Simone Pfeifer: Affordances and Platform Dynamics in Digital Ethnographic Research: Examples from Muslim Everyday Life on Instagram

Abstract

Affordances and platform dynamics have often been studied as part of digital anthropological work (e.g., Costa 2018; Bareither 2018; Madianou & Miller 2012). However, these studies rarely mention how these affordances affect their digital research and how they have creatively responded to these dynamics. Drawing on examples from a digital team ethnography on Muslim everyday life on Instagram, this talk showed how the dynamics and affordances of the platform have influenced the evolving of the research profile and became an important resource for reflection.

About the Speaker

Simone Pfeifer is a social and cultural anthropologist with a focus on media, digital and visual anthropology. Currently she works as a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG Research Training Group 2661: „anschließen-ausschließen – Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks“ at the University of Cologne. At the same time she is an associate senior research fellow in the research project “Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Appropriation and Dissemination” at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. She holds MAs in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Cologne and in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD at the University of Cologne with a dissertation on the social media practices and transnational everyday lives of Senegalese in Berlin and Dakar. Her post-doctoral works explores Muslim everyday life and digital media practices in Germany. She uses digital ethnography and curatorial strategies for the co-creation of knowledge.