Meet the Researcher: Professor Annette Markham

Annette Markham has been studying the impact of digital technologies on identities, relationships, and societies since the mid-1990s. Her pioneering sociological studies are well represented in her earliest work, Life Online: Researching Real Experiences in Virtual Space; (1998, Alta Mira). Annette’s more recent work focuses on innovative methods for building digital literacy in the public sphere through creative workshops and arts-based interventions. She has conducted workshops, PhD courses, and exhibited work in UK, Denmark, Canada, USA, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland.

Annette’s work on moodboarding emerged in 2018 with the development of a PhD course to explore how visual methods like moodboarding could be used to enhance ethnographic fieldwork techniques. Participants spent a week generating moodboards in response to immersion in the particular weather and cultural uniqueness of the Danish west coast. Mapping moods emerged again in 2020, as Annette collaborated with people in 26 countries to build layered and textural accounts of their experiences of lockdowns during COVID. In 2022, PlaceLab and Annette Markham are collaborating to explore how people make sense of moods in their cities, in the past pandemic, the present, and the speculative near future.

This series of workshops, held in Barcelona, Melbourne, Brunswick, and Ho Chi Minh City, gives citizens the opportunity to build rich and textural mood maps of the social and cultural aspects of life in digitally-saturated social contexts. Their moodboards are prompted by the idea that focusing on mood as a form of ‘data’ can push back against the dehumanising tendencies of automated data-collection about citizens.

Annette’s extensive experience with community workshops has led a strong recognition that when citizens become ethnographers of their own lives and communities, the gain confidence that their local knowledge practices can produce rich insights that are not only useful in a local sense, but can add value to discussions at the level of municipalities, cities, and regions. These workshops help people recognize that citizens can generate complex forms of ‘data’ about their desires or needs. When it comes to generating information about the mood or affective feeling of a place, how might these moodboarding exercises help city planners or technology designers make more informed decisions?

Annette Markham currently holds a Professorship within the School of Media and Communication and is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University. She also holds a fractional appointment as Professor of Information Studies and Digital Design at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her written works are published broadly and can be found at https://annettemarkham.com/