Methods Exercise 6
Methodology Manifesto

While the different methodologies used in Africana Studies research are evolving more and more every day, some are clearly more favored than others. Ethnography and oral history are certainly the most straightforward and established methods in Africana research, so perhaps this is the reason there seems to be such a preference towards them. Indeed, these methods are essential to the discipline, particularly because they both involve intimate interaction and usually in-person verbal communication between the researcher and a community. The words, experiences, and opinions of these communities often open up new perspectives that contribute to larger discourses in ways that have either been silenced or ignored in the past. Furthermore, for some projects, oral history and ethnography simply make the most sense and could potentially offer the best information.
However, I do believe that shying away from digital media and performance research keeps entire segments of the black experience hidden from researchers, and subsequently, from academia the general public. The way that young black people today are interacting with the world and with each other is irrevocably tied to technology, social media and the emergence of the digital age. The blogs, videos, pages and even the posts and comments that scatter the internet can greatly inform one’s understanding of what it means to be black in this day and age. Digital research in the past has largely consisted of other methodologies (like ethnography and oral history) being transferred online by way of online surveys and interviews. But the Internet is almost a completely different world, with its own rules of interaction and social norms. I think it warrants its own methodologies.
There is just as much work to be done with performance research, which also holds amazing potential as a research tool. Unlike, Digital Media, performative research should be anything but new. Peoples of African descent have always expressed themselves through performance, whether it is through song, dance, storytelling, or art. There is an irrefutable link to the past when black people perform their culture today and what constitutes a performance is open to the researcher’s interpretation. Thus, just as a dance performance can be analyzed, so can an online persona.
In fact, one particular way researchers can utilize digital media more is by combining it with performance research. Not only can the analysis of past online performance (by way of archived digital media databases like YouTube) be beneficial to Africana research in the same way that Oral History can, but the analysis of current or ongoing forms of online performance (blogs, pages, Facebook, Twitter) can put existing issues into conversation with each other in the same way that ethnography can. Researchers might record a performance themselves, for example, and with or without commentary, analyze the way people respond to it on social media. Or they might analyze a video of a performance already present and pose a question as a comment and analyze those responses. In my own research I plan to use these two methods hand in hand, perhaps in the very ways I’ve just mentioned. It is not only because I believe they are the best ways of exploring my question, but also precisely because I believe that they have the untapped potential within the discipline.

