Jennifer Barth
Computing
Lecturer | BA MA DPhil
T +4 (0)20 7919 7863
j.barth (@gold.ac.uk)
Current Research
Jennifer Barth teaches in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies (CAST). After completing her DPhil at the University of Oxford entitled Taste, ethics and the market in Guatemalan coffee. An ethnographic study, she has been exploring the areas of digital sociology, digital research methods and how we might become hybrid social researchers moving across the physical and digital world. This work comes out of the desire to augment her ethnographic practice with digital techniques and multimedia field research. She has undertaken multiple short digital projects including one on Firesheep and privacy and another on Cloud computing, both featured in the media.
Her extended ethnographic DPhil thesis on coffee took her to Latin America where she worked closely with coffee producers and other coffee professionals located in or passing through Guatemala. Through a performative and relational lens, the thesis works to make visible the range and diversity of processes and agencies involved in the production of markets for ethical coffee. It considers coffee as vital and mobile; an active producer of public effects rather than a passive object moved through a commodity network. The thesis extends the qualifications of coffee to the daily enactments of cultivation and the skills and techniques that work to reveal taste. On this view, taste mediates the agency of the materials in both high quality and sustainable coffees and this expands and extends ethics to interpersonal, material and bodily relations that link producers and consumers in multiple ways.
Jennifer has undertaken research projects as both academic and consultant in Zimbabwe and Tanzania where she looked at the potential for ethical investment strategies to meet the needs as defined by the people at whom they were directed.
She is the CAST course leader for the MA/MSc Digital Sociology and teaches in the Digital Case Studies, Digital Sandbox, and Digital Research Methods modules.
Research Interests
Ethnographic methods in the physical and digital world, digital sociology, intersections of social theory and computing practice, digital research methods, coffee production and networks, ethical commitments in supply networks and ethical investment strategies, materiality, affect and taste, economic sociology and geography
Recent conference and workshops
28 January, 2012, Uploading Ethnography: Developing a Real Time Archive, Workshop part of the Real Time Research Project, funded by ESRC National Centre for Research Methods.
3 December 2011, ‘The Hybrid Social Researcher’, Event One of the Real Time Research project, Goldsmiths, University of London.
April 2011, ‘Learning to taste coffee: Origin stories, ethical imaginations, and the perfect cup’, Association of American Geographers, Seattle.
Publications
Barth, Jennifer, Brauer Chris and Robert Zimmer. Submitted. ‘Digital Interventions in Social Research.’ Sociological Review.
Barth, Jennifer. 2010. Taste, ethics and the market in Guatemalan coffee. An ethnographic study. Unpubished DPhil thesis, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.