This study made use of a variety of qualitative and narrative techniques, including ethnography and participant observation, direct interviews and digital ethnography to explore the topic of Somali (im)mobility, transnational belonging and digital technologies. This chapter presents the research methods and process, describing both the opportunities and challenges associated with researching digitally-mediated social worlds through ethnographic techniques. Digital spaces are important extensions of social worlds and should, therefore, become critical to every anthropological field site and ethnographic research study. This is ever more important as distinctions between being offline and being online fade, and as our “frontier” (Kopytoff, 1987) lives are increasingly mediated by digital spaces and information (Nyamnjoh & Brudvig, 2016). As Tom Boellstorff highlights, “Technology is now ubiquitous worldwide, and few, if any, future fieldwork projects could ever constitute ‘ethnography unplugged’. If digital is nothing more than a synonym for internet-mediated, then all anthropology is now digital anthropology in some way, shape or form” (Boellstorff cited in Horst & Miller: 2012:12).
Exploring the digital also poses challenges to defining a field site and, indeed, a social group to study. I argue that digital ethnography provides transformational opportunities to step away from anthropology’s traditional reliance on bounded notions of place, community and shared identity factors (such as ethnic or national identity) that are often associated with particular places as central analytical factors (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997a). This is especially important as ICTs become critical constitutions of the everyday. ICTs are increasingly central to social, economic, political, emotional and cultural life, not only for many who regularly access new technologies, but also for those who don’t have access, as information flows, networks and communications are increasingly digitising in media and institutions. Ethnography and its narrative techniques are well suited to studying culture in a digitally mediated world. Digital anthropology and digital ethnography also provide a framework through which to understand the centrality of mobility and frontier-ness to culture today.
Anthropology and ethnographic techniques are also vital tools and offer important perspective in the context of society’s increasing attention to big data and quantitative driven insights. In many cases – though, there is a potential for big data (or, analysis of large digital datasets) to deliver important insights – knowledge produced through quantitative techniques is clearly distinct from thick data, characteristic of ethnographic data and analysis through interpretative methods. There are important distinctions and complementarities to be understood between
big data and thick data, as they lead to diverse epistemological “ways of knowing”, which determine how we come to understand and treat social issues and complex cultural phenomena (as well as transformations associated with the results of data).
This chapter also discusses the role of reflexivity and interpretative approaches in anthropological research and analysis, while sharing ethical considerations that emerged in the research process. Anthropology, as all research disciplines, is based on a politics of representation that is shaped by methodologies and ethics of engagement. Navigating and negotiating the politics of representation begs the questions: who stands to benefit from the anthropological endeavour, and towards what end? To address these questions, in this chapter I define and situate feminist fieldwork – its significance, ethics and practicalities, and how it challenges “traditional” ethnographic objectivity. Feminist ethnography pushes ethnographers to listen to women’s voices, to apply a critical lens to the question of women’s agency, and to engage in research that is socially and politically relevant to people we study. This is important because women’s voices and perspectives (including Somali women) are often marginalised or wholly absent from dominant public and political narratives, including narratives on their own representation. Incorporating women’s voices and perspectives is central to ethically engaging with questions of representation, as well as accurately understanding culture and power, place-making and people-making (Gupta & Ferguson, 2001:24–5). Towards this end, I discuss the role of subjectivity, embodiment, reciprocity and reflexivity in feminist ethnographic practice. I describe arising ethical and epistemological issues and solutions surrounding the politics and ethics of representing others in research, as well as how feminist anthropology provided a framework to guide me through critical issues of engagement and representation of Somali migrants in Cape Town.
This chapter also reviews relevant concepts and literature on digital anthropology and digital ethnography that have shaped thinking and practices in this area. Considering the novelty and evolving nature of such fields, this chapter situates how to conceptualise and negotiate methodologies in the era of digitalisation of life, while presenting the new idea of feminist digital ethnography. Feminist digital anthropology/ethnography is well suited to study both the adoption and use of digital technologies, on the one hand, and how virtual spaces intersect with power and agency in everyday lives to give rise to new forms of mobility and possibilities for social and political resistance, on the other hand. Feminist digital anthropology/ethnography was particularly useful to a study of mobile Somali as this approach (conceptually and methodologically) recognises the ways in which identity is transnational (dispersed through nodes and nation-places) and permanently on the move as a response to unfolding experiences of layers of power, domination and resistance in everyday life.
This chapter ends with key methodological questions and considerations about representation and “writing culture” in a digital age. I argue that the intersection of digital and feminist ethnography and anthropologies presents important questions regarding the decolonisation of knowledge production both methodologically and analytically. In lieu of the many possibilities for self-representation on and through digital technologies – and in light of the variety of means to engage across cultures, societies and traditional hierarchies online – I conclude this chapter with the ongoing question: can and should the anthropologist continue to represent others? Furthermore, how can anthropology harness the unique power of digital spaces and multiple mediums, including visual, oral and written, to support knowledge production and cultural understanding through self-representation?
