When Anonymity is No Longer Enough: 'Fictionalization' as a New Way of Writing Ethnography in the Age of Digital Surveillance
(Together with Jürgen Schaflechner, FU-Berlin)
This project investigates how contemporary regimes of data tracking and algorithmic identification reshape notions of anonymity, privacy, and control in ethnographic writing. While anonymity has long been a concern in research ethics, today’s data-driven infrastructures render true anonymity increasingly fragile. The research examines how tracking technologies, originally designed for targeted advertising and behavioral prediction, produce new forms of social control and vulnerability, particularly in contexts of rising authoritarianism. By analyzing data points within ethnographic texts, the project explores how dispersed digital traces are recombined into powerful mechanisms of identification and governance. Ultimately, it aims to theorize how ethnographic texts can be written in ways that disperse personas, times, and places to avoid being corroborated as data points. Can one still write in ways that make it impossible for AI to identify a person? What degree of fictionalization is necessary and viable in each specific case under discussion?