COGR 201L Qualitative Analysis and  Information Systems Spring 2008 Fridays 10 AM-12:50PM Office Hours: W 10:30-noon Office: MCC 205   Brian Goldfarb email:bgoldfar @ ucsd,edu Communication UCSD   Meetings Resources

course website: http://communication.ucsd.edu/goldfarb/COGR201L/

Course Overview:

This graduate seminar will be concerned with historical and ethnographic studies of information systems - the design and use of information and communication technologies in their social, ethical, political and organizational dimensions. We will consider the range of approaches to qualitative research and the challanges posed by information and communication technologies both as objects of study and means of academic inquiry. While focussing attention on information technology as a site of research, the course is equally engaged with recent debates and critical reflection on what it means do qualitative research. Questions addressed include: How do digital media shift the relationships between researcher and subjects? What ethical challanges are presented by uses of networked media as research sites or research tools? What strategies can we use for dealing with multiple forms of media as data?

Requirements

• Participants will initiate discussion for one of the weekly sessions with a short presentation framing key questions or concerns that the readings pose for the feild, and a discussion of how they relate to the presenter's own research interests.
• A 15-20 page term paper addressing a topic relevent to the seminar will be due at the beginning of finals week. The paper may engage qualitative approaches discussed in the course while addressing an area of your primary research interest, or be a discussion of issues in qualitative analysis generated by this seminar.

Texts

• Yvonna Lincoln and Norma Denzin, eds, Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Hankerchief
• Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out
• Additional readings on e-reserves or distributed as handouts

Course Schedule:

week: 1  |  2  |  3  |  4  | 5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10

Week One (April 4):  Introduction

• Course overview
• Research topics/objects of study
  

Week Two (April 11): Situating Qualitative Inquiry

• Yvonna Lincoln and Norman Denzin, eds, , "Introduction: Revolutions, Ruptures, and Rifts in Inquiry," (Turning Points)
• Donna Harraway, "Situated Knowledges," (Turning Points)
• Patricia Hill Collins, "Toward and Afrocentric Feminist Epistomology," (Turning Points)
• Kamala Visweswaran, "Defining Feminist Ethnograpy," (Turning Points)
• Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description:Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," (Turning Points)
• Patti Lather, "Issues of Valitdity in Openly Ideological Research: Between a Rock and a Soft Place" (Turning points)
  

Week Three (April 18): Situating Qualitative Inquiry

• Adele E. Clarke, Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn, Prologue, Ch 1 and Ch 2 (e-reserves)
• George Marcus, "Ethnography In/Of the World System," Annual Review of Anthropology, 1995.
• Saskia Sassen "Towards a Sociology of Information Technologies"

Week Four (April 25) Ethnography of Cybercultures

• Auturo Escobar "Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture" The Cyberculture Reader eds, David Bell and Barbara Kennedy
• Peter Lyman and Nina Wakeford, "Going into the (Virtual) Field"
• Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Chapters One, Two, Three, and Four
• Liav Sade-Beck, "Internet Ethnography: Online and Offline," International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3 (2) June, 2004
• Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe & Lewis Kaye, “Your Second Life? Goodwill and the performativity of intellectual property in online digital gaming”
  

Week Five (May 2 ) Technologies as Actors [out of town Friday, alt meeting TBA]    

• John Law, "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity"
• Leigh Star, "The Ethnography of Infrastructure," American Behavioral Scientist, Vol 43, nol 3, 1999
• Geof Bowker and Leigh Star, Sorting things Out, "Introduction" and Chapters 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10.
• Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is, Ch3 "Social Computing," Ch 4 "Embodied Interaction" (net version through UC library).
  

Week Six (May 9): Visual Data and Creative Research Methods

• David Guantlett, "Using New Creative Visual Research Methods to Understand the Place of Popular Media in People's Lives"
• David Gauntlett and Peter Holzworth "Creative and visual methods for exploring identities"
• Michael Rich, "Health Literacy via Media Literacy: Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment," American Behavior Scientist, V 48, n 2
• Marcelo Ramella and Gonzalo Olmos, "Participant Authored Audio Visual Stories: Giving the Camera Away or Giving the Camera a Way?"
• Elisabeth Soep, "Learning about research from youth media artists" and "Beyond Literacy and Voice inYouth Media Production"
• Susan Finley "Arts-Based Inquiry in QI: Seven Years From Crisis to Guerrilla Warfare"
• Judith Babbitts, "Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States," Memory Bytes, eds, Lauren Rabinowitz and Abraham Geil
• Jon Wagner, "Contrasting Images, Complementary Trajectories: Sociology, Visual Sociology and Visual Research,"
• Jon Wagner, "Visible Materials, visualised theory and images of social research"
• Katherine Cross, Allison Kabel and Cathy Lysack, "Images of self and spinal cord injury: exploring drawing as a visual method in disability research"
  
• Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research
  

Week Seven (May 16): Digital [Dis]ability                 

• Ingunn Moser, "Disability and the Promises of Technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the
  normal"
• Ingunn Moser and John Law, “Making Voices: New Media Technologies, Disabilities, and Articulation” in Digital Media Revisited, eds, Liestol, Morrison and Rasmussen
• Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell, Digital Disability, Chapters 1, 2, 7 and 8 (pp 3-38, 129-154)
• Bowker, N., & Tuffin, K. (2003). "Dicing with deception: People with disabilities' strategies for managing safety and identity online." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication [On-line], 8 (2) . Available: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue2/bowker.html
• Chis Abbott, "Writing the Visual" pages 31-46, in Silicon literacies : Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, ed., Ilana Snyder

Week Eight (May 23): Ethics and Performance

• Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, "Ethics: The Failure of Positivist Science" (Turing Points)
• Dwight Conquergood, "Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance," (Turning Points)
• Dwight Conquergood, "Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,"(Turning Points)
• AAA Code of Ethics: http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ethicscode.pdf
• UCSD Human Subjects Committee Website: http://irb.ucsd.edu/
• Dwight Conquergood, "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research," The Performance Studies Reader, ed Henry Bial.

Week Nine (May 30): Mobile and Intimate Media

• Anandam Kavoori and Noah Arceneaux, eds, The Cell Phone Reader
• René Lysloff and Leslie Gay, Jr, eds, Music and Technoculture
• Mizuko Ito, "Personal Portable Pedestrian: Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use"
  
• Mizuko Ito, "Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production," in Joe Karaganis and Natalie Jeremijenko Ed., Structures of Participation in Digital Culture.
• Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe, "Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use" Forthcoming in Mizuko Ito, Misa Matsuda, and Daisuke Okabe Eds., Personal, Portable Intimate: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. MIT Press
• Daisuke Okabe, "Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations through Everyday Camera Phone Use"
  
• Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey, "The Mobile Communication Society : A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technologyy"
• The Encyclopedia of Informal Learning

Week Ten (June 6): Networked Activism

• Wyatt Galusky, "Identifying with Information: Citizen Empowerment, the Internet, and the Environmental Anti-Toxins Movement"
• Tiziana Terranova, "Demonstrating the Globe: Virtual Action in the Networked Society"
• Mark Graham and Shahram Khosravi. 2002. “Reordering Public and Private in Iranian Cyberspace: Identity, Politics and Mobilization,” Identities 9: 219-246."

Finals Week (June 12): FINAL PAPER due on Monday June 12th

Additional Reading:

• Media Worlds. Faye D. Ginsburg, et al. eds. University of California Press
• Sunaina Mara and Elisabeth Soep, Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, and the Global
• Karen Riggs Granny @ Work
• Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive"
• Mimi White and James Schwoch, eds., Questions of Method in Cultural Studies
• Dwight Conquergood, "Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, 1992 pp 80-123
• Special Issue on Disability, Identity, and Interdependence: ICTs and New Social Forms, Information, Communication & Society, Volume 9 Issue 3 2006
• Paul Rabinow, “Representations are social facts: modernity and post- modernity in anthropology.” In James Clifford and George Marcus. Writing Culture.
• David Phillips, "Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonymity and the Politics of Sexual Identity"
• Paul Dourish, Rebecca Grinter, Jessica Delgado De La FlorAnd Melissa Joseph, " Security in the Wild: User Strategies for Managing Security as an Everyday, Practical Problem"
• Lucy Suchman, Jeanette Blomberg, Julian E. Orr and Randall Trigg , "Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice "
  
• Sherry Hs, "Digital learning and play" A synthesis and elaboration from a CILS Bay Area Institute Roundtable
• Rafael Fajardo, " Pixels, Politics and Play: Digital Video Games As Social Commentary"
• Natalie Jeeremejenko, "Changing Structures of Participation in New Media Education," Share, Share Widely
• John Seely Brown: Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age.
• Augusto Boal, "Selection from Theatre of the Oppressed," in The New Media Reader
• Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds, The Video Game Theory Reader
  • Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins, and Kurt Squire, "Theory by Design"
  • Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, "Video Games and Configurative Performances"
  • Chris Crawford, "Interactive Storytelling"
• J.L. Lemke "Metamedia Literacy: Transforming Meanings and Media" http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/reinking.htm and "Towards Critical Multimedia Literacy: Technology, Research, and Politics" and "The Coming Paradigm Wars in Education: Curriculum vs. Information Access." In Cyberspace Superhighways: Access, Ethics, and Control, Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Computers,Freedom, and Privacy. Chicago: John Marshall Law School. 1994. [pp.76-85]
• Jon Lanestedt, “The Challenge of Digital Learning Environments in Higher Education,” in Digital Media Revisited
• David Buckingham et al, "The Media Literacy of Children and Young People" A review of the research literature on behalf of Ofcom
• Bertram C. Bruce, "Literacy Technologies: What Stance Should We Take?"
• Andrew Morrison, "From Oracy to Electracies: Hypernarrative, Place and Multimodal Dsicourses in Learning," Digital Media Revisited
• Christian Clark, " The Indigenous Knowledge Resource Management Northern Australia Project: Garma 2004"
• Interviewing and coding:
  • Robert Weiss, Learning From Strangers; The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies. Ch 4
  • Kathleen DeWalt and Billie DeWalt, "Informal Interviewing in Participant Observation"
  • Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, "Open Coding," Basics of Qualitative Research