Staying with and inbetween hostility: non-digital-centric ethnography in a digitally mediated world

This paper offers a reflection on my attempts to stay with the everyday mediations of hostility within a digitalizing asylum system in the UK. Drawing out the ambiguities of how hostility (both as a governance effect and everyday-circulating atmosphere) shapes everyday life for asylum seekers, I explore how non-digital-centric ethnography remains vital for geographic research that grapples with the inbetweenness of everyday digital life lived through smartphones. In this paper, I propose two core provocations that are rooted in a feminist methodological praxis of embracing ambiguity in the complex and messy work of researching everyday digital life. First, that non-digital-centric ethnography can allow researchers to stay with unfolding assemblages of affective governance that now exist inbetween digital and non-digital space-times: in my case, staying with the everyday affective mediations of the UK’s Hostile Environment. Second, in the grounded context of doing research with asylum-seeking individuals, I explore how staying inbetween – both as an ethnographic practice and wider epistemological orientation – can make possible the kind of research encounters that are necessary for seeing, hearing, watching, feeling, and understanding how hostility unfolds at the everyday level between asylum seekers and their smartphone devices.