ORCID Profile
0000-0001-8152-2473
Current Organisations
RMIT University
,
Aarhus Universitet
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2018
Abstract: Beginning with the premise that most regulatory guidelines for research ethics are deeply flawed, this article walks the reader through three models that can help social researchers, technologists, and designers identify and reflect on how they’re approaching ethics, or “doing the right thing” in their own work. The first, an error-avoidance model, has traditionally focused on creating frameworks to help researchers avoid repeating historical ethical violations. The second concept-driven model focuses on refining the concepts that undergird core ethical frameworks. Both are dominant in human-focused research and tend to be highly proceduralized, implemented a priori or from the top down as part of largescale regulatory structures. In both of these models, the agency of the researcher is removed or dismissed as less relevant than the agency of the system. The article draws on recent controversies around data collection and corporate experimentation on social media users as well as two academic research cases to illustrate how these two models fail repeatedly because they do not retain enough flexibility to allow for recontextualizing ethics as needed on a case-by-case basis. The third, an impact-model of ethics, offers an alternative whereby researchers, technologists, and designers can take a more active role in decisions about the contexts they study, by exploring the possible positive and negative impact of their work. This article invites us to work toward building a different balance in agential distribution in our models around responsible conduct of research, so that the conceptual and regulatory systems that guide and impede our actions are more balanced with our own agency as decision makers, with accountability and responsibility for doing the ‘right thing’.
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Date: 11-08-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-10-2021
DOI: 10.1177/13548565211047158
Abstract: Public attention on disconnection and digital detox focuses on the health and wellbeing associated with disconnecting without much attention on what happens to selfhood or identity when abruptly disconnected. In an age of ubiquitous internet and “always on” use practices, what does disconnection do? Focusing on what happens when we disconnect, at the micro level, reveals interesting echolocative communication patterns otherwise not noticed. Abruptly stopping the continuous call and response pattern of interaction among youth produces deep anxieties and feelings of existential vulnerability that are commonly brushed aside. The work in this article is part of a larger project related to echolocation as a theory of communication. In an era of constant connectivity and “always on” or more importantly, “always available” internet, the seemingly seamless and steady state of connectivity is, at the more granular level, a process of continual echolocation, in the way we might think of sonar, whereby certain animals like bats determine the shape and location of objects in space by sending steady streams of signals and attending closely to the quality of the echo. Echolocation challenges researchers and theorists to reconsider the core elements and processes in an era of continuous, machinic as well as human interaction in multiple and massive networks of information flow. This does not mean we no longer experience dyadic (two person) or intra interactions, of course, but echolocation, the process of moving, navigating, and positioning through radar-like call and response provides a promising model to apply to how humans make sense of who they are in the complexities of continuous and tangled data flows.
Publisher: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers
Date: 11-2006
DOI: 10.3172/JIE.15.2.37
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2018
Abstract: This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Special Issue contributes specific cases and fine-grained conceptual distinctions to ongoing discussions about the ethics in data-driven research. In the second decade of the 21st century, a grand narrative is emerging that posits knowledge derived from data analytics as true, because of the objective qualities of data, their means of collection and analysis, and the sheer size of the data set. The by-product of this grand narrative is that the qualitative aspects of behavior and experience that form the data are diminished, and the human is removed from the process of analysis. This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by the tool, which obscures human decisions in the process. The scholars involved in this Special Issue problematize the assumptions and trends in big data research and point out the crisis in accountability that emerges from using such data to make societal interventions. Our collaborators offer a range of answers to the question of how to configure ethics through a methodological framework in the context of the prevalence of big data, neural networks, and automated, algorithmic governance of much of human socia(bi)lity
Publisher: ACM Press
Date: 2017
Publisher: Springer Nature Singapore
Date: 2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-10-2021
Abstract: In 5 months of COVID isolation, living out of a suitcase in temporary housing, countless fractal patterns emerged. I can’t say if I created these patterns by looking for them, or that I know the whole world by looking at a grain of sand. The truth of the matter is that it feels like the key for massive scale change is just in front of us, but slipping from our grasp. As we move through these days, weeks, and months, we have very little time before the difference recedes again. I address this matter of concern as a matter of method in performative grounded theory piece.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 10-2019
Publisher: Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies
Date: 20-12-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Date: 2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2019
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 28-11-2018
Abstract: Critical pedagogy is a vital part of building data literacy. It moves beyond the level of data critique to social action in response to datafication. This article contends that academics can do more to teach those in the public sphere as well as classroom to become critical interpretive researchers of their own lived experience, an action articipatory research framework that identifies critical thinking as the purpose of research and improved digital or data literacy as the outcome of research. This article suggests three strategic modes through which the strengths of critical approaches and qualitative epistemologies can be blended to serve as pedagogical tools for understanding and critically analyzing data, datafication, and other aspects of the digital era.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2012
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-08-2019
Abstract: This article describes an ongoing series of public arts–based experiments that build critical curiosity and develop data literacy via self-reflexive public interventions. Examined through the lens of remix methodology the Museum of Random Memory exemplifies a form of collective–reflexive meta-analysis whereby interdisciplinary researchers generate immediate social change and build better questions for future public engagement. The experiments help people critically analyze their own social lives and well being in cultural environments of growing datafication and automated (artificial intelligence [AI]-driven) decision-making. Reflexivity, bricolage, and critical pedagogy are emphasized as approaches for responding to changing needs in the public sphere that also build more robust interdisciplinary academic teams.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2021
