I am delighted to read this quote below from Angell & Demetis, 2010, Science’s First Mistake: Misinterpreting Observation, Delusion and Paradox. (thanks webisteme for posting this!)

We cannot even know if reality is consistent with sense data, because we only perceive what is already consistent.

After all, under hypnosis we can be jabbed with a needle and yet feel no pain, or smell disgusting imaginary odors, or consider ourselves nailed to the spot unable to move, or a million and one other sensory sensations impressed upon us by the hypnotist. 

So what if our society is the hypnotist, and we experience everything in a way we have been pre-programmed and disposed to expect? What if there are other dimensions, available only to senses we do not have? That possibility is of no consequence. It is our blessing, and our curse, to be trapped in three dimensions with the senses we do have, or rather with the senses we have been deluded into having.

But damn my brain hurts to think about this quote in the context of reflexive ethnography.

I’ve been writing for 2 weeks straight so I can’t produce anything comprehensible. So I’m going to out-source the thinking to Mike Lynch - another wonderful recommendation from Barry Brown. Take some time to read Lynch (2000) Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge. Lynch starts off by telling us what he’s pretty much going to rip other forms of reflexivity to shreds - he doesn’t even spare the anthropologists!

Although reflexivity often is associated with radical epistemologies, social scientists with more conventional leanings often speak of reflexivity as a methodological tool, substantive property of social systems, or source of individual enlightenment. Radical and conventional social scientists alike tend to stress the importance of being reflexive, as opposed to being unreflexive, but they do not share a coherent conception of what `being reflexive’ means or entails. As an alternative to reflexive self-privileging, I recommend an ethnomethodological conception of reflexivity as an ordinary, unremarkable and unavoidable feature of action. The ethnomethodological conception does not support a particular theoretical or methodological standpoint by contrasting it to an `unreflexive’ counterpart. It has little value as a critical weapon or source of epistemological advantage, which, in the present context, can have advantages of its own for promoting peace and epistemic democracy.

I love Lynch’s piece so much that I’ve put it online for anyone to download. This should not be stuck in the gallows of academic journals. The section that is most useful starts on page 28  where he outlines 6 different version of reflexivity, and then outline an reflexive ethnomethodology. 

Lynch just kills it in this piece. He really does. He pretty much demystifies the typical anthropological or sociolgical excercise of being reflexive about her/his fieldwork. 

Ya I know this is straight up ethnomethodology - but Mike Lynch’s work is excellent and super revelevant (unlike many other grumpy old ethnomethodology pieces).

After reading another suggestion from Barry, Mike Lynch’s Silence in Context: Ethnomethodology and Social Theory (1999), i’ve decided that i need to keep that one near my intellectual heart so that my work remains ethnographically driven, not theory driven. It’s a subtle distinction, but important to the work that I do. Hmmm I think it’s Barry’s secret mission to brainwash me with ethnomethodology. 

Well I really want to read Angell’s & Demetis’s Science’s First Mistake- but when will I have the time before I move to China! 

Another reason why I’m interested in reading this book is because it comes out of Information Systems Analysis.  

And this quote makes me of Ghost in The Shell, Denoi Coil, Fringe, and Tron. 

ahhhh maybe watching Tron will be a temporary solution. 

I started to write this post about how much I love fieldwork when I had just returned  from my last field work trip to Oaxaca, Mexico from December 2009 to January 2010. But I’m just getting around to posting it!  This will be a 4 part post that shows 4 excerpts taken out of my field notes (unedited) on observations that have nothing to do with technology usage. 

I just returned from Oaxaca, Mexico and this was the one of the most fun fieldwork trips ever. I miss everyone in the village so much as a I’m reading through my fieldnotes. Three things really stand out in my fieldwork trip this year. 

1.) After three years of visiting the village, I felt so welcome this year. I really felt like the people trusted me and were so much more open with me. I could just chill with families and feel confident that they were very comfortable with me in their house. In the past two years, I didn’t live in the village. This year, I went with my research colleague, Tanya Menendez, and we both lived in the village with several families. It makes such a different to go to sleep with the family in the same house and to wake up together, eat breakfast together, brush your teeth together - you get to see all the little things and hear all the stories that people talk about at the end of the day. 

2.)  I’ve noticed that I’ve become a better ethnographer. After three years of doing fieldwork in China, Mexico, and the US, I can actually see how my fieldwork notes have improved this time!  One of the best things I’ve learned about doing excellent and honest ethnography (yes I put a value on that!) is something that my adviser Barry Brown told me and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since.

