Researching Digital Society

Harry Dyer, Associate Professor, School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia

Abstract

Drawing on Harry Dyer's recent book, ‘Researching Digital Society: An Introduction’, this talk explores digital research as praxis and a form of sociological imagination. In doing so, this session will explore the ways in which digital research is inherently a political practice. Framing digital data as always partial, mediated, and produced through sociotechnical arrangements, we’ll explore how researchers interrogate the arrangements that generate digital data, the role researchers themselves play in validating certain versions of reality, and the way methodological choices confirm or challenge particular conceptions of the social.

The session further considers the challenge of working with ‘less obvious voices’ in digital research, questioning current digital ethnographic conventions that risk privileging ‘rich’ highly active users and content over the quieter, more mundane traces of digital life. We’ll explore what this means for research in particular as a process that can (re)confirm and validate social realities and relations of power.

Bio

Harry is Associate Professor of Education at the University of East Anglia. His research critically interrogates the ways digital technologies and social media reshape how knowledge is produced, shared, and contested - and what this means for education and culture. He is co-organiser of Social Media & Society, and chair of Digital Social Sciences at SENSS. His most recent book, Researching Digital Society (SAGE Publishing), charts current debates around how digital technologies are shaping the social world, and guides researchers interested in the overlaps of technology and society.

Joining Online
This event will be accessible via Microsoft Teams. If you would like to attend online, please contact ed.research@durham.ac.uk to request the Teams link.