Situated Immersion
Reimagining Remote Methods
It was 7pm on a Thursday evening — time for my Brooklyn mutual aid group’s monthly community call on Zoom. I set up my iPad so I could join the call while washing dishes. On the counter next to me was a legal pad, which I tried not to get wet when I took off my gloves to make notes. I clicked through the meeting link, waited to connect, then saw a grid of now-familiar faces, along with new ones. One of the group’s core organizers, a young white woman, welcomed everyone, saying we’d wait a few minutes for others to join. Just then one of my kids piped up behind me: “Mom, can I have more dessert?”
Moments like this punctuated my fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic with neighborhood groups in Brooklyn, part of an ethnographic study of digital platforms and neighborhood organizing. Conducting research “remotely” made for new barriers and new possibilities, parallel to the challenges and opportunities experienced by neighborhood organizers. In this essay, I propose rethinking remoteness to emphasize the intimacies of conducting research where we are, in what I consider situated immersion. What does ethnographic immersion in the “field” look like when conducting research from “home”? Remote methods create new exclusions, but they also reconfigure the boundaries of “home” and “field,” just as the pandemic reconfigured experiences of “public” and “private” online. How can situated immersion be a resource rather than barrier to ethnographic knowing?
How can situated immersion be a resource rather than barrier to ethnographic knowing?
Researchers often frame digital or online methods as “remote,” in contrast to co-present methods, and many ethnographers offer insight into applying such methods during the pandemic. Neither digital nor co-present methods are any more or less mediated, however, as anthropologists Heather Horst and Daniel Miller point out. Remote can refer to online observation, video interviews, and diary studies or other mobile methods, which are well suited to studying technology practices. But in what sense is remote fieldwork remote or at a distance — especially when conducted in the same neighborhood? A hallmark of ethnography is its immersiveness, the immersion of the fieldworker in the social worlds of others. But as the authors of the Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography discuss in their feminist and decolonial critique, sustained, long term fieldwork is often not possible for many — the precarious, those with family obligations (especially mothers), and others unable to travel.
Some groups in my research, like neighborhood and block associations or tenants’ rights groups, moved their meetings online, to videoconferencing apps like Zoom, as did city community boards and public land-use hearings. Others, like new mutual aid groups, began as Facebook groups, Whatsapp chats, or over email, sparked by urgent needs for community support as residents lost jobs, childcare, or access to medicine and groceries. Yet these online interactions were grounded in specific places, often in response to longstanding — and heightened — racial and economic disparities, in neighborhoods where Black and Latinx residents have been steadily displaced by rising rents and development for at least twenty years.
In many ways, moving events and activities online brought “home” into new relation with “public” or community life.
In many ways, moving events and activities online brought “home” into new relation with “public” or community life. Many scholars of digital technologies have analyzed emerging configurations of public and private, such as shifting understandings of what publicness means. Conducting fieldwork online similarly reconfigures the boundaries of “home” versus the “field,” distinctions that have long constituted “the field” as a place (an often problematic hierarchy in which “data” are extracted to create value for the ethnographer back “home”). Like our interlocutors, researchers are enmeshed — online and otherwise — in multiple networks and lines of connection. Even in co-present fieldwork, we cannot fully separate from these overlapping worlds. To re-imagine situated immersion as a resource, I offer the following considerations:
Field Switching: Moving between “home” and “field” may take place not through travel, but by switching attention from one social space to another. Instead of immersing myself “in fieldwork,” I now wove moments of field research into daily life. Remote methods are in some ways more accessible (I didn’t need to arrange childcare to attend community meetings) but also create new conflicts (often, I couldn’t devote my full attention to these meetings). What’s more, this balancing act wasn’t unique to me. Other parents frequently took breaks for kid bedtime or were joined by a child in pajamas saying good night. Most participants, however, did not have children or had children who were grown, suggesting many parents of young kids weren’t as able to get involved. As one member of a neighborhood association told me, more younger people joined when community meetings moved online, because the timing had been inconvenient for them before. But others, particularly older residents, found it difficult to access digital tools: “we’ve lost are the older neighborhood residents who are not able to navigate technology… And that’s really unfortunate, because we need their voices.”
Situated Immersion: Instead of defining the “field” as somewhere to go spatially, the field becomes a practice, a way of relating to people, places, and activities. Home and field come into new relation, just as “private” and “public” distinctions are reworked on digital platforms. Situating fieldwork means locating one’s self in the research, building on existing ties or seeking new field sites based on how and where you are — whether or not that entails geographic proximity. As with autoethnography, situatedness risks limiting the communities researchers can access, but can equally offer new resources for understanding lived experience.
Mobile & Sensory Methods: Remoteness also offers new means to collect ethnographic data, including mobile and sensory methods. Diary studies or other mobile methods, such as having participants share videos and photos, offer alternatives to “being there” that can be more participatory. Attention to sensory experiences, such as the sounds of the neighborhood during the pandemic, can create new dimensions for ethnographic analysis and reflection. What are the embodied, sensory experiences of meeting over Zoom or isolating at home?
Building on the view that my interlocutors are themselves situated in overlapping worlds and ties, I contend that remoteness is not about geographic distance, but a different kind of relation. Situating fieldwork means attention to how researchers and participants move through multiple social and spatial contexts through digital practices. Just as “social distancing” could be better phrased as “physical distancing,” participating in community meetings over Zoom was often quite intimate. On video calls, the spaces of people’s homes were often visible, creating a hybrid space between public and private, one structured by class and other social distinctions. Public often means accessible to all, comprised of strangers, in Michael Warner’s sense. But community calls were never entirely public (one might ask, what space is?), but they were more public than the circumscribed spaces of family and friends.
…rethinking remoteness not as across distance but as potentially enabling new forms of mutuality and care.
Returning to the evening of the community call, I later turned off my camera and brought my iPad to my son’s room, where he was reading before bed. I sat next to him, listening to the call with one ear while he read a book in his favorite series, occasionally updating me about various plot points. Finally, the call wound down — the organizers usually ended the meetings on time. I turned my video back on to say good-bye, as the remaining participants chimed in over voice or chat to do the same. My notes have lapses in them from moving between the meeting and the bedtime routine. But those lapses make up and shape the emotional contours of the call, an event that took place across living rooms and kitchen tables. Being immersed in remote fieldwork meant switching attention between Zoom and good-night hugs, just as my interlocutors negotiated boundaries of digital and co-present, public and private. Situating research in these partial connections, to embrace fragmented, patchwork methods, means rethinking remoteness not as across distance but as potentially enabling new forms of mutuality and care.
Jordan Kraemer is a media anthropologist and ethnographer of digital platforms and urban inequality. She is currently Director of Policy & Research at ADL’s Center for Technology & Society.
