I just listened to an interesting lecture by Shane Blackman and wanted to get a thought down on paper (so to speak) while it was still fresh in my mind. He recounted a number of instances where participants in ethnographic research he was conducting cited concepts from other research during the period of fieldwork – things like Mods citing Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics or young ‘aggressive beggars’ in Brighton asking him about the concept of the ‘underclass’. The anecdotes are interesting and amusing. But I think the fact they are funny in this way is extremely interesting – in that it is, arguably, the kind of humour that stems from circumstances contravening our unacknowledged expectations. In this case the expectation that research participants live in an environment which is insulated from research? One of the most interesting things I’ve found about conducting research on asexuality is the extent to which the asexuality community was proactively looking for engagement by researchers.
In a very real sense digital communications are transforming the landscape within which (a) groups form who may later become the subject of research (b) the way research, as well as its constituent concepts and themes, are disseminated. The intersection between the two changes has enormous practical ramifications for at least some fields of study and they remain underexplored. Looking at these questions holds out the possibility of substantially reframing debates about impact and public engagement to make them much more interesting.
Mark Carrigan 