This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by new media platforms. Specifically, it shows how the social and technical design of online music platforms link the consumption of music immanently to its circulation. The thesis makes contributions to ethnomusicology, media studies, and digital anthropology, as well as to the study of music's technical cultures. It is based on a comparative ethnographic study of music circulation and consumption within two field sites: the commercial streaming service Spotify and the extralegal, unlicensed peer to peer platform 'Jekyll'. Governance comes to the fore in both sites: the study shows how practices of music curation, collection and consumption are regulated by the technical design of these platforms. Surprisingly, music consumption and circulation on Jekyll generates a variety of social relations, including pronounced social hierarchies. This is far less apparent on Spotify, due to the platform's individuated mode of address. The subjectivities of online music consumers are mediated by both their personal histories and by the broader technical genealogies of the platforms they use. The thesis illuminates the mutual interdependencies of the licensed and extralegal spheres, two domains often portrayed as not only separate but antagonistic. It also provides insight into the hybrid modes of exchange that generate digital music platforms. Through examining the entailments of circulatory participation, the study offers new insights into digital polymedia and to labour, exchange and governmentality online, as well as providing nuanced understandings of the ownership and collection of music in digital environments. Moreover, it advances new concepts to identify core aspects of digital music cultures, namely 'circulatory maintenance' and 'circumvention technology'. The thesis shows overall how Spotify and Jekyll are not merely emblematic of emergent consumption practices engendered by new media, but are bound up in the mutual co-creation of culture, engendering novel musical subjectivities, practices, socialities and ideologies. The complex musical, technical and social assemblages formed around music circulation online point to the affective potentials of music itself, producing inalienable attachments to the objects through which music is formatted, experienced, and circulated.

Using a case-study design, this qualitative investigation examines individual linguistic identity formation and the development of multiliteracies of two second language (L2) English speakers within the context of the massively multiplayer online role-play gaming (MMORPG) community. The theories and methodologies of this study draw from perspectives of sociolinguistics, digital ethnography, and discourse studies. From October 2021- March 2022, data was collected and consisted of the participants’ personal interviews and their asynchronous computer mediated communications (ACMC) within their respective gaming discussion communities. Data analyses consisted of both qualitative coding procedures of the ACMC data into literacy features and cross examination with participants’ personal interviews. Through these two case studies, this thesis shows how two English L2 gamers- one being Russian L1 and one being both Russian and Ukrainian L1- use linguistically sophisticated employment of digital multiliteracies to express their translocal and individual identities. The findings of these case studies contribute to conceptual understandings of how modern virtual communities of practice mediated by communication technologies act in conjunction with translocal L2 identity formation.

Grounded in fieldwork within a civil association of street vendors in Mexico City, my research interweaves ethnographic and historical approaches to better understand the ways people read and interpret each other in everyday encounters. The study explores representations of street markets in Mexico City’s dominant discourses. Using field methods such as participant observation, filmmaking and street photography, I outline the benefits and difficulties implicated in the assemblage of a periodic market in public spaces. I also trace the trajectories of street market participants in order to understand the role and significance of street markets in their everyday lives and existence in the city. I use the notion of ‘trajectories’ proposed by Massey to define street markets as places of encounters. Following daylight and the daily rhythm of the market, I relate social interactions with the nuances of living in the city. By exploring methods of verbal and non-verbal communication in social interactions in the street market such as dar vista and tantear, I examine the kind of socialities that emerge from these encounters. These practices of communication also allow people to formulate social critiques about the ways of living and socialising in a megacity. Finally, the website that accompanies the thesis, www.diadetianguis.org, is grounded in the idea of trajectories. It aims to explore non-linear modes of ethnographic representation that can enhance and interrelate different ways of approaching and interpreting ethnographic data through a variety of means, such as audiovisual media, mapping and hypermedia. I recommend that one reads the thesis along with the hyperlinks given in particular sections, as a means to encourage the reader to make her own way to explore the website and remaining chapters. The website is also available in the complementary DVD entitled ‘www.diadetianguis.org’. To access the home page, please open the DVD and click on the file: tianguis/index.html. Clicking on this file will open the web browser and allow for navigating the website offline.

Brand-lurking Phenomenon on Social Media Abstract The key measures to assess consumer-brand engagement on social media have mainly been visible interactions with media content, including 'likes', comments and shares. However, as research into consumers' online behaviour demonstrates, only a minority of users in fact participate 'visibly'. On social media, the vast majority of users are passive participants, so called 'lurkers'. This thesis explores consumers' publicly invisible behaviours on social media and introduces an original methodological approach to exploring the otherwise invisible behavioural patterns on social media, which builds on ethnographic principles and combines digital methods with qualitative methods. Drawing on a data set of 134 hours of screen recordings obtained through ad hoc tracking devices installed on PCs and smartphones of 15 young adults from seven European countries recruited from the "Generation Z" and 15 in- depth interviews conducted with the same participants, the study proposes the following contributions. First, the thesis illustrates a research protocol to explore consumers' lurking behaviours in relation to branded content as they occur within the young people's natural social media settings. Second, it introduces the concept of invisible engagement, defined as an...

