2026/06/22 by Samantha Thompson, Sarah Elwood · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Focus Groups and Qualitative Methods #Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis #Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1080/0966369x.2026.2674917
openalex publication_date 2026/06/22 · openalex created_date 2026/06/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/24
Digital mediations of various elements of ethnographic research can shift sociospatial contexts of gathering and interpreting evidence, encounters with research participants, and emotional and embodied experiences in research. Yet, there remains limited reflection by geographers on digital ethnographies and their implications for sociospatial research. We contribute to these discussions through articulation of ‘feminist digital ethnography’: a methodological approach to digital ethnography that interweaves digital mediations of familiar ethnographic research practices with feminist principles of relationality and reflexivity in knowledge-making. Our framework for feminist approaches to digital ethnography centers reflexive attention to the significance of digital mediation for knowledge-making relationships, interpretive insights, and care practices in research. We develop this framework through reflexive analysis of our collaboration in Samantha’s dissertation research, which examined struggles over tenant protections through archival evidence and interviews. In our analysis, we focus on two vital arenas of possibility and challenge for feminist digital ethnographies: digital mediations of interpretive knowledge-making through practices of collage and time travel and diverse care relationships shaped by trust and vulnerability in emotional, embodied research. We argue that embedding feminist principles of reflexivity, attention to power and positionality, intersectionality, and embodied knowledge-making can strengthen approaches to digital ethnographic research in Geography.