Exploring inclusive ethnography as a methodology to account for multiple experiences

Abstract

Sartoretto shows the necessity of ethnography inspired methodologies that are attentive to communication as an open-ended process to better understand media related practices. The chapter highlights the ways multimedia ethnographic fieldwork is useful to inform research that seeks to understand realities in transitional and unequal societies outside the Euro-American context. Sartoretto also explicates that a too strong focus on analyzing the significances for social action of new technologies that are unequally available across different groups tends to give an eschewed view of the democratizing potentials of these technologies. By focusing on the experiences of a marginalized group in Brazil that is geographically distant from urban centers and does not have access to the most advanced technologies, the chapter broadens the horizons of analysis of the interplay between social action and media.