About

In an algorithmic age, we must rediscover the human scale.

In social sciences, we need to rethink the value of thick data and human-centric approaches. Algorithms can predict our clicks or hold artificial conversations, but they cannot feel our longings, pains, and joys.

Global Media Ethnography Lab (GMEL) serves as a hub to explore how people create, circulate, and experience media across diverse cultural, technological, and geopolitical contexts. We combine ethnographic inquiry with interdisciplinary approaches to understand contemporary media worlds and their social impacts.

GMEL exists to ensure that as communication speeds up, we do not lose sight of the human scale – the stories, the silences, and the messy, unquantifiable lived experiences that define who we are. GMEL highlights the media histories, practices, voices, meanings, and emotions in communicative processes. Our research focuses on emergent technologies and everyday life, diaspora and mobility, aging, wellbeing & gender, and ethnographic approaches to communication studies.