ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the conceptual and methodological impasses that arise when social sites are “opened up” to “diverse mobilities” enabled by today’s interconnectivity. Drawing on sociomaterial framings, this chapter discusses new ways in which ethnography as a methodology can contribute to the study of “new”, “fluid” and “hybrid” mobilities. More specifically, access, inclusion and participation in contexts like school and online communities are attended to as dimensions of doing multiple-scale, “thick” ethnography. The chapter introduces the concept of “selective permeability” to elaborate on the ways in which the (im)mobility of people and tools across physical and digital spaces occurs randomly at times, but it is also a consequence of specific normative decisions, by digital tools or human beings. This concept originates from ethnographic data and analyses that show how participation is negotiated in light of the educational curriculum or other situated/informal expectations wherein boundaries and systems that are fixed and obey the laws of political/economical/institutional logics of control and governance also emerge. The chapter draws on data from multiple projects that consist of video recordings and observations of participants’ activities in and across online–physical spaces.
