About the Event
In this panel, we want to reflect on the epistemological, methodological, ethical and practical challenges of doing digital fieldwork. When the COVID 19 pandemic spread around the world, it transformed all facets of our lives, including the research projects we were involved in. Travel and face-to-face fieldwork were restricted, and the internet became the dominant research venue. Even before the pandemic, however, many researchers were already finding innovative ways to update traditional research methodologies using a wide array of digital sources. Accordingly, our invited speakers will share their experiences in developing robust, digital research methods characterized by flexibility and creativity.


About the Speakers:

Melissa Gasparotto is Associate Director of Research Services and Institutional Partnerships for The New York Public Library Research Libraries. Her research and recent publications explore changing models of open access publishing and eBook discovery in Latin America, and the global information ecology around digital content. She is active in a variety of professional organizations and consortia, including the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), Latin America Northeast Libraries Consortium, and the Latin American Research Resources Project. She earned an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Long Island University.


Presentation Title: Fieldwork at a Distance: Navigating Technology-Mediated Research Methods, Ethics and Best Practices

Ana G. Alvarez holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Gender and Latin American Studies from Birkbeck College, and has taught at the universities of Bielefeld (Germany), London (UK), and Zurich (Switzerland). As an activist and academic, she has been among the first social scientists to conduct fieldwork with travesti and trans-women communities in Buenos Aires since the 1990s, and has participated in gltttb (gay, lésbico, travesti, transexual, transgénero y bisexual) and feminist political movements and gender rights advocacy in Argentina, where she was a participant of the Area Queer at the University of Buenos Aires' Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas. Her work has been published in academic journals and collections, most recently in the anthology Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader (Routledge 2018) and in Avá: Revista de Antropología, where she coordinated the dossier 'Cuerpo, tecnología y placer' (2017).

Presentation Title: Bricoleur`s work; (re)constructing travesti cabaret through the Internet.



Patricia Oliart is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Head of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University (UK). She recently edited Pedagogías de la disidencia en América Latina (La Siniestra, 2020). Other publications are about the circumstances and particular shape that emancipatory ideas take in the political and intellectual life of individuals in Peru. Her current project is about youth cultural and political collectives and the political subjectivities emerging around them in Latin America. She is preparing a book on youth activism in Peru in the past twenty years.

Presentation Title: Conducting and supervising online research