Elisenda Ardèvol: "Social sciences research helps design citizens"

With a doctoral degree from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Elisenda Ardèvol is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the UOC Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is currently participating in the University Master’s Degree in the Information and Knowledge Society and in the interdisciplinary doctoral programme in the Information and Knowledge Society at the UOC, where she teaches about qualitative methodologies. She also participates in the master’s degree in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary-making at the UAB as well as other classes and seminars on anthropology, audiovisual media and digital technologies in different national and international universities. She is the lead researcher in the consolidated Digital Culture and New Media (MEDIACCIONS) research group at the UOC.

First, can you broadly explain the nature of your research activity?

My field of research is interdisciplinary in the sense that it combines different research fields and subjects related to digital technologies in people’s everyday lives. My research group, Digital Culture and New Media (MEDIACCIONS), was created when we began working together with Professors Antoni Roig and Gemma San Cornelio in around 2006. It was recognized as an emergent group by the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU Catalunya) in 2009, and as a consolidated group in 2014. Today it is a research team based on three main themes: communication, social and cultural anthropology, and design, art and technology.

Anthropology would be the aspect most related to your career.

Exactly, I got my training in social and cultural anthropology from the UAB and my first fieldwork was on the gypsy community in Andalusia and the social and cultural changes. Then I met Luis Pérez Tolón, who suggested that I participate in making a documentary about the gypsy community, which resulted in my interest in anthropology related to audiovisual communication. I later went to Los Angeles to study visual anthropology, the subject of my doctoral degree, until I arrived at the UOC in 1998 to begin studying how to apply everything I had learnt about audiovisual communication to the field of research on digital and online communication. Thus we created a first research group with Professor Agnès Vayreda, with whom we analysed the new forms of expression and sociability that emerged from the first online forums at the UOC, researching the pioneering field of digital culture.

With the arrival of now-established channels like YouTube in 2006, audiovisual media began to have an increasingly greater impact on the Internet, and society also expressed itself through photography, video and audio. This meant a natural confluence between what I had been doing, anthropological studies on the media, and virtual ethnography or digital and online anthropology.

Audiovisual media is a field that has changed at a frenetic pace:  right now can anyone with a mobile phone be a creator?

We are all cultural creators in one way or another (but we don’t all have the same opportunities, means, skills or interests). One of the questions I studied concerned self-production on YouTube and the popular culture surrounding it with the phenomenon of prosumers; that is, consumers who also produce. Here we observe a fundamental change in how we understand social communication, the audience and those who form it, as well as a new way of learning and teaching, such as through video tutorials on YouTube. In the European research project Horizon 2020 Transmedia Literacy – which we are doing with Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) with Carlos Scolari and which involves eight countries – we are analysing the transformations of young people’s learning with this new media, exploring issues such as the exchange of knowledge through YouTube and phenomena such as the YouTubers and the tutorials, which we find in all spheres of knowledge, from the trendy YouTubers to the TEDtalks.

Shouldn't we be cautious when selecting appropriate content in this ocean of digital producers?

We can say that new forms of curating, new curators and new opinion leaders are appearing, and what we have seen in the aforementioned project is that young people have their own channels of recognition and the YouTubers of reference through whom they find out about other consumer products of interest. And we are not only thinking about video games but also, for example, literary recommendations.

Today, could someone who communicates better have more chances as an opinion leader than someone with knowledge of a field?

Opinion leaders are people who are passionate about fields that interest them and have the ability to transmit their knowledge of this field, be it sport, cooking or science. They may not have any qualification to accredit their expertise but they must know what they are talking about. In short, it is their audience who validates their knowledge. The new opinion leaders combine knowledge, passion for what they do and communication skills.

Can you tell us about the new project Future Practices:  Spaces of Digital Creation and Social Innovation?

This research project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and is based on the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the new forms of digital creation, the future visions and the new collaborative and participatory production practices, which has a great deal to do with how we conceive social innovation; in other words, technology at the service of citizens. It also emerged out of the teamwork with Doctor Débora Lanzeni and Professor Sarah Pink. At an international level, we are working with an interesting team of people from Australia, Italy, Denmark and Barcelona, and we are also working jointly on fieldwork with different spaces of digital creation and artistic experimentation, such as the Fablabs, Makerspaces or LivingLabs, as well as other citizen spaces.

Your research has a very interdisciplinary approach.

In my work supervising doctoral theses I have always wanted to maintain this interdisciplinary vision and I was not afraid to include aspects unrelated with my expertise in collaboration with other experts. Such as a thesis I am jointly supervising on artificial intelligence by Àlex Ribas with Professor Bromberg, with whom we are working on how to coordinate these two fields of research, which are the development of intelligent systems and what we can contribute from the social sciences. Or another thesis on the design of interactive systems of augmented reality and joint creation with Professor Parès. In fact, there are many more synergies than we think but that are not apparent. At the research group MEDIACCIONS we are interested in establishing connections with the world of technology, design and with developers. In other words, there should be a flow of dialogue between anthropology, communication, creation and technological development.

Does society adequately value social sciences research?

In contrast to other countries such as Germany, in our country the crisis has brought cuts in education and research. We must add to this society’s ignorance of what the social sciences do and how they intervene in the world beyond surveys and microeconomics. For example, I was recently talking to a friend who is an engineer. I asked him what his work was and he said he manufactured cars. I responded that with the social sciences we make citizens… Which is more important?  

To conclude the interview, can you recommend a film?

I recommend the documentary HyperNormalisation to reflect on the current state of the world, the film The Distinguished Citizen, a black comedy about citizens, and Wadjda, a highly ethnographic film that takes us into other cultural universes.