Qualitative Sociology最新文献

Sociology's focus on sociality and co-presence has long oriented studies of commensality-the social dimension of eating together. This literature commonly prioritizes face-to-face interactions and takes physical proximity for granted. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 largely halted in-person gatherings and altered everyday foodways. Consequently, many people turned to digital commensality, cooking and eating together through video-call technology such as Zoom and FaceTime. We explore the implications of these new foodways and ask: has digital commensality helped cultivate co-presence amidst pandemic-induced physical separation? If so, how? To address these questions, we analyze two forms of qualitative data collected by the first author: interviews with individuals who cooked and ate together at a distance since March 2020 and digital ethnography during different groups' online food events (e.g., happy hours, dinners, holiday gatherings, and birthday celebrations). Digital commensality helps foster a sense of co-presence and social connectedness at a distance. Specifically, participants use three temporally oriented strategies to create or maintain co-presence: they draw on pre-pandemic pasts and reinvent culinary traditions to meet new circumstances; they creatively adapt novel digital foodways through online dining; and they actively imagine post-pandemic futures where physically proximate commensality is again possible.

Using the Connected Learning framework as a conceptual lens, this study utilizes digital ethnographic methods to explore outcomes of a Hip-Hop Based Education program developed to provide music related career pathways for Chicago youth. Using the narratives of the participants within the program, I draw on participant observation online and in-depth interviews collected to explore the link between the tenets of Connected Learning and digital participation in this artistic community of practice. I explore participants' work within social media platforms toward building their creative skill, cultivating a public voice, connecting to mentors, and communicating in ways that strengthens the social bonds within their peer community. This study's findings affirm prior studies that suggest late adolescence is an important time frame where children are developing social identities online in affinity spaces but in ways that are tied to civic engagement, self-empowerment, and critical skill development for their future pathways. To conclude, I suggest that investigating participant activity on social media platforms as a part of field work can help ethnographers to better connect their impact to the agency and life trajectories of their youth participants.

The basic practice of ethnography has essentially remained unchanged in hundreds of years. How has online life changed things? I contrast two transformative inventions, the telephone and the internet, with respect to their impact on fieldwork. I argue that our current era has created entirely new constraints and opportunities for ethnographic research.

This special issue gathers empirical papers that develop and employ digital ethnographic methods to answer core sociological questions related to community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. Each paper, in its own right, offers key sociological insights, and as a collection, this special issue demonstrates the need to bring ethnographic methods to digital communities, interactions, practices, and tools. Both as a topic and a methodological approach, "the digital" points us to the need to update, rethink, and grow qualitative sociology. The exemplary papers comprising this special issue exhibit this curiosity and expansiveness, with lessons and implications for an interdisciplinary set of fields and research problems.

Sociology has a long history of analyzing relationships between strangers in everyday life. The ubiquity of social media and mobile technologies, however, necessitates refined theories of how people relate to and interact with strangers in a social world where online and offline contexts are intertwined. This study examines public encounters between acquainted strangers, a type of connection fostered through social media wherein people are both digital acquaintances and offline strangers. Drawing on ethnographic data of queer men who use mobile dating and hookup apps, I find that queer men experience these encounters as routine yet problematic, which past theories of stranger relationships cannot fully explain. I argue that offline interactions with acquainted strangers amplify interactional uncertainties around identification (e.g. "I know them, but do they know me?") and recognition (e.g. "What are the moral demands of our relationship?"). Managing these uncertainties is socially significant as the decision to regard or ignore an acquainted stranger marks not only interpersonal acceptance/rejection but also broader forms of belonging and exclusion. These findings underscore how mobile technologies are fundamentally transforming what it means to be a "stranger."