Twitter and Ethnography: Notes from a Global Experiment

In June 2015, the Rice Ethnography Studio ran an experiment. Their question was this: “What can Twitter do to/for the field?”. Anthropologists and graduate students linked their fieldsites via Twitter, under the hashtag #ESIFRice, in an effort to open conversations about how our fields of enquiry are conceptualised, thinking together about what kinds of new questions the experiment could raise. In this PublicETHOS talk, Andrea Ballestero, convenor of the Rice Ethnography Studio, and Rachel Douglas-Jones co-Head of ETHOS Lab, speak about their different experiences of the experiment, the meaning of the ‘ethnographic tweet’, and the significance of public conversations for ethnographic research.