 Mobile work - Mobile Methods

The Digital Ethnography Research Centre DERC focuses on understanding a contemporary world where digital and mobile technologies are increasingly inextricable from the environments and relationships in which everyday life plays out. DERC excels in both academic scholarship and in our applied work with external partners from industry and other sectors.DERC approaches this world and how we experience it, through innovative, reflexive and ethical ethnographic approaches, developed through anthropology, media and cultural studies, design, arts and documentary practice and games research.Our research is incisive, interventional and internationally leading. Going beyond the call of pure academia we combine academic scholarship with applied practice to produce research, analysis and dissemination projects that are innovative, and based on ethnographic insights.DERC partners and collaborates with a range of institutions in Australia and globally, including other universities, companies and other organisations. This includes collaborative research projects, conferences symposia and workshops, and international visits, fellowships and publications.

Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC)

Disaster response can involve extreme physical and digital mobilities. In the aftermath of the 2015 Germanwings crash, for example, hundreds of emergency personnel from local and international agencies converged to scour two square miles of steep, rocky terrain for debris and DNA. Surrounding such physical mobilities are often myriad efforts to mobilise information and coordinate actions through digital technologies. New capabilities for mobile work that emerge in this context can be very positive, but they can also raise complex ethical, legal and social challenges. In collaborative research with practitioners, information technology developers and interdisciplinary teams of researchers, I explore what it means to do work on the move in crisis management to gain insight into the relationship between embodied practices of mobile work and the immaterial im|mobilities of data. This takes the form of engaged ‘speculative’ sociology and involves a mixture of mobile methods, including participant observation and participant intervention, ways of ‘following the information’, affirmative critique, disclosive ethics, utopia as method, ethical and privacy impact assessment, and speculative design. These methods are a means for ‘staying with the trouble’ of often ambiguous emergent ‘intra-actions’ and effects. In this talk I provide examples from this collaborative research to explore how we can combine methods or devise new methods to capitalise on diverse forms of data to build rich and practically as well as theoretically fruitful understandings of digitally-suffused working life.
 
<A HREF="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/monika-buscher" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Monika Büscher</A> is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. She is Director of the <A HREF="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Centre for Mobilities Research</A> and Associate Director at the <A HREF="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/social-futures/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Institute for Social Futures</A>. Her research explores the digital dimension of contemporary ‘mobile lives’ with a focus on IT ethics and risk governance. Her interdisciplinary, experimental, engaged public sociology explores and shapes socio-technical futures. She currently leads research on the informationalization of risk governance, exploring opportunities and challenges in national and international projects (<A HREF="http://www.bridgeproject.eu/en" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">BRIDGE</A>, <A HREF="http://www.secincore.eu/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">SecInCoRe</A>). Her theoretical orientation builds on mobilities research, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, science and technology studies, feminist and non-representational theory, and design research. She has published many articles and books, including <A HREF="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230223288" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Ethnographies of Diagnostic Work</A>, <A HREF="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yk95AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Mobile+Methods&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi4zJO_ybXMAhXFbxQKHTbcCJgQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=Mobile%20Methods&f=false" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Mobile Methods</A> and <A HREF="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=85-LAgAAQBAJ&pg=PR2&lpg=PR2&dq=Design+Research.+Synergies+from+Interdisciplinary+Perspectives&source=bl&ots=C7Gt32-yzm&sig=ivRCY9oHS-1JAkT2MVYkgW_JdKY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP9IavyrXMAhUJaxQKHSgCC5cQ6AEISzAH#v=onepage&q=Design%20Research.%20Synergies%20from%20Interdisciplinary%20Perspectives&f=false" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Design Research. Synergies from Interdisciplinary Perspectives</A>. In 2011 she received an honorary doctorate for her work in participatory design from Roskilde University, Denmark. She edits the book series <A HREF="https://www.routledge.com/series/CHGMOB" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Changing Mobilities </A>(Routledge) with Peter Adey.

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Mobile work - Mobile Methods

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