Word Count: 542

Methods Exercise 5:
Using and Analyzing Digital Media Sources

***What is “contemporary blacktivism” according to FACEBOOK?
“Blacktivism,” which I understand as activism for black interests, usually manifests itself on social media as a refusal to let ignorance and compliance prevail in ways that continue to harm the black community. This can mean anything from discussing bigger systematic issues like police brutality and mass incarceration to “dragging” celebrities who step out of line and enforce already damaging black stereotypes. In short, “blacktivism” is being vocal and tackling the racial issues no one wants to talk about. On Facebook, this concept immediately evokes the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has had a very significant presence on social media in the last few years. The movement, which came into in 2013 when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the shooting and murder of Trayvon Martin, has since been equated with the ever recurring stories of black men, women and children being killed at the hands of law enforcement. These days, it has broadened even more, and now encompasses a variety of different interests, all for the benefit and advancement of the black community.
I took this as my starting point in answering this assignment question and first typed the words “black lives matter” in the Facebook search bar. From there, I had several options to choose from. The first page on the list was the general Black Lives Matter community page, which had almost 100,000 likes, including my own. There were also subsets of this community that called themselves “community organizations” or simply “organizations,” such as Black Lives Matter Boston (my home city) and Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, a page that a close friend of mine had liked. There does seem to be a marked difference between the more localized pages that categorize themselves as “organizations” and the general “community” page. While the general community page documents protests, business shut downs, and racial injustices from across the country, the localized organizations do more advertising for upcoming community discussions and events as well as posting relevant articles about black health, education, and interests in the presidential elections. Often, the organization pages also re-post information from the general page, presumably to keep their smaller community informed on the bigger nationwide events Black Lives Matter (BLM) is organizing.
In terms of the actual discussions taking place on the pages, they differ too. The general BLM page has a lot of what the Internet likes to call “trolls.” These people only “like” the page to undermine and insult it, so that on almost every post, there is a comment with 50+ likes that reads “#blackliesmatter” or “#whitelivesmattertoo” or even“#blacklivesdontmatter.” It is disheartening to see, but understandable when one considers that, on Facebook, these types of community pages are open to everyone. While the administrators of the page could go and delete every comment that undermines their movement, it makes more of a statement to simply keep posting in spite of them. To those who do support the cause, it is likely that they encounter this ignorance every day on and offline. While “trolls” exist on the localized pages as well, they aren’t as visible or as vocal. These pages are much less vulnerable and public than the general BLM page, so it makes sense that the comments would consist more of encouraging words, jokes and the like.
After the listed relevant pages associated with the words “black lives matter,” Facebook then gives you the option to view the most popular and relevant posts, photos, people, places and more. I chose to scroll down the list of poplar and relevant posts from all over Facebook, which includes not just what my friends and I have posted about black lives matter but also instances where the phrase has come up in newspapers, blogs, magazines, and other social media networks through interface. While the BLM pages allowed me to examine what blacktivism meant for the actual activists and their ardent adversaries, I felt that these search results would allow me to see how the Facebook in general interacted with black activism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the posts, most of which were new articles, reflected the ongoing debate between “#blacklivesmatter” and “#alllivesmatter.” This discussion certainly keeps the bigger issues that BLM is trying to address at bay. Instead, everyone from presidential candidates, reporters, politicians, TV show hosts and celebrities has an opinion about if the movement is politically correct, if it is affecting crime in any way or affecting police officers in any way etc. But by posting these videos and articles on Facebook, that conversation about black lives mattering is being opened up all the more.
Interestingly, “blacktivism” takes place here just as much as it does on the BLM pages. If activism, as Kvasny, Payton, an Hales quote Denning as defining it, is “normal, non-disruptive use of the internet in support of an agenda or cause” and usually manifests itself in five modes, “collection, publication, dialogue, coordination of action an lobbying decision makers,” I’d say that posts and discussions had outside of BLM pages do more in terms of collection, publication and dialogue. The BLM pages really hone in on the coordination of action and lobbying decision makers in that protests are actively planned, petitions are distributed, and political figures are confronted face to face by activists. But in the comments section of these more general Facebook posts, which again include articles, blogs and videos, supporters collect facts, publish their blog musings and have lively debates with opponents as well as those who may be in the middle. This is not to say that these happenings are any more important than what is taking place on the BLM pages, indeed, the lobbing work and coordinating of these pages are the backbone of the movement, but their words can only get so far when their either preaching to the choir or to people who are against them on principle. Both of these sections of Facebook help define what blacktivism is and help us see just how it manifests on social media platforms such as this one.
Doing this kind of research on Facebook certainly has its strengths. Like most social media, Facebook is a posting and sharing platform, home of both creators and curators, as the Pew Research Center defines them. This means that there are a wide range of potential research tools from posts themselves to articles, blogs, images and videos. One of the biggest hurdles is the automatic personalization of the site. For daily use, this feature is great because you’ll only see things you’re interested in or that relates to you in some way. But for research, it is harder to move beyond that without changing some settings. Luckily, this was not an issue for this assignment because blacktivism is one of my interests, but it is something digital media researchers must keep in mind.

