The ethos and methods of participatory research have been widely embraced as a powerful approach to address systemic inequity in the design of technology. While there have been many gains and developments that...
Tag: autoethnography
Resilience: Lessons from a Period of Disruption
What happens when the research lens is turned inward? As a Strategic Designer, I spend most of time planning for research to engage with people so I can better understand their needs and behaviors and turn...
Beneath the Hype: Self-Ethnography to Explore the Human Possibilities within NFT Technology
This presentation narrates my journey as a skeptical researcher into the emerging world of NFTs. After unexpectedly moving into this much-hyped space, I use the resilience that curiosity fosters to overcome my...
Researching the Researcher: How I Used Data Analysis to Understand My Reading Habits
PechaKucha Presentation—The digital world has given us unprecedented access to information about ourselves. As human beings we can quantify ourselves on the basis of how much we eat, how much we exercise, how many miles we've travelled, among dozens of other facets of our lives. As technology...
Everybody’s a Winner: How Unidimensional Scaling up as an Entrepreneurial Rite of Passage is Beginning to Be Resisted in India’s Startup Capital
Taking India's startup capital Bangalore as its field, the paper researches the absence of conventional scale as a potentially positive emic experience for the entrepreneur. The study leverages a mixed methods approach, employing semi-structured interviews with select entrepreneurs, employees,...
Data Walks into a Bar: A Love Story
PechaKucha Presentation As a qualitative researcher, I was always a bit afraid – if not disdainful – of quantitative data. This pecha kucha tells the uneasy love story of how and why I fell in love with quantitative data. Transitioning from life as an ethnographer who avoided quantitative work at...
Self-Ethnography: Or, How I Earned my Berkeley Citizenship in an Ethnographic Journey through the Crunchy Granola and the Scientific
PechaKucha Presentation A researcher who used to combine “thinking + feeling” lines on a journey map found herself on the feelings frontier by widely exploring new innovations in neuroscience, psychology, and mind-body connection, alongside the resurgence in popularity of “old” ways of healing –...
Center Frame: Agency in the Lives of Researchers
PechaKucha Presentation We try to avoid being on camera, but as researchers, are we ever really out of frame? Centered around a life-changing project that had lackluster results, this piece is a meditation on our agency, or lack of agency, as researchers. Our work gives us unique glimpses into...
Remembering the Blister: How What Didn’t Kill Me Made Me Stronger
I’m an ethnographer at a major financial institution. My work became a lot more meaningful after my family and I lost our home in a devastating arson attack. In this PechaKucha, I tell the story of how this catastrophic fire loss forced me to reclaim my agency. Today, I channel memories of...
Ethnographic Agency in a Data Driven World
This paper argues that ethnographers can gain increased agency in data-driven corporate environments by increasing their quantitative literacy: their ability to create, understand, and strategically use quantitative data to shape organizations. Drawing on the author's experience conducting...