Screencasts as a method of Remote Ethnography

Digital Anthropology is a discipline that is often hard to define as the rate of development across technologic innovation, is paralleled with a changing face of usership and application. For a relatively recent sub-discipline, these challenges of delving into the ever-changing modes in which humans engage with the digital, is often grounded with the need of innovating the methods of ethnographic research in digital or virtual worlds (Boellstorff 2012, Pink 2015, Frömming 2017) to accommodate for these new modes of human behavior and experience. It is however, with the emergence of the COVID-19 and SARS-COV20 viruses, and the resulting phenomena socially and politically referred as a global pandemic, that many aspects of Digital Anthropology take on a new wave of significance. Whereby many of the aspects and methods of research that were developed within the sub-discipline, have helped paved the way in which many anthropologists now grapple with the question, how do we conduct ethnographic research beyond the limitations of the material world engagement? With border closures, lockdowns, and social distancing, the very premise of long-term ethnographic fieldwork has been challenged, and for many, whether they like it or not, Anthropology as well as many aspects of life, are #NOW Digital. 2020 — the year of CARE / the_future_is_here.

Issue #5