Urban Futures Symposium August 2023

Ethnography is a research approach that values conducting immersive and exploratory qualitative inquiry in naturalistic situations. Since the advent of the internet, digital ethnography has become an approach that applies ethnographic sensibilities and tools to understanding life in the digital age, how humans use and make sense of digital technologies, how communities develop around or through different types of digital platforms, and other aspects related to the practices and infrastructures of digital transformations in societies. The field of Digital Ethnography is wide and diverse. 

In this session, each speaker will describe the approach and present an example of their research to showcase a particular research design, methodological approach, or tool. All presenters are core members of RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC).

Speakers:

• Ingrid Richardson: Techniques for studying mediated embodiment
• Kelsie Nabben: Digital ethnography of hardware
• Dan Harris: Video as digital ethnographic method
• Annette Markham: Multi-agent mapping as digital ethnographic method

Keynote presentation by Dr Rob Raven, Professor of Sustainability Transitions and Deputy Director (Research) at Monash Sustainable Development Institute and visiting professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University.

Our cities and underpinning socio-technical systems are in need of transformation to achieve better social and environmental outcomes such as articulated in the Paris agreement and the SDGs. 
Real-life experimentation has become a ubiquitous approach in sustainability governance and practice, including in cities such as in urban living labs. In this talk, Prof. Raven will first position experimentation in the scholarly work on sustainability transitions. This literature conceptualises experiments as protective spaces and seed-beds for radical change in the context of system-level path dependencies and windows of opportunities for shifts towards sustainability. Examples of recent and ongoing projects with living lab and urban experimentation approaches involving PhD students will then be provided. To conclude, reflections on the challenges and opportunities of urban experimentation will be offered, pointing towards future research.   

In this session participants will explore the dilemmas of the field when working with marginalised or hard-to-reach communities, as well as communities sceptical of researchers. Through a reflection on in-the-field moments and scenarios likely to be faced by emerging researchers, we ask the 'so what' question. We will stage productive encounters for participants to interrogate the reasons for their research agendas and why they require the labour and participation of over-intellectualised communities.

Speakers: Ellen van Holstein and David Kelly