Reclaiming the Radical: Feminist Legacies and the Transformative Power of Media Ethnography

In this commentary, we respond to Kirsten Drotner’s foundational article “Media Ethnography: An Other Story?” published in Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research in 1999. Drotner’s text innovatively wove together the scholarly, intellectual, and social conditions that helped establish media ethnography as a key approach to studying everyday media use. Drotner issued a call to action, namely, to develop media ethnography by pursuing dialogue with feminist epistemologies and to attend to unheard voices and silenced experiences. This call has gained new relevance in the contemporary moment. Positivist logics and quantitative methodologies dominate research agendas and thereby risk to undermine interpretive qualitative media research. Continuing paths set out in Drotner’s original essay, this commentary traces the connections between media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and feminist epistemologies that provided the groundwork for the ethnographic turn in media studies. Second, we discuss the transformations media ethnography has undergone in response to the digital turn over the course of the last three decades, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by digitization and datafication. Continuing the dialogue with feminist epistemologies, we offer a critical reflection on digital ethnography, exploring how digital technologies reshape the epistemological concerns and research practices of media ethnographers.