GMEL is committed to fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment. We combine ethnographic inquiry with interdisciplinary approaches to understand contemporary media worlds and their social impacts. GMEL highlights nuanced understanding of media histories, everyday practices, personal voices, cultural meanings, and ambivalent emotions in communicative processes.
Our research encompasses four areas:
Media technologies are deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life, while everyday practices continually reshape how technologies are adopted, interpreted, and transformed. We investigate this dynamic relationship across diverse cultural and social contexts, paying close attention to lived experiences that are often overlooked by large-scale analyses. Ethnographic inquiry allows us to understand how technological change unfolds through ordinary routines, relationships, and local meanings.
Our research draws on critical feminist perspectives to examine how media both reflect and shape gendered identities and power structures in contemporary society. We explore how people negotiate gender through media production, circulation, and everyday use across diverse cultural settings. Ethnographic approaches foreground lived experiences and personal voices, revealing the complexities and contradictions of gender in everyday media life.
People move across borders, create homes, and cultivate belongings in places that are often marked by uncertainty and change. We study how diasporic communities navigate mobility, identity, memory, and connection through media in everyday life. Ethnographic research helps illuminate the struggles, creativity, and moments of joy that emerge within these in-between spaces.
We understand ethnography as both a way of conducting research and a way of communicating knowledge. This research cluster explores diverse qualitative methods, collaborative fieldwork practices, and innovative forms of ethnographic writing across disciplines. By reflecting critically on how knowledge is produced and represented, we seek to advance ethnography as both a rigorous methodology and a creative scholarly practice.