Barry and I were on a bus ride back from an exhaustive fieldwork workshop in Mexico. It was 7pm and really dark. With the Pacific Ocean to our left, our bus felt like it was hugging the mountain as we were making our way up the Pacific Coast from Mexico back into the US. We were chatting about my dissertation and  I was saying something to the effect that my fieldwork in China during the summer didn’t go as expected because I didn’t get to observe what I had wanted to research. He responded to me, “you don’t get to chose what you observe.”  Barry’s advice was so simple, yet so true. He reminded me that every moment is ethnographic. So this time I took his advice with me into the mountains of Oaxaca. I ended up writing everything down. I almost became obsessive about what I recorded. Glancing over my fieldnotes, I am surprised about how much of it isn’t about technology. 

And then that’s when I realized that this is precisely what informs my analysis and my way of thinking about technology usage - I have to understand all those little moments that do and don’t involve technology. Communication technologies is only a sliver of people’s everyday lives. We forget how much time it takes to prepare a tortilla, make a blanket, and farm the fields.

3.) This realization of the importance of moments that have nothing to even do with technology made me realize how I was transformed by the fieldwork. There’s always the concern for an ethnographer when going into a field site of how much time it takes to feel like you’re a part of the community, get adjusted to the food and lifestyle (I never have a problem with the food!), and understand local rhythms. I was pretty proud of myself for just how quickly I adapted to life in the village.

There was one moment when I first arrived where I was craving for something I owned but didn’t bring - my sunglasses. We were 1600 meters above sea level so I was not used to the strong sun rays. We were walking up the mountain to the cemetery with several kids around the ages of 6 to 10 years old and two participants around the age of 25 years old. The kids were running around us and I was trying to keep up but the sun was directly hitting my eyes. I kept squinting and rubbing my eyelids, my contacts slightly in pain from the burning sun. I tired to focus on the semi-trail beneath my feet where the grass had been flattened over time, trying to avoid the dried cow dung and rocks.

After 20 minutes of climbing, I looked up and saw little white tips poking out of the mountain top. We climbed for another half hour and by the time we reached the top, the sun has moved slightly above our heads. By now I could see the white tips revealing themselves into large white Catholic crosses that were on top of tombs. We walked into the middle of the cemetery. One of the kids brought me to their uncle’s tomb. He  told me that he had just recently died of diabetes at a young age, only early mid-50’s. Their was still a candle burning inside his tomb.

I started thinking about the cycle of poverty and health. Many of the kids I was with are fed candy all day because it is less expensive to buy candy than to make food. This leads to early diabetes. It’s hard to reverse this practice of candy feeding because candy is also seen as a luxury - it’s a new food product and when guests arrive, one is always given candy in the way that males offer other males a cigarette in China. Children are always stuffing little sticky balls that are half-melted into my hands. And there is no way I can turn it down because I know how much it costs and more so I know the intent behind the gift. 

I squinted my eyes to focus on the date of his passing and then readjusted my eyes to the landscape. I realized that we were were standing on top of a mountain peak and we were surrounded by the deep juts of the Oaxacan Sierras. I put my hand over my eyes from the hard sun that lit up the glittering peaks all around us.

The kids were running around on top of the graves and one of the participants, Ivan, stood on a cement block and just looked out into the valley. He too, put his hand over his eyes as he surveyed the view. He had just returned from 3 years of living in the US as an undocumented migrant. This was his first time visiting the village cemetery since he has crossed the desert into the United States 5 years ago. I was looking at his back, but I didn’t focus on just his body. This time I wasn’t squinting to look at the details of a trail or tomb,  but I was squinting to see the entire magicalness of the place.

There I stood, behind Ivan, with the sun shining on us. Surrounded by a forest of raised tombs, the lifted weight of the moment fell on all of us like snow. And a pattern emerged to tell a story of attachment, home, and belonging. All the stories from the first and second field site visits over the past 3 years streamed into the moment. It became clear to me why all the phone calls to the US, the caseta visits, the trips to the internet cafe 1 hour away - why it all matters so much. They matter because these are the ties that are greatest to them. So despite years of no contact between an undocument migrant and her/his family, the village as an infrastructure survives. Despite peso depreciation, unequal immigration laws, deathly crossings into the deserts, expensive telephone access, and inconsistent mobile access, the weight of a place can carry the heart of a Oaxacan back to here - this cemetery. 

