited, creatively adapted, and in part reinvented in two parallel tracks that combine theory inputs and presentations of materials with individual and group work sessions. 

The first Mixing Methods Summer School of the CRC  enabled the participants to experiment with different ethnomethodological approaches and discuss the main question of how it might be possible to disrupt the routines of digital media practices. With the help of experts, the participants gained extensive insight into how digital media can be breached to deepen their own research projects. The participants were able to combine theory inputs with work sessions where the participants experimented with productive ruptures, crossovers, and reconfigurations in the encounter with digital technologies. 

Highlights

A blend of research practice and critical reflection, the summer school featured three keynotes by prominent researchers in the fields of (digital) sociology, media studies, and Human-Computer Interaction. Bringing the participants together, the keynotes provided stimulating perspectives on the history, present, and prospects of ethnomethodology (Anne Rawls), experimental methods in digital sociology (Noortje Marres), and methods of critical (un)making (Kristina Lindström/Åsa Ståhl).

  • a keynote by Noortje Marres: „For a situational analytics: An interpretative methodology for the study of social life in computational settings“
    Marres presented experimental methods in digital sociology. She enabled the study of situations in platform- and other computing-intensive settings at scale by reviewing Adele Clark’s “Situational Analytics” (2005) and her case for a specific set of modifications of situational analysis.
  • a keynote by Anne Rawls: „Revealing Order through Disorder: Garfinkel’s Breaching Tutorials and Studies of Difficulty and Difference“
    Rawls gave an insight in her research on the history, present and prospects of ethnomethodology
  • a keynote by Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl: „Un/Making Matters, Practices and Imaginaries“
    Lindström and Ståhl showed their enquiries of methods of critical (un)making. The design makers discussed three different orientations of un/making: un/making in the aftermath of design, un/making preferable things and un/making futures, based on their practice-based research.

In addition, participant had the opportunity to choose between two parallel tracks:

 

led by Loup Cellard

In everyday life, we navigate through situations where attributes about us and the world are tracked, ordered through information architectures and enriched by personalisation methods. Our worry regarding the power of computational devices is justified by many critical studies rightly pointing to their roles as pervasive background instruments participating in the scripting of interactions, the constant optimisation of experience, and the risks of a mundane infrastructural surveillance. The approach of track 1 of the Summer School consists in reclaiming a pause to inquire and reflexively intervene in the normative and routinized enactment of digital media. To borrow a method of american sociologist Harold Garfinkel, we will ask the participants to conduct “breaching experiments”: interventions that break expectations and conventions, therefore revealing the latent organisation of our digitised life. Moreover, our aim is to envision what “digital breaching experiments” could look like: the disruptions of familiar behaviours, socio-technical norms and regular flows of information in digital media contexts. Respecifying breaching experiments for digital media studies brings a number of empirical and methodological challenges we will explore based on two case studies: the data traffic infrastructures of (A) mobile apps and the scripted interactions of (B) social media and conversational agents (e.g. Alexa, Google Home). If two groups are already formed to work on the mentioned case studies, participants are invited to either join one of the groups or think about how “breaching experiments” or similar types of “norm breaking” experiments can be performed in relation to a case study of their choice (e.g. drones, chatbots, urban sensors, user interfaces…). Loup is at your disposal before and during the workshop to provide some methodological guidance. No specific knowledge about ethnomethodology is needed to follow the Track.

led by Philippe Sormani

In his 1997 paper “Toward a Critical Technical Practice”, Philip E. Agre passingly remarked upon “computing […] as a kind of imperialism [aiming] to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image” (p. 131). Track 2 of the Summer School returns to Agre’s passing remark, and his project of “critical technical practice” more broadly, to reflect upon, reconfigure, and/or reorient that project in the light of contemporary developments in ethnomethodological analysis, and its distinctive notion(s) of “respecification” in particular. For this purpose, the track invites its participants to select from their “materials” and ongoing inquiries a discourse fragment, video recording, physical object, and/or computational artefact for which they wish to deepen and discuss its empirical analysis. The jointly investigated “perspicuous setting(s)” (Garfinkel 2002), in addition to explicating the “methods” involved in situ, will invite participants to tease out, if not tinker with, the normative implications of their empirical analysis, be it in the light of the notion of “montage” (e.g., Stalder 2016) or related notions (such as “assemblage” or “entanglement”), all of which have gained traction in and across media studies, current digital sociology, as well as science and technology studies. Track 2, in other words, brings together workshop participants and current practitioners in ethnomethodology, upcoming and established, to work out what “critical technical practice” could actually look like today (conceptually, analytically, interactively, aesthetically, etc.). Therefore, participants are invited to “bring their own materials,” whatever they may be, team up and/or do solo subprojects, whilst taking inspiration from the Track’s and its guests’ (ethno-)methodological inputs. Participants may join one or the other case study launched by the convenor, too. Designed as reflexive endeavors, these case studies explicate various AI assemblages and robotic systems (e.g., “DIY AI” kits, “AV” prototypes) from within their multifaceted montage and tricky performance(s) in situ and in vivo.   

Program

26 July, 10 – 11.15 am

Keynote: „For a situational analytics: An interpretative methodology for the study of social life in computational settings“ (Noortje Marres)

26 July, 5 – 6.15 pm

Keynote: „Revealing Order through Disorder: Garfinkel’s Breaching Tutorials and Studies of Difficulty and Difference“ (Anne Rawls)

27 July, 5 – 6.15 pm

Keynote: „Un/Making Matters, Practices and Imaginaries“ (Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl)

Contact

coordination office
office[at]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de