“Grænsekrydser, backstabber og opportunist”: Praksisbaseret etik som intimt grænsearbejde

Abstract

“Boundary crossing, backstabbing opportunist”: Practice based ethics as intimate boundary work. The mediatisation of more and more aspects of everyday life presents ethnography with specific ethical challenges. The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) recommends to rely less on procedural ethics and instead to adopt practice based ethics. As part of a turn to such practice based ethics, the classical concept of ‘practical judgment’ has re-emerged, but due to the relative lack of work in this field, it remains unclear how it is to be practiced and evaluated in digital media saturated contexts. Addressing this vacuum, and drawing from theories of intimacy and affect, I offer the notion of ‘intimate boundary work’ as an analytical approach to conceptualize the practical judgment that mediatized contexts involve. I show that the notion of intimate boundary work allows for rich descriptions and analyses of the practical judgments engaged in by both researcher and participants in media ethnographic fieldwork. Based on fieldwork among gay men using locative ‘hook-up apps’, two moments of practical judgment are explored, focusing on the ethical tensions between data and person, public and private, anonymization and access, and built vs. media environmental presence.