Junior Research Fellowship Proposal

Feeling at home in a digital world

Population ageing is a global phenomenon that, according to the UN, will define the 21st century. After Japan, Finland (tied with Italy) ranks second in the global ranking of countries with the highest old-age dependency ratios (United Nations, 2020). As elsewhere, Finland’s ageing population tends to remain resident at home into old age. ‘Ageing in place’ policies around the world aim to support people to live in their own homes and communities for as long as possible. But what is ‘home’? Is it the physical home, or does the very notion of home now mean something different considering that we are now digitally connected in ways that transcend previous notions of place? To better understand the needs of people, we need to examine where people actually live in the digital era. Homes can be places of sanctuary but also can be where people experience neglect and isolation. With increasing numbers of Finnish people living alone in apartments (Official Statistics of Finland, 2017), and 29% of those aged 75 and over experiencing loneliness at least some of the time (Official Statistics of Finland, 2018), it is important to understand how notions of connectivity, family, community, and sociality figure in the crafting of comfortable living spaces.

Previous anthropological work, such as Greschke's ‘Is there a home in cyberspace’ (2012), has considered ‘online’ as a kind of home for migrants. Hjorth et. al. (2020) look at the way that kinship is implicated in the use of digital technologies within domestic spaces. However, our understanding of how physical and digital homes work in tandem remains under-explored in anthropological research. My proposal seeks to remedy this gap through an ethnographic study of how digital and physical spaces interact, paying attention to how people craft spaces of wellbeing. This research builds on a key insight from my PhD: the home as a central site for care is now supplemented by digital spaces that allow for people to better calibrate closeness and distance, autonomy and dependence. This finding contributed to the concept of the smartphone as a ‘transportal home’ (Miller et. al. 2021). For my JRF project, I will advance this area of study by examining how the smartphone and physical domestic space interact. The current pandemic has massively increased people’s awareness of both their relationship to the home and their dependence on digital communication simultaneously, therefore the context is ideal for my proposed research.

Being half-Finnish and having spent a great deal of time in Finnish homes, I have witnessed how the home has become a space where the kind of familial sociality once associated with living close to family members is often now experienced digitally. Care is often communicated across physical distances through personal devices, particularly as people become less mobile. At the same time, the research examines how our relationship to our physical surroundings impacts the way we think and feel about our digital homes. For example, does our notion of privacy at home shape the way we think about privacy online? Instead of considering visual materials as a supplementary form of documentation to text, this research will explore the potential of visual collaboration for revealing what it means to ‘feel at home’ beyond the confines of language.

Aims
1) To understand how the interaction of digital and physical spaces impacts on conceptions of home, in particular on how older adults craft spaces of wellbeing.

2) To extend anthropology’s remit towards affective experiences through participatory visual practices.
3) To integrate public engagement within research design by organising a public exhibition and workshop. These activities will be sites of research and knowledge exchange between participants and relevant stakeholders including policy makers.

Methods

I will conduct one year of ethnographic fieldwork (years one and two) primarily grounded in home stays, digital ethnography, and graphic methods of documentation. I will draw initially on my already existing network in the city of Helsinki and intend to work with a broad demographic of participants living in social housing, rented accommodation, and in homes owned by the occupier. I seek to gain a holistic perspective of the way that older adults’ relationships to their homes and digital devices fit within the wider context of their lives. In the context of covid-19, where especially older people may be cautious about inviting visitors into their home, conducting anthropological research via homestays appears to be one way around the problem of access to the domestic space. By spending longer durations of time with people, and socially distancing from others if necessary, the research may continue even if there is a resurgence of the virus in Finland.

Outputs

The proposed research will form a comparative perspective to my research in Japan and will result in journal articles contributing to the development of three areas of anthropology: digital culture, ageing, and graphic ethnography. The use of drawing as a fieldwork method and mode of ethnographic expression has received increased attention in recent years (Taussig 2009 & 2011, Ingold 2011, Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015, Causey 2016, Le Calvé and Gaudin 2019, Bonano 2019, Theodossopoulos 2020, Rumsby 2020), demonstrating a growing establishment of graphic anthropology as a subfield of the discipline. However, the field is still young and there is much work to be done on the analytical contributions of a graphic approach. I will draw on my experience of researching and organising exhibitions to plan a collaborative exhibition featuring visual material co- produced with my participants (year two). This material will then form the basis of a graphic monograph which will communicate my findings in an accessible way to research participants, local welfare services, students, and beyond (year three). I am keen for my research to have practical impact, and will therefore build on my experience collaborating with medical practitioners in Japan to seek ways for the research to benefit older adults through collaborative intervention. Overall, I see a JRF as an ideal opportunity to become a leader in uniting public engagement with analytical advancement in anthropological research.

References

Bonanno, L. 2019. ‘I swear I hated it, and therefore I drew it’, entanglements, 2(2):39-55.

Causey, A., 2016. Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Daniels, I. (2019) What are Exhibitions for? An Anthropological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Publishing

Haapio-Kirk, L. (in preparation) Ageing with Smartphones in Japan. London: UCL Press

Ingold, T., ed., 2011. Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines. Farnham: Ashgate

Le Calvé, Maxime, and Olivier Gaudin. “Depicting Berlin’s Atmospheres: Phenomenographic Sketches.” Ambiances. Environnement Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain, no. 5 (December 20, 2019). https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.2667.

Miller, D., Awondo, P., De Vries, M., Duque, M., Garvey, P., Haapio-Kirk, L., Hawkins, C., Otaegui, A., Rabho, L., Walton, S., Wang, X. (2021 in press) The Global Smartphone. London: UCL Press

Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Families [e-publication]. ISSN=1798-3231. Annual Review 2017, 7. Living alone varies by age . Helsinki: Statistics Finland Accessed 09.09.2020. Available online at: http://www.stat.fi/til/perh/2017/02/perh_2017_02_2018-12-05_kat_007_en.html

Taussig, M., 2009. What Do Drawings Want? Culture, Theory and Critique, 50 (2), 263–174.

Taussig, M., 2011. I Swear I Saw This. Drawing in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely my Own. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Greschke, H. M. (2012). Is there a home in cyberspace?: the Internet in migrants' everyday life and the emergence of global communities (Vol. 14). London: Routledge

Grimshaw, A. and Ravetz, A., 2015. Drawing with a camera? Ethnographic film and transformative anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(2), pp.255-275.

Hjorth, L., Ohashi, K., Sinanan, J., Horst, H., Pink, S., Kato, F., & Zhou, B. (2020). Digital Media Practices in Households: Kinship through Data. Amsterdam University Press

Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Statistics on living conditions [e-publication].2018. Helsinki: Statistics Finland. Accessed 12.09.2020. Available at: http://www.stat.fi/til/eot/2017/eot_2017_2019-05-24_tie_001_en.htm

Rumsby, C. (2020). Retrospective (re) presentation: turning the written ethnographic text into an 'ethno-graphic'. Entanglements, 3(2), 7-27.

Theodossopoulos, D., 2020. Iphigenia's sacrifice: generational historicity as a structure of feeling in times of austerity. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 26(4), pp.842-863.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2020). World Population Ageing 2019 (ST/ESA/SER.A/444). Accessed 10.09.2020. Available at: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/files/docu ments/2020/Jan/un_2019_worldpopulationageing_report.pdf