Decentralising your (my) research networks

I’m delighted to have my abstract for the DIY Methods decentralised conference accepted! My research has been languishing after having children, COVID, personal upheavals, and shifting to part-time work. It’s good to have a deadline to help focus me!

Here’s my abstract:

Decentralising your (my) research networks

Stream: conventional

We weave together knowledge out of community. Research methods, particularly in internet studies (my area, more or less), are constantly changing. Over the last few years in-person conferences have become unattractive as I’ve become a parent, begun to see the cracks in the foundation of my previous academic ‘home’, experienced the Covid pandemic, and reflected on the urgent need for climate action. At the same time, Twitter has become X, and an increasingly hostile space under Musk’s ownership. Where do I find community instead, and have the deep conversations that lead to thoughtful research methods?

This zine reflects on the use of the Fediverse, and specifically Mastodon, as a space for academic connection and discussion. As I consider analysing the ways in which discourses of sustainability and regeneration are embedded in Mastodon’s design and communities, I want to use Mastodon as a space to develop appropriate research methods. Over one-month period, I will outline research methods and invite feedback and collaboration. This will include discussing research ethics, technical challenges, and other considerations.

I want to consider how the use of hashtags, a chronological timeline, privacy affordances, and the particular Code of Conduct on different servers help to structure conversations around methodology. What does it mean to wait for researchers in other timezones to wake up and come online? How do those of us with shared interests find each other? What does it mean to have these conversations in public, in a space where many people have deep anxieties about being the subject of research? I will track my reflections – including on the ways that Mastodon’s affordances shape collaboration – in a research journal.

The final publication will be a series of four A4 8-folded booklets, drawing together screenshots, hand-written reflections, and collage. This format will help to highlight my own positionality, situated on Noongar Boodjar in western australia and situated at one node of a broad network (much of which is invisible to me). The use of different styles will allow me to make the distance and interplay between my personal voice and academic recommendations more visible.