Fieldwork: A Story of Friendship and “Intimate Strangers”
I initially started research on the topics of mobility and ICTs when carrying out ethnographic research for my Master’s degree in Social Anthropology in 2012. During this research, I analysed the emergence and nature of conviviality in Bellville to better understand its popularity as a destination for migrants from diverse countries including Somalia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Angola, Mozambique, Kenya, Jordan, Pakistan and Bangladesh amongst others. Many migrants settled in the area seeking work and income-generating opportunities, such as informal trading, shop keeping, and other livelihoods, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 xenophobic outbreaks. In this research, it was evident to me that networks and infrastructures of mobility, such as ICT infrastructures, the internet and the Bellville train station (central for many commuters’ access to the city and to commercial spaces), were foundational to people’s association with, understanding of and trust in the place, leading to a sense of mutuality of belonging and conviviality in Bellville.
For example, it is common to find people gathered around internet cafes and TVs in Bellville, a popular destination for Somali migrants in Cape Town, to get updates on international news. This was evident to me in my first observations of Bellville during a period of ethnographic fieldwork done between 2012 and 2013. I noticed that Al Jazeera is a popular news channel played in several public restaurants, such as Restaurant Dur Dur. As Somali journalist, Abdulahi Qorshe, who works for Somali National Television and who now lives in South Africa explained to me, “With Al Jazeera you can learn about Somali and Kenyan news. Many Somalis live in Kenya, you see, and we want to know what is going on”. He remarked further, “A lot of people watch local stations which are full of television dramas. We are looking for the international news.” News and information exchange play a significant role in Somali diaspora
communities in order to maintain relationships with Somalia and with global political predicaments around the world, which family, friends and Somalis in general may face in everyday life. This led people who claim Somali identity to become avid internet users. One man explained to me that, “We mostly use social networks.” In another context, the owner of an international call centre in Bellville, explained, “People in Bellville call all over the world, mostly Kenya, Somalia, Europe and America.” Bellville is an internationally connected locality, transnational in every way through its Somali diaspora which is increasingly representative of emerging cosmopolitanisms.
Through its Somali community, Bellville represents the idea that the “local is not just the other side of the global” but rather that the local and the global interact to produce spaces that are representative of global flows (Parthasarathy, 2009; Piot, 1999). Being a largely immigrant residential and commercial business trading community, the notion of “collective” habitus in Bellville’s central business district is informed by common understandings of uprooted, transitory life and the insecurities endured and mitigated through strategic mobility, supported by various technologies of mobility. Clifford’s (1997) suggestion of “dwelling-in-travel” or “travelling-in-dwelling” describes the liminal (“frontier”) zone of Bellville as the place extends beyond its own geographic locale to involve transnational networks that are critically supported by ICTs. For many, Bellville has become a home away from home. However, it is also a place that is characterised by temporary heritage, a chapter of one’s life that concludes far from the city – either in a place called home or, for many, reunited with family regardless of locality. For Somali, the practicalities of home, family, news, information and capital are dispersed around the world through nodes and social histories of mobility. For many, these have or will intersect at some point in South Africa. Within Cape Town and South Africa by extension, Bellville is a critical place where social capital and economic opportunity accumulate and are accumulated both for Somali and other migrant communities.
When conceptualising and commencing this PhD research, I was especially interested in the digitally mediated lives of Somali migrants, particularly in the context of increasing insecurity and violence targeted at Somali migrants in South Africa, as well as contestations over multiculturalism and belonging in urban South Africa. Since this topic extended from my previous research in Bellville, I had already developed good relationships with several Somali contacts and friends, and the two studies flowed quite seamlessly from one to the next, conceptually and methodologically. My PhD research relied largely on snowball sampling, meaning that interlocutors who agreed to participate in the research helped me to recruit future interviewees from among their friends, family and acquaintances. It was somewhat easier to find participants for my PhD research than when starting my Master’s because I had already
developed friendships and a level of trust with an initial group of participants, who also had participated in interviews for my Master’s research. This level of trust made it more likely that participants would be willing to introduce me to others, or to include me in group gatherings, such as graduation ceremonies of the Somali Association of South Africa’s educational programme, or friendship outings, meetings and discussions.
One factor that likely increased participants’ interest and trust in the research process was my inclusion of participants and community leaders as reviewers of my previous publications on the topic. For example, when publishing my Master’s thesis I gave the main interview participants authority to provide input and comments on the content of the thesis. My research was published as a book and disseminated within the Somali community in Cape Town, NGO networks and to key informants, which I believe also made participants proud to be associated with research activities. Additionally, the book was accessible both in paperback and e-book format and made available for preview on Google, which made it available and accessible to Somalis elsewhere beyond South Africa. However, as much as this research attempted to locate and place itself in a given locality – in this case, Bellville – the study was actually multi- sited (Marcus, 1995) in that research took place both online and in offline spaces. This sort of multi-cited and mobile ethnography “moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse time-space” (Marcus 1998:79).
