IIAA – International Institute of Anthropological Applications

International Institute of Anthropological Applications (IIAA) IIAA trains students to look at societies holistically, to respect cultural differences, and to learn about social phenomena through a careful process of participant observation and interviewing. It equips them in the investigation of the principles of human acquisition and behavior and the application of these principles to address the contemporary issues and problems. IIAA uses action-oriented anthropology to catalyze positive change that creates a safe, just and inclusive world. Making positive change involves many things – personal and professional commitment, active listening, advocacy, teaching, and training, policy work through networking, collaboration, grassroots and community-based and collective efforts. Students who are trained at the International Institute of Anthropological applications (IIAA) can take on very different roles in their career directions such as researchers, policy analysts, program evaluators, needs assessors, impact assessors, community advocates, trainers, culture brokers, managers, change agents, consultants, etc. Anthropological applications can be used to solve problems in an enormous variety of fields –public health and medicine, business, law, human rights, education, environmental issues, community development, museums, disaster research & management, government and international development. IIAA promotes human-centered work applied to practical problems by linking a network of professional anthropologists working across employment sectors.  We support all anthropologists in bringing real solutions to communities, organizations, and policymakers, by offering advocacy, information, networks, mentoring, and continuing education. We look forward to collaborating and connecting applied anthropologists worldwide and other applied sciences to address the urgent and important challenges that lasting change demands. It encourages to work together to make a just world. The unifying factor is a commitment to making a positive impact on the quality of life in the world.

Digital Ethnography

Digital ethnography is becoming an increasingly used and needed approach when studying digital culture and practices and the use of digital media and technologies in research . Digital ethnography is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through internet-mediated social interaction. We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not. The Internet is an open context for social interactions where practices, meanings and identities are intermingled. Social interactions on virtual environments present a challenge for social researchers and open up a new field for qualitative research. Challenges of mediation, of online settings and shifts in distance or in time, here subsumed under the term “digital ethnography,” are all
met in the course of trying to establish this engagement. 

This course provides theoretical, methodological and practical tools for conducting ethnography in a digital age, and for the approach of digital ethnography as a set of methods and as a research practice. It covers a broad range of methodological approaches aimed at answering the complexities of the object of research and the different ways in which this object has been constructed. Digital ethnographers, ethnographers of the Internet mediated cultures are faced with the need to answer very pressing questions such as how to use heterogeneous data (text, audiovisual data, etc.) in their analysis, or how to combine research in front of the screen and in the virtual field. A perennial point of tension lies between the apparent ease of data collection and the difficulty of getting access and participating in the field. The present course on Digital Ethnography explains students each and every step of the ethnographic process
how to develop research questions, create research designs and models, decide which data collection methods to use, and how to analyze and interpret data. It aims to provide detailed, accessible and up-to-date treatments of such technologies, and to assess in a critical way their methodological implications. The digital ethnography provides a means by which the impact, development and use of digital technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analyzed and understood. Digital ethnographic accounts are not only for students and academics in anthropology, sociology, media and communication, digital cultures, digital humanities, internet studies, science and technology studies, cultural geography and social computing, but for other readers interested in the social impact of digital technologies. More information

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