Abstract: Over 3 years, researchers, artists, and activists collaborated on eight public engagement experiments in five countries. All focused on building critical consciousness about digital futures. The interventions worked: Once participants broke through the seamlessness of interface surfaces, they immediately thought more critically about how digital platforms actually operate. Yet even as participants reached into these black boxes, they did not imagine alternatives. This article offers a critical theory reading of the theme of inevitability, using the concept of discursive closure, whereby we can see how particular values and (infra)structures are naturalized, neutralized, and legitimated, closing off discussion of alternatives that might counter current hegemonic power. This article highlights the importance of considering iterative formats for speculative interventions, whereby facilitators can focus not only on imagining new or different digital futures, but find creative ways to identify and help overcome the current resignation to the inevitable.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 08-12-2020
Abstract: This working paper introduces key issues and challenges for ethnographic research of digitally saturated social environments, online social contexts, or digitally-mediated phenomena. It focuses on empirical approaches used by ethnographers and sociologists studying digital culture. In the context of digital social research, this may involve observing or collecting actual behaviors and actions in social networking platforms or studying use and interactions with and around digital devices, technologies, and media in naturalistic environments. It might also involve recording and observing in contrived settings, like workshops, focus groups, experiments, or interviews. The target of one’s study could include people in their physical forms or just data produced through human behaviors, movements, or flows of information. The study might seem small scale, whereby one is looking at a single case, instance, in idual or small group, or largescale, when exploring patterns in aggregated datasets, analyzing upswells or shifts of interest in events or crisis, examining how ideas flow or emerge through various groups, platforms, or networks. With such a broad range of topics, approaches, choices, there will obviously be different theories, concepts, methods, ethics, and best practices. This paper provides a good starting point. It is a variation of a chapter for a forthcoming Handbook of Qualitative Research. Update: as of 2022, the Handbook has not yet been published.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2005
Publisher: Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies
Date: 20-12-2021
Publisher: University of Illinois Libraries
Date: 21-09-2013
Abstract: The term ‘data’ functions as a powerful frame for discourse about how knowledge is derived and privileges certain ways of knowing over others. Through its ambiguity, the term can foster a self–perpetuating sensibility that ‘data’ is incontrovertible, something to question the meaning or the veracity of, but not the existence of. This article critically examines the concept of ‘data’ within larger questions of research method and frameworks for scientific inquiry. The current dominance of the term ‘data’ and ‘big data’ in discussions of scientific inquiry as well as everyday advertising focuses our attention on only certain aspects of the research process. The author suggests deliberately decentering the term, to explore nuanced frames for describing the materials, processes, and goals of inquiry.
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Date: 2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-1996
DOI: 10.1177/0893318996009004002
Abstract: This article provides a critical ethnographic account of how the members of a small design company experienced a work environment riddled with ambiguous communication. I present the organization's official philosophies as well as the discourse of the members to illustrate how ambiguous communication was strategically applied and how members responded and made sense of it. Although management's goal in providing vague goals and objectives was intended to spark freedom and creativity, the employees experienced this work environment as paradoxical and constraining. I contend that the members' responses to this system demonstrate how the interplay of ambiguous discourse and organizational power can construct complex structures of control. Even when organizational members were aware of contradictory and ambiguous communication practices by management, they were largely unaware of the extent to which their responses to this situation naturalized, reproduced, and strengthened a painfully experienced organizational system of control.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-01-2023
DOI: 10.1177/13548565221148108
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a further extension of the sociotechnical logics of digital platforms to every realm of social life. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help in iduals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this paper showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. We contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help in iduals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building in idual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-11-2021
Abstract: The idea of doing a self-guided series of prompts for a largescale project in the midst of a global pandemic emerged as a solution to the twin problems of distance and distraction. The goal of a “21-day autoethnography challenge” set of self-guided prompts was to build embodied sensibilities toward the material we study, practice autoethnographic forms of writing and analysis, and transform personal experiences through this COVID-19 moment into critical understanding of scale, sensemaking, and relationality of humans, nonhumans, and the planet. This article showcases the prompts to illustrate the method and flexible adaptation required for the project.
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: 2013
Abstract: Although fieldwork is the foundation of robust ethnographic inquiry in physical settings, the practical methods have never fit comfortably in digital contexts. For many researchers, the activities of fieldwork must be so radically adjusted, they hardly resemble fieldwork anymore. How does one conduct “participant observation” of Twitter? When identities and cultural formations are located in or made of information flows through global networks, where are the boundaries of “the field”? In such global networks, what strategies do we use to get close to people? What might count as an interview? This essay discusses the persistent challenges of transferring fieldwork methods intended for physically situated contexts to digitally-mediated social contexts. I offer provocations for considering the premises rather than the procedures of fieldwork. These may not be seen on the surface level of method but operate at a level below method, or in everyday inquiry practices. I suggest that a practice of reflexive methodological analysis allows for more resonant and adaptive fieldwork suitable for studying 21st century networked communication practices and cultural formations.
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Annette Markham.