Sarah Pink: Digital Ethnography

Sarah Pink is a Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia, and the author or co-editor of several books about digital ethnography. To approach this area, we get Sarah’s help with some conceptual groundwork about the methods, values, and history of ethnography, and its relation to neighbouring fields such as anthropology or cultural geography. But the conversation focusses on digital ethnography: Information technology changes not only the methods of ethnography by providing tools or modes of expression, but also raises new questions by changing notions of embodiment, geographic place, and social relation, all of which are central themes for ethnographers. We also talk about how an field that largely eschews prediction and hypothesis can reason about future technology such as self-driving cars. Sarah’s book is Pink et al., Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, SAGE Publications, 2016.