Reconsidering Multi-sitedness: New Directions for Ethnography in the Age of AI

Multi-sited ethnography is a mainstay of social studies of technology, using ‘tracking’ strategies to follow actors and discourses across space and time. However, new practical and methodological questions are emerging. For example, studies of technology production are less about getting inside the ‘lab’ than navigating technical and institutional barriers around access, while studies of platform use have dramatically changed following corporate API restrictions. Although ethnographers of AI-driven systems have improvised skillfully to work across these limitations, they lack shared vocabularies and methodological guidelines. This special interest group (SIG) convenes around these issues, engaging multi-sited ethnography along two distinct but related dimensions. The first, multi-sided, is concerned with ethnographic attention to the sites where value and meaning are produced and translated into use. The second, multi-sighted, concerns the perspectival nature of ethnography as well as the ‘points of view’ borne by the infrastructures that mediate work and life. These dimensions bring into view the entanglement of technology production and use, such that to study one is to study the other. We therefore ask how we can substantively study production and use together, and what it might take to intervene in sociotechnical AI systems we cannot fully enter.