Over the past decades, processes of digitization have increasingly accelerated, resulting in massive transformations in almost every sector of society. In the wake of these evolutions, the social sciences have accordingly developed different methodological devices that allow to research the nuances and specificities of these digital transformation of society, including approaches that specifically address the field of qualitative-ethnographic studies (e.g., Pink et al., 2015). At the same time, as we live in a society where the borders between the ‘analogue’ and the ‘digital’ are increasingly hard to draw (Stalder, 2021), the designing of robust ethnographic research that seek to profit from this growing interwovenness (rather than only seeing this as a methodological burden and/or challenge to overcome, Jandric ́& Knox, 2022) has become increasingly challenging.

The lecture addresses this challenge by outlining the emerging field of hybrid ethnographies, which argues for the importance of consciously deciding whether or not to (still) design certain ethnographic activities (mainly) digitally or physically (e.g., Schulte-Römer & Gesing, 2022). This is a decision with respect to where researchers collect their data. The same occurs for the hybridity of how data are collected and analyzed, including various forms of integrating offline (e.g., paper notebooks) and online (e.g., usage of messaging apps to bundle knowledge, exchange observations and expand the range of data that could be collected) tools (cf. Kleinlein, 2023).

To illuminate how such hybrid ethnographies can be developed in practice, and which challenges and potentials occur, we present two of our ongoing studies: first, a hybrid team ethnography of a large-scale event that could not be researched by a solitary singular researcher alone; second, a hybrid co-design ethnography of an educational app that is being co-designed with students and teachers. We conclude by arguing that in hybrid-ethnographic research designs, careful attention must be paid to the manifold and also ambivalent ways in which the analogue and the digital are affecting one another, since these interrelations do not only substantially influence how we get to see the educational world, but equally how we (as researchers) contribute to the increasingly algorithmically-mediated visibilities of education.

Bios:

Mathias Decuypere is professor in education with a focus on school development and governance at the Zurich University of Teacher Education (Switzerland) and is equally affiliated to KU Leuven (Belgium). His main interests are situated at the digitization, datafication and platformization of education; and how these evolutions enact distinct forms of education policy, governance, and practice

Sigrid Hartong is professor for sociology at the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg (www.hsu-hh.de/sozgov/en). Her research focus is on the transformation of governance in education and society, with a particular emphasis on the manifestations and effects of digitization and datafication. She is PI of the project SMASCH-Smart Schools (www.smasch.eu) and initiator of the educators´ professionalization initiative Unblack the Box (www.unblackthebox.org).