Word Count: 1140

Methods Exercise 4: Oral History vs. Ethnography

Oral History and Ethnography are two methods widely used in anthropology and other disciplines as a way of understanding daily life or past experience. In both methods, the researcher spends time with an informant, asking questions and recording details, but from there, the methodologies differ greatly.
An ethnographer’s goal is to gain an understanding of a community’s current experience. For this reason, they place themselves within the community they wish to study becoming both observers and participators in the customs and rituals of that community. Ethnographers spend a considerable amount of time with their informants in the community they are studying, at least a year in most cases. This kind of day-to-day interaction means that the ethnographer is not only exposed to the informants’ words by way of interviews, but is also able to observe how their informants interact with other members of the community. Thus, it is not only important for an ethnographer to have a good informant, a “native speaker” of the community, but they must also notice how that individual navigates that space in relation to others and interpret the significance of that. Ethnographers must be aware of changes in the community and how or if they relate to changes in time, leadership, events etc.
There are also several ways in which an ethnographer can conduct field notes. While they can simply transcribe interviews by way of recordings, like Oral Historians do, it is also very common for ethnographers to go through their day in the community and write down their observations and thoughts after the fact. This means that much of the final ethnography is subject to interpretation, and while direct quotes from informants may be present, the ethnography itself will inevitably be written through the ethnographer’s eyes and with his or her understanding via guidance of the informants. For this reason, it is important that ethnographers are forthcoming with their own backgrounds, opinions, and stakes in the research because they will most definitely color the way in which they “read” the community. For an ethnographer to have integrity, he or she must be aware that their own identity will influence what they not only how they interpret their experience in the community but also what they think is important enough to be remembered, recorded and ultimately shared. They must also rely all of this to their informants.
In these final few ways, ethnography and oral history overlap. From their interviews, Oral Historians are the ones that ultimately decide what is important, interesting, and relevant to the work they are doing. Thus, oral historians must inform their interviewees of the purpose of their project and what their motivations are for recording their history. Often, this reassurance in the value of the speaker’s testimony is necessary because oral historians are interested in reconstructing a specific moment in time from a point of view that is rarely considered. While we often think of history as a factual recounting of past events, it is important to realize that there are people behind the pen with their own opinions, ideas and motivations. There are people who get their stories told and people who are passed over, even though they were just as present. Oral historians strive to fill these holes in history and give academia, as well as the public, an opportunity to see history in a different light. However, oral historians are not simply inscribers of a narrator’s story. On the contrary, because their work is often designed to add to already existing historical knowledge, some oral historians feel that they have a responsibility to connect an individual’s life story to a broader historical narrative or context. The work might be largely comprised of the narrator’s own words and interpretations but how and why those experiences impact our understanding of history will be determined by the researcher themselves.
Oral historians and ethnographers differ in several ways. Ethnographers spend more time with their informants and become thoroughly enmeshed in the daily lives of the community as a way to understand what life is like for them right now. Oral historians however, meet with their narrators on a few occasions to record their experiences during a particular moment in history, a moment that the oral historian is actively trying to reconstruct through his or her narrator’s point of view. Both oral historians and ethnographers have a personal stake in their research and a reason why they think it is important to do. The questions they are trying to answer may be different, but both are simply trying to illuminate experiences that may be in the general public’s or academic public’s blind spot. Thus no one method is greater than the other, simply different.
Africana studies benefits greatly from both research methods because there are some questions that may be better answered through ethnography and others that are better suited to oral history. Much of African American as well as African diasporic history has been heavily silenced by dominant groups that ultimately got to decide who’s history got told. Because of this, finding narrators willing to share their own historical experiences is useful to all people wanting to gain a more holistic understanding of history. However, it is no secret that people of African decent are still largely marginalized throughout the world. Unfortunately, their position as second class citizens is often built into the very structure of the countries in which they inhibit, at least this is so in the United States. Thus, ethnographies that place researchers in the same communities as African Americans, for example, allows the ethnographer experience the current disparities first hand. When these ethnographies become public documents, it then allows society to grapple with these important issues. These two methods might approach Africana Studies from different angles, but just as history influences the present, oral history and ethnography work together and off each other to deepen the understanding of the black experience as a whole. Thus, both methods are important in the continual evolution of this field.

Word Count: 1005