When I initially started my research in Bellville and its Somali community, I decided to volunteer as an English teacher with the Somali Association of South Africa and assisted with their new and emerging English language instruction programme. I already had experience volunteering as an English teacher at another affiliated non-governmental organisation, the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, which provides educational classes and services for refugees and migrants (not specific to Somali). It was through my volunteering that I was introduced to the Somali Association of South Africa and several Somali contacts who were instrumental to helping me understand the issues of importance to Somalis in general and in Bellville in particular.
Identifying people to participate in interviews and the process of conducting ethnographic fieldwork often begs one to wear different hats to gain access and build personal relationships and solidarity. At the onset of my research, I was able to develop a higher level of trust being in the role of “teacher” rather than “researcher”. This is an interesting distinction to reflect upon in the context of conducting ethnography and the different subjectivities we embody and strategically adopt (or aim to distance ourselves from) as we enter and strive to understand
social worlds, and navigate our own vulnerability as actors wearing multiple, interchangeable hats in new social spaces. Bennett and Pereira (2013) present this experience through the metaphor of “jacketed women” – with the jacket being an interesting symbol for the ways in which our embodied history and habitus “affect our intellectual and imaginative selves, organise our bodies and minds … and present us to the world” (Bennett & Pereira, 2013:3). As researchers, our “jackets” can be both enabling and constraining in the process of questioning underlying assumptions about ourselves, the field of research and participants of study.
At the start of this research I volunteered teaching English to a group of ten Somali students for six months. Among this group, I conducted further participant observation with several students. For example, one student, a young woman, approached me for additional help in learning to read and write English. We spent time together outside of the classroom, hanging out at her family’s trading stall with her sister, where the two young women worked selling fashion merchandise such as bags, hats and belts, and occasionally visiting her family’s home which was in a large apartment building around the corner from the shop. Although she spoke almost perfect English, having lived most of her life in South Africa, she did not have a formal education and desperately wanted to learn to read and write and, as she revealed, to become a doctor. Another student and I became friends on Facebook where we continued to chat, and I occasionally visited his shop to catch up in person. Other contacts were not directly affiliated or identified through a formal organisation or its services, but were people I was introduced to through others, whom I knew before starting research specific to my PhD, and who kindly agreed to participate in interviews. Twenty-five individuals in the Somali community of Cape Town were interviewed in the research, and ten interlocutors were engaged in participant observation over the course of five years. Additionally, conversations with a Somali academic, two representatives from a Somali telecommunications company and NGOs and other activists working on gender, digital equality, migration and human rights policy issues informed the analysis. Majority of the names referenced in this ethnography are pseudonyms, except in few cases where participants specifically expressed that they would like their names attributed to their views.
After about a year of fieldwork and research towards my PhD, an exciting opportunity came my way involving full-time work with an organisation carrying out research and advocacy on internet and digital rights policy issues, and specifically on the topic of gender and ICT. My research at the World Wide Web Foundation was not part of my PhD fieldwork. However, working there and simultaneously completing my PhD, greatly informed my knowledge and understanding of emerging issues and debates around access to and use of digital
technologies, gender issues online and the internet and human rights. As part of my job, I coordinated research on the topic of the gender digital divide in ten countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America (including Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Cameroon, Nigeria, Egypt, Colombia, India, Indonesia and the Philippines), working with diverse NGOs and women’s organisations to study the issues of concern in each of the regions. As mentioned, while this was not formally part of my PhD research, it certainly continued to shape my perspective and passion for researching the critical impact of digital technologies on mobilities, particularly in marginalised communities, and on public issues emerging at the intersection of technology, gender and human rights, particularly in the global South. This was a topic that I had done quite a bit of work on while co-editing a book published by the Human Sciences Research Council Press, ICTs, Mobility and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives from South Africa (2016), at the invitation by my supervisor Professor Francis Nyamnjoh. These experiences were central to my own ethnographic and theoretical understanding of technology access and use, their impacts on social inclusion and equality, and the particularities of digital mobility across cities of the global South.
Navigating Research-Work Balance During Ethnographic Endeavours “At Home”
In the period of my fieldwork during which I was simultaneously working, my research had to be more routinely scheduled than when I was a “full-time” ethnographer and PhD student. Whereas in the first year of my research, I had fewer work commitments and more time to volunteer in Bellville, spend all day hanging out and simply wander around speaking to people; upon juggling full-time and then part-time work, I needed to schedule appointments with interlocutors in order to ensure they would be there and to make the most of our time together. Ethnographers “at home” need to negotiate time and the boundaries of where “home”, “work” and “field-site” start and finish. This negotiating of time, does, in hindsight, shift the possibilities that can be afforded by “timeless” ethnography, characteristic of “deep hanging out”. However, the notion that an ethnographer has no other commitments than to one’s field-site and participants is unrealistic. This is especially so for ethnographers who are also caretakers of others – mothers, for example; as well as recognising that individuals have different social, informational, and emotional limits determining how “productive” they might be both in the field and in other aspects of life, such as work, socialising, etc.
“If you are willing to take a thousand steps you should take the first one”
During the period where my fieldwork was more “scheduled” than was previously the case, interviews and discussions took place at the shared office of one of my “protagonist”
interlocutors. After I had not seen Aisha for several months, we connected and she asked me