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To outline the current trajectories in digital social research and to highlight the roles of qualitative research in those trajectories.

A secondary analysis of the primary literature.

Qualitative research has shifted over time in relation to rapidly changing digital phenomena, but arguably finds itself in ‘crisis’ when faced with algorithms and ubiquitous digital data. However, there are many highly significant qualitative approaches that are being pursued and have the potential to contextualize, situate and critique narratives and practices of data.

To situate current debates around methods within longer trajectories of digital social research, recognizing their conceptual, disciplinary and empirical commitments.

The present chapter explores the topic of death in the context of contemporary New Delhi, India. Building upon what I chose to call an ‘expanded ethnography’, it explores the multiple ways in which sensory, visual and digital mediations and tools can help researchers address such an existentially delicate topic. Building on a mix of online visual ethnography (of computer screens and smartphones), of bodily/sensory practices, of sound recording and image-making, my research focussed on retirement homes and shelters amidst a bulging Indian metropolis. I engaged with subjects who, because of personal choices or family difficulties, have ended up finishing their lives in solitude amidst a city forced to co-live with the presence of death. Alternating between photographic portraits, filmic observations and moments of playful exchanges in front of a camera (with me as one of the objects portrayed) my method capitalizes upon the integration (and problematisation) of bodily (sensory and affective) as well as digital techniques. All together these different mediations have granted me access to different layers of connection to the topic of death in Delhi and also to my ageing guides/interlocutors.

While access to devices and connectivity remain key issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, a growing body of literature also recognises the importance of media literacies and competencies necessary to navigate an information-rich society. This media literacy movement highlights skills that lead to critical analysis and the assembly and production of knowledge. In the Caribbean region, information literacies have been linked to competency in exploiting opportunities for informal and lifelong learning. This paper builds on the literature dealing with media literacies by drawing on ethnographic interviews with women in Trinidad and Tobago.

The methodology consists of an 18-month long ethnography including participant observation data as well as transcripts of 90 interviews.

The research shows how women in a lower middle class community dubbed ‘Belleton’ build and refine their digital media skills through lifelong adult learning. These informal learning processes that are facilitated by digital technologies that are spaces of learning where these women construct knowledge and build fluency and larger life skills.

This research makes a contribution to the literature on media literacy and digital skill-building. It ethnographically analyses the social practices of Trinidadian women who interact with digital media in a wide range of daily life activities including DIY consumption and small-business entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay between the curatorial practices of consumers as collectors and the materiality of the collected objects. In particular, this study explores how the material substances of collected objects shapes curatorial practices and how the ongoing use of the collected objects challenges curatorial practices.

Taking advantage of the publicization of once-private collections on social media, we collect 111 YouTube videos created by plastic shoe aficionados. Drawing from visual anthropology and theorizations of materiality, we analyze consumer interactions with the objects they collect.

This study’s findings elucidate consumers’ interactions with the material substances of the objects they collect and demonstrate how these interactions shape the ways in which consumers curate their collections, including how they wear, care for, catalog, and display the collected objects.

Our findings have implications for theorization on consumer collections, consumer identity, and consumer participation in brand communities and are relevant for consumer researchers who study the interactions and relationships between consumers and consumption objects.

This study is the first to re-examine consumers as collectors to extend and update consumer research on the curatorial practices of physical, wearable collectibles. This study sets the foundations for further research to advance our understanding of consumers as collectors as well as to illuminate other theories and aspects of consumer research that consider consumer–object interactions.

Final research papers are still the preferred method for end-of-term assessment in higher education. However, there is a recent push for a greater increase in digital literacy skills in today’s students. Determining the best way to utilize technology, while keeping an eye dedicated toward the pedagogical purpose, is the ultimate focus of this chapter. The authors of this chapter have endeavored to exhibit how tools such as wikis, blogs, and podcasting were best used in higher education situations to promote learning and expand student digital literacy by providing an alternative to the classic final paper option while fully engaging learners with a multimodal approach to learning. The research discussed has demonstrated that learner-generated knowledge requires a higher order of understanding, and as such, leads to higher levels of learning and longer retention of material. Cooperation and collaboration are now key components of the higher education experience; many of these technical alternatives are designed with built-in collaborative elements.

The author investigates and debates around authenticity in relation to the heritage communities of a Chinese intangible cultural heritage (ICH) item ‘Nüshu’. Nüshu is a monosyllabic phonetic system of writing created and used by women in the Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, in Southern China. Drawing on insights from both online and offline ethnographies, this study argues that in the field of ICH, disputes over heritage authenticity are fiercely negotiated by different stakeholders, including powerful state and supra-state actors. However, the emergence of digital platform has become a way for Nüshu participants to perform their identity and competence and lay claim to their own heritage authenticity.