No matter how far a villager goes or how long one lives outside of the village, everyone wants to be buried in the place they were born (women who marry in adopt the male’s village). This is the underlying tie that binds migrants to their home, no matter how many thousand miles they travel for work or how many trips they make to the US. The elaborate governing system of Usos y Costumbres (Uses and Customs), reminds each villager of their attachment. The system dictates that every migrant male has to serve several terms throughout their life in the political governance of the village. It doesn’t matter what you are doing or how far away you are, you must come back to serve the cargo for 1 year every time you are voted into the position. If one fails to serve their cargo (responsibility), then they are denied burial in the village.

It may not sound like a big deal, but it would be the equivalent of telling someone that if you don’t serve in an administrative government position every few years in the town that you were born, then you will not be allowed to die in the company of friends and family - you will die alone. So no matter where you are at with your career, if you are voted into the role, it is not negotiable. Now, imagine that.

Usos and Costumbres is practical in that it creates a stable and obligatory system to maintain village political and social structure. It is also cultural because it creates an emotional investment to the village, a common language and practice, and shared pressures - all factors that contribute to the strong village identity. The system tells every male villager (and their family) that nothing is more important than the ties to your village, and if you forgo these ties then you forgo your community.These ties are stronger than the ties that bond a Oaxacan to her/his nation.

People tend to gravitate towards what they can connect to. This - the Usos y Costumbres and the migration process - as intense as it sounds, I could connect with it. All of it came back to family. We tend to think of America as a place of rapid change and opportunities. And then places like this village in Oaxaca seem to never change. But the tethers of the global economy shake even the mountain tops.  Anytime rapid changes come through the winds, power, love, and dreams are constantly being centered and de-centered. In the process of all that centering and de-centering, hearts can waiver and the choices that appear before us often pull us away from those we love and those who love us.

And in this one visit to the cemetery, I could understand how the Usos y Costumbres was a system of centering - centering the actual body and heart to the village. One could not tele-serve his cargo from the United States. One had to come back to Oaxaca and then risk the crossing across the desert again to enter into the US.

So there I stood in the cemetery, surrounded by every single person who had ever been born in the village or married into this village was buried or will be buried in one of the tombs. I was squinting to read the words on the tombs and squinting to see the grandness.

Overall I must admit that I was nervous about how quickly I could adjust to living in a place where I couldn’t shower everyday and have running water and electricity 24/7. But I did just fine. I didn’t even really think about it after a while.

Is there such thing as conducting ethnographic fieldwork where you are not transformed by the process? I always feel like I am an undergoing a new experience when I’m in the field and I’m not sure if I ever want to change that. Perhaps that’s a good way to gauge my interest in a project - my personal degree of internal transformation. I see no other way to conduct engaged and passionate ethnography.

So I’m going to provide 4 excerpts out of my unedited field notes of moments that have nothing to do with technology directly. But these moments inform my research and they maintain my connection to the village. I hope they give a sense of why my heart is in Oaxaca.

Post 1 of 4: I touched the stomach of a pregnant Donkey!

Post 2 of 4: spending New Year’s Eve Dancing til 5am

Post 3 of 4: Time for the Jaripeo - Bullriding

Post 4 of 4: Eating Live Insect

——

AN ADDENDUM ON THE ART OF SQUINTING

Squinty has been my online moniker for over 10 years and my friends have always said that I squint a lot when I listen to people talking. I think I squint a lot because I want to understand the details of a conversation and perhaps it’s a physical display of my brain cells moving around (I also am Chinese so my eyes are already squinty). But after this fieldwork trip, I was thinking about squinting as a way to understand the connections and patterns of a context. Ethnography is the constant negotiation of the micro and macro. If an ethnographer is always focused on the micro, then s/he can easily get lost in the details. One has to pop up a layer to get perspective on the details. So engaging with the macro is an engagement with patterns. Ethnography, like squinting, is the constant moving between the micro and the macro. I think this is a lovely way to explain the work of ethnography or any kind of work that involves a holistic understanding of details and patterns.

————

ANOTHER TANGENT  - ETHNOGRAPHY AS ACHIEVING SAMENESS

One of the other side thoughts that came out of this story about me wishing that I had sunglasses with me is the idea of similarity.  An important part of ethnography, but rarely discussed, is the ethnographer’s goal of achieving sameness with his/her participants. To garner the trust of your participants, you want to minimize any obvious  visuals that would make you different from the people you are hanging out with. I say this not because I think one should trick participants. Participants are not stupid and it’s almost impossible to lie about your background, especially when doing fieldwork in close communities or doing deeply emotive ethnography where people share their hopes and dreams. I saw this because one of the most important assests and ethnographer has are her/his eyes and smile. You want to minimize anything that would take your participants away from focusing on your face.  So when working in a village where no one wears sunglasses, it means I can’t wear sunglasses even if I wanted to. You don’t want to block your eyes from being seen. 

