17 February 2025
Digital Sociality across Public and Private Spheres
Associate Professor Karen Waltorp and Tom Bratrud, Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Bergen, are the editors of a special issue of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (Volume 33, Issue 2) and have co-authored the introduction, ‘Digital Sociality across Public and Private Spheres." This special issue grew out of a panel at the EASA conference during the Futures Anthropologies Network (FAN)’ in Belfast 2022, convened by Marianne Lien and discussed by Synnøve Bendix. Professor Karen Waltorp has also been a convenor of FAN from 2016-2023.The introduction examines the relationship between public and private spheres, a longstanding theme in the social sciences. Bratrud and Waltorp present a framework for ethnographically examining people's access to various spheres and collectives as digital technologies reconfigure boundaries between the public and private. Their ethnographic focus is specifically on the Nordic countries, which are among the most digitalized in the world.
The authors argue for the importance of ethnographic studies to understand digital sociality across various scales and spheres of social life in specific regions. They propose the figure-ground reversal as an analytical device, which affords a non-digital-centric focus while giving digital phenomena attention in their specific contexts.
Keywords: Digital Anthropology, Digital Technology, figure-ground, Nordics, Private,
Public; Scandinavia
The article is open access and can be accessed online