Conference Agenda

This paper explores how digital ethnography can be mobilized to build equitable research infrastructures that center relationality, care, and peer learning. Drawing from my work on a Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) pilot project, I examine how first-generation women academics engage in digital knowledge co-production through a feminist, peer-based Discord server model. The project emerged in response to gaps in conventional academic systems that privilege hierarchy, institutional access, and expertise, often marginalizing early-career and first-generation researchers.

Using qualitative content analysis of asynchronous online forums and peer mentoring channels, this paper theorizes peer mobilization as a feminist digital methodology that both documents and transforms the social processes of research collaboration. The paper contributes to ongoing conversations about feminist research praxis, digital ethnography, and the future of qualitative inquiry in the digital world.

In qualitative research, the researcher inhabits a complex relational space that extends beyond immediate encounters. This is particularly evident when interviews are conducted by research assistants or graduate students, and the researcher engages only with transcripts or recordings. In such cases, the researcher’s relationship to participants is mediated through texts, voices, and narratives—yet it may still acquire an intensity of familiarity. Through attentive reading, listening, and interpretation, the researcher develops a form of vicarious presence—entering the experiential worlds of others without direct encounter.
In the study of loss and bereavement, this dynamic assumes distinctive contours. Narratives not only recount the grief of the living but also summon the absent dead, rendering them present within the research encounter. The relational field thus extends beyond the participant–researcher dyad to include those who are no longer alive yet remain insistently invoked. In this sense, qualitative research may unfold within what might be described as virtual relationships—connections sustained through memory, language, and affect rather than corporeal presence.
In this presentation, I share my experience of vicarious presence with both the bereaved and the deceased. Such relationships carry both epistemological and ethical implications. Epistemologically, they demonstrate that knowledge production in such research is never solely descriptive but constituted through acts of witnessing, memorialization, and relational imagination. Ethically, they position the researcher as a custodian—entrusted to hold, preserve, and at times withhold narratives carrying profound affective weight. This generates what might be termed a narrative burden: the responsibility to carry stories of others—stories of people who do not know the researcher—which nonetheless become integrated into the researcher’s interpretive horizon.
From this perspective, the text becomes more than data: a site of relational presence, a medium through which absence is rendered tangible and ethical witnessing is enacted.

The study examines promissory digital health as a question of how healthcare professionals give meaning to future work from the vantage point of present practices. Focusing on home-based remote monitoring of older patients, we draw on qualitative in-depth interviews with nurses and doctors and an inductive analysis of key tensions between present and future. We identify five tensions that link the experienced burden of current remote monitoring practices with professionals’ optimistic anticipations of future change. Nurses’ accounts emphasize relational guidance and practical troubleshooting, while doctors’ foreground diagnostic decision-making and organizational planning, presenting both shared and profession-specific concerns. By showing how present experiences and imagined futures are co-constituted through work-related tensions, our study advances debates on promissory digital health and professionals’ work. It highlights the micro-level of this work as the arena where meanings of current and anticipated practices are navigated and where the future of promissory digital health is made actionable.

This research examines comments museumgoers share on online review platforms, specifically Google Maps, which I approach narratively. I employ a narrative analytic framework, sometimes theoretically and sometimes as an analytic mode, to better conceptualize the kind of impressions museumgoers share after visiting dark history museums (museums which narrate genocide and mass violence). I approach these public reviews as “small stories” or bits and fractures of larger narratives, asking how the messages that these mediational institutions deliver (museums) are remediated and reinterpreted. Crucially, how are they renarrated and renarrativized by museum audiences.

To complicate things, museumgoers who share reviews online, juxtapose two different socio-technical and socio-material environments, hence also two types of entanglements: the first concerns the actual/physical museum visit (arrival at a geographical, touristic destination, walking about, seeing the display and other visitors, etc.), with – in the case of dark history museums – its challenging affective and ethical display; with what it reveals about the past and the present, and also with what it conceals. The second concerns the digital user or visitor, as she interacts with the platform and engages it (design, narrative affordances).

I take this opportunity to creatively think through these different environments and entanglements; to highlight the types of challenges they pose for experimental and innovative qualitative processes, conceptualizations and theorizing. Specifically narrative analysis. More than an answer, I wish to raise questions, and to methodologically find non-positivist approaches to the study of visitors’ online short stories that remediate collective tragic narratives. How can analyses address performative, embodied and otherwise hidden types of narrative knowledge(s), that are banked within these brief digital reviews, and within the environments and entanglements through which they are shaped and shared?

The planned project ‘Surviving the man-pocalypse?’ (2026-2030), explores intersections between survival gaming and survivalism through ‘connective ethnography’ (Hine, 2007); that is, ethnographic fieldwork that moves between multiple online and offline fields of practice and highlights the connections between them. We explore how players make sense of survival and survival games in our current geopolitical, cultural, and climatological moment, and how their engagement with survival games might affect their perception of survivalist movements and vice versa.

On one hand, we are anticipating resistance from potential participants, as in previous studies, survivalists have been skeptical of research (Mitchell, 2002). On the other hand, we see that the time to conduct this research is now: rhetorics of war are ramping up, civil defense is in the public focus in the Nordic countries (the Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian governments updated their national crisis preparation guides late 2024) as in the rest of Europe. Protectionist, accelerationist, and culturally and socially apocalyptic ideologies are growing in gaming and survivalism communities, e.g. Wells et al (2024) noted that gaming communities have become spaces for the normalization of ‘anti-democratic, right-wing extremist views’. Empirical research on the intersection between survivalism and survival games is one way to better understand the underlying sociocultural processes.

We discuss the complexities of conducting sustainable and responsible research on challenging topics during challenging times. Further, while not all communities are tied to radical politics, the perceived ‘apocalyptic turn’ (Kelly, 2020) threatening (white) masculinity is present in both game and survivalist communities. We might thereby be positioned as Other due to our (gendered, cultural, social, national) identities. However, as research team members engage in practices related to survival games and prepping, survivalism training, and civil defense measures, we could also be perceived as insiders. Therefore, we also address the contextual tensions between belonging and otherness.