Nomadic Digital Ethnography and Engagement

Abstract

The availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as cell phones, WIFI connections, and social media has broadly changed communication norms amongst mobile pastoralists. Scholars and development organisations have reported on the end results of digital tools, for example by examining the ability of governments and development organisations to send early-warning weather reports through enhanced cellular access; the use of SMS to engage in deliberative polling; and the use of WIFI connections to provide banking services. However, researchers have not yet fully addressed how these tools are changing the communicative norms and ethnographic research methods used between researchers and mobile pastoralists. These changing communicative norms embed relations that inform academic understanding of the opportunities that arise from the interplay of complex forms of social and economic variability as experienced by herders. This paper draws from the fields of Communication and Anthropology to understand how these same ICTs have changed the complex communication between herders and researchers through the establishment of new communicative networks. I ask how new communicative networks impact on both existing and emerging ethnographic research practices and how the emergent 'digital field' of research might open space for new communicative networks and research projects. Then, I propose that digital ethnography may be one way in which both herders and researchers can respond to variability while establishing research projects wherein herders are recognised both as participants in a research project and as co-producers of knowledge.