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This thesis investigates strategies of digital activism pursued by Indigenous activists in the age of Reconciliation in Canada. The point of departure is the relationship between Indigenous people and the settler establishment, which has been historically informed by several attempts to assimilate the Natives into the white majority. Discarding the integration concept in IMER research as colonial, this study focuses instead on anticolonial advocacy strategies pursued through Indigenous knowledge within digital environments. It does so by adopting digital ethnography as method and conducting participant observation of one selected Indigenous association on Instagram. In line with these premises, Indigenous theories are operationalized into a context-specific analytical framework. This approach leads to two overarching results. On the one hand, four recurrent motifs are identified as key in Indigenous digital advocacy in the age of Reconciliation in Canada. On the other hand, a full set of anticolonial strategies is recognized as the alternative response to Reconciliation.

This thesis is an exploration in graphic anthropology alongside a digital community of nonbinary people on the social media app, TikTok. Nonbinary visuality is a complicated and still poorly understood set of experiences largely due to a lack of thoughtful representation in both academic and non-academic circles. This work applies comic-style drawing to gather nonbinary visual narratives as they are shared digitally. In doing so, this work contributes to an understanding of what it might mean to ‘look’ nonbinary. Between September 2021-May 2022 I conducted a digital ethnography on TikTok. I applied comic drawing as my primary mode of notetaking and communicating about my experiences. I also recruited 5 nonbinary social media mutuals who each contributed 1-6 video clips to my project. Informed by these video clips and my own auto-ethnographic experiences on the app, I created a collection of comic style drawings. Selections of these drawings were shared on social media (@enbyanthro) and through an interactive documentary housed on my project website (nbvisualnarratives.ca). Throughout my work here, I consider drawing as a process of gathering - of bringing together and being together. As I gathered individual nonbinary narratives through my drawing method I connected those stories to broader dialogues about being nonbinary. The ethno-graphic gatherings discussed here are made up of both personal narratives and shared experiences, brought together through the process of drawing. / Graduate

The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements. / Doctor of Philosophy / The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.

In this research, I find out how Afro-Brazilian women under oppression can benefit from the Afro-Brazilian religions of Candomblé and Umbanda. The theoretical framework is the intersectional theory, in which gender and race are the most prominent categories, along with class, sexuality, and (implicitly) religion. The data come from digital ethnographic research, through observations of documentaries on YouTube, in which Afro-Brazilian religious adherents tell and show their worldview. Also, two Umbandan ceremonies were observed in Brazil in real-time. I make the observations as an outsider, suggesting interpretations by a Western scholar, and recognizing my blind frame.   The research shows that Afro-Brazilian women have a religious context in Afro-Brazilian religions, where they gain respect, dignity, and opportunities for leadership positions, particularly due to the matriarchal structure. The history of slavery is honored by ceremonies in which contact with ancestors is key. The Afro-Brazilians can here be role models, welcoming people who have been despising them through history, and treating all as equals; in contrast to white ignorance, a central attribute of social oppression. Many opponents of Afro-Brazilian religions accuse the religions of being witchcraft. For instance, the increasingly larger group of Neo-Pentecostal adherents. On the other hand, the Afro-Brazilian religions gain increasingly more tolerance among other people in power, creating a polarized religious climate in Brazil. The adherents of the Afro-Brazilian religions value their religious identity highly, including their religious nickname, particular clothes, and usage of African languages. The temples offer them a community where they are valued as individuals and recognize the history of Afro-Brazilians.

Work structures our daily experiences across all spheres of life, including what we do outside of work. But our theories of work have largely sidestepped a deeper probe into the significance of leisure. This dissertation explores the process and consequences of turning leisure into labor. At the intersection of sport, technology, and entertainment, esports has created a market for professional gamers— those who make a living playing video games. My qualitative study draws on interviews with 75 esports professionals alongside digital ethnographic practices. Video gaming begins as a hobby, a self-driven pursuit undertaken purely for fun. Competitive gamers who take their play seriously find themselves not just playing but training with purpose and discipline. Professional gaming is more than a job; it is an immersive lifestyle that demands arduous work in exchange for fun. But in in getting paid to play, professional gamers enter an uncertain, unstable, short-lived career, with long demanding hours, limited future prospects, and sometimes little to no pay. In the end, some gamers choose to stay, some leave, while others push past the fun. The professionalization and commodification of professional gaming offers a unique take on the boundaries of work, and the meaning and value of our time, effort, skills, and selves. This dissertation presents two papers tracing the career arc of a professional gamer: becoming, being, and retiring. In the first paper I ask: what are the structures and practices of creating and sustaining consent to work? I examine consent through two perspectives: consent at work—high effort and productivity— and consent to work—opting into and staying committed to work itself. The second paper investigates how people balance their intrinsic motivations to work—passion, fulfillment, excitement—with the constraints of work—routine, obligations, necessity— and how this negotiation shapes their career paths. / 2026-05-21T00:00:00Z