——-

I am so excited to announce that I’ve started a research internship with Nokia Research Center (NRC) Palo Alto!. I’m working with Jofish Kaye and the IDEA Team (Innovate Design Experience Animate), which is led by Mirjana Spasojevic. The IDEA team is super diverse and there are so many people doing cool things. 

This is my first time working outside of academia and with a technology company as a  sociologist, so everything is new to me. I’m a baby to the CSCW, CHI, & HCI world. That’s why I’m really grateful to be working with Jofish, because I consider him to be really inter-disciplinary. Quoting Jofish,

“I believe studying the borders can tell you more about what the mainstream will be than studying the mainstream.”

How many people can claim that their mentor writes about almost everything in the world - from smells to epistemology? (at least that’s what it looks like from his publications)

 I’ve only been here for a few weeks but already I’m learning so much about the role of research in IT companies and how ethnographers can contribute to technology research. 

I am working on two different projects and it’s starting to look like instead of only chossing one of them, they’ve each taken on a life of its own! The first one is about hacking/DIY/OSS, tinkering, and customization cultures. And the second project is about the social life of phones. We’re looking at things like gifting, sharing, and death of cellphones. If anyone has any research to share in any of these areas please share. I’m still in the exploratory phase so I would love to read your research!

While I’m here - I am going to figure out how to take advantage of Nokia’s Simple Context app for my research. After talking with David Racz and Brett Clippingdale - the brains behind this app - I’m super excited to get it working on my N95 and N97. 

My second goal is to work on publishing papers with Jofish. Up until now I’ve been stuck in course work and writing grants. Now that I’ve been awarded enough funding to move to CHina for my dissertation work I need to give some time to publishing papers. It’s interesting to work with CSCW researchers who crank papers out like every few months where in sociology it can take years to publish one paper. 

And I get to hang out with Nokia researcher Liz Bales from UCSD and UI consultant, Janet Go who is working on Nokia’s Storyplay. 

I am just bursting with happiness over all the people I’ve met and the amazing things that they are doing. In exploring our hacking topic, we’ve already met up with Daniela Rosner,  Elizabeth Goodman,  and Cristen Torrey. We also spoke to Jenna Burrell over at Berkeley. I love Jenna’s work. Just yesterday we had a long time with Jurgen Scheiblel and Ville Tuulos about Python programming and open source culture. I also spoke to Jurgen about his Mobi Spray project. Oh and I finally got to meet Morgan Ames - who’s now going to be my Spanish partner! I can’t believe all the people I’ve been reading throughout these years are all located here in one place…and they are real humans…and they are cool!

Thanks Barry Brown. You’re such a great advisor for telling me that sociologists do get jobs outside of academia and that I can make meaningful contributions to the tech world! Thanks for introducing me to Jofish and setting up our talk at Nokia. 

*Oh I am wearing a helmet in this picture because Jofish made me buy one for my bikecommute to the office -  apparently helmets are a big deal in California and so is the protection of my brain. 

rfp for “Hybrid Design Practices: A Workshop on Leisure and Play” - submit by June 25th, workshop on Sept. 30

My colleague, Silvia Lindtner, and advisor, Barry Brown, are organizing a workshop on hybrid design practices at the upcoming Ubicomp 2009 conference.

They are looking for participant submissions from ethnographers, designers, and researchers who have experience in design methodologies and practices.

This looks like a fun workshop! Plus it takes place at Disneyland :)

___________

The focus of this workshop is on hybrid design practices, approaches that draw on techniques from various fields to create novel methods of inquiry. The aims of this workshop are, first, to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of practitioners and researchers to learn from one another’s expertise in choosing and evaluating methods of design practice, and, second, to discuss implications of the underlying methodologies and epistemologies upon which these techniques are built.

Participants will actively contribute to the practical focus of the workshop; we call for submissions detailing the practices participants leverage in their own work, from which we will select methods of research engagement that will further shape the workshop.

Through hands-on field exploration of leisure activities in the public spaces of the Disney properties, design exercises, and brainstorming, participants will be actively involved with the application of a variety of methods to the study and design of ubiquitous computing systems from the ground-up. By leveraging methods and guiding theories that participants commonly use in their own work, we will explore the contrasts and intersections between the approaches put forward by the participants. The goals of this workshop, then, are twofold; first, to open up a space for reflection on current approaches towards interdisciplinary research and design in Ubicomp, and second, to develop a new vocabulary, both practically and theoretically, for “making” interdisciplinary Ubicomp research, thus, marking the study of hybrid design practice as an area of community-wide inquiry.