LA LEY DE VÍCTIMAS Y RESTITUCIÓN DE TIERRAS, LEY 1448 DE 2011

I conducted a traditional and virtual ethnography over the course of four years that bridges semiotic (linguistic and visual) and cultural anthropologies to Africana Studies theory by inductively interpreting the words and actions of Liberian-born young people in the United States and Liberia and situating them in broader public discourses. Those broader discourses came specifically from popular culture, news media, schools, and the Liberian and United States across a wide timespan.

The central participants (“research subjects” or “informants”) were indigenous Liberian-born young people between 18 and 30-years-old who lived in the Philadelphia area. My secondary participants were Liberian young people in the

Monrovia area (also in the same age range) and African American peers in the Philadelphia area (also in the same age range).

My primary means for gathering information, or “data,” which Clifford Geertz famously called out as “our constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (1973:9) included: (1) conducting participant-observation at school, home, and other social spaces with the participants; (2) conducting ethnographic interviews; (3) performing virtual ethnography via social media sites like Facebook© and Instagram© (i.e., interacting with participants via these sites and taking screenshots of participants’ postings and comments and downloading participants’ images); (4) audio and video recording interviews and participant-observation sessions whenever fitting and feasible; (5) periodically photographing participants, their friends, their belongings, and their surroundings; (6) handwriting and typing written field notes and audio recording “audio field notes” after spending time with participants; and (7) conducting archival research in various libraries and online. The fieldwork sites included: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States and surrounding suburban communities; Monrovia, Liberia and some of its immediate surrounding areas; and digital space.

Painted wood section of a residential cement block wall in the Sinkor neighborhood of Monrovia, 2011 (Photograph by author)

The central phase of this ethnography spanned just over two and half years, from the fall of 2011 to the summer of 2014, but the overall project began taking form in 2008 and trickles into this very moment. The main data comes from face-to-face participant-observation and digital/virtual participant-observation that centered on a small group of young people as they attended high school and college, went to work, interacted with family, and socialized with peers in the Philadelphia area. For one academic year (2011 to 2012), I spent between five and ten hours each week “hanging out” with each participant.

Victoria hard at work in English class her senior year of high school, 2012 (Photograph by author)

During this time, I tried to pay close attention to various aspects of their multimodal communicative practices (e.g., how they talked; who they talked to; what they talked about [especially regarding race, ethnicity, language, gender, sex, or hip hop]; how they dressed; how they wore their hