國立成功大學多元文化研究中心

Speaker: Dr. Nicolas Lainez

Moderator: 曾薰慧 Tseng, Hsun-Hui (國立成功大學台灣文學系助理教授)

Time: 10:00-12:00 September 15, 2023

Venue: 台文系TWL 88155

Language: English

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Nicolas Lainez is a Research Fellow at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement). His is based at CESSMA in Paris. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Prior to becoming an anthropologist, he worked as a photojournalist for the media and the NGO sector. He has worked as a Postdoc Fellow for the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies-Yusof Ishak Institute, and an Adjunct faculty at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at NUS in Singapore. His research areas include financialization, credit, debt, migration, trafficking, gender, sexuality and visual anthropology. His work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Geoforum, Time & Society, The Sociological Review, Culture, Health and Sexuality, and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

ABSTRACT:

Digital ethnography and remote fieldwork have gained much attention since the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has hampered research trips and face-to-face ethnography and interviews. To overcome the challenges of the pandemic, scholars have revived and developed methods to conduct fieldwork digitally and remotely that achieve similar ends as face-to-face interviews and ethnography. These methods include the study of social networking, blogs and forums, online interviews, online discussion platforms, photo, video, voice elicitation diaries, journaling, epistolary interviews, arts-based projects combined with Skype interviews, and remote fieldwork using research assistants. The pandemic has brought about an urgent need to develop these methods further and reflect on their strengths and limitations. Even if the pandemic is behind us by now, it is worthwhile to consider and apply these methods in conjunction with more traditional face-to-face methods.