HELPING PEOPLE'S

Juliano Spyer (@jasper) is part of the Why We Post global research project, based at the UCL Department of Anthropology, that looks into the uses and consequences of social media. The project involved nine anthropologists, each of whom spent 15 months in communities around the world. On 29th February 2016, the first 3 books are being launched that compare the results from all the fieldsites, as well as a book on social media in England. There will also be a free online course. For more information, follow their twitter @UCLWhyWePost. When is it that fieldwork finishes? Thanks to social media, the separation between being in the fieldsite and being in the library is becoming ever more blurred. This is true for anthropologists in general, not just those who study social media, because in many societies platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp have become an important channel of interaction during fieldwork. In a way, I have carried my fieldsite in Brazil with me back to L...

The full programme for our Ethics & Social Media Conference has now been announced. You can see details of session abstracts here , and register for the conference on eventbrite 1000 Conference Registration and Coffee  1030 Keynote 1 The Ethical Disruptions of Social Media Research: tales from the field  Professor Susan Halford (Director Web Science Institute, University of Southampton) 1130 Parallel Session 1 Session A: Ethical Practicalities (I)  Using Twitter as a data source: An overview of ethical challenges. Wasim Ahmed (University of Sheffield)  Ethical issues in qualitative research on Facebook. Gill Mooney (University of Leeds)  The Ethics of Researching Tinder. Jenna Condie (Western Sydney University)  Session B: Blurred Lines Trying to re-focus the blurred lines between researchers and participants in social media research. Sarah Quinton (Oxford Brookes)  Reconciling the Tumblr Fangirl and the Academic: Embracing the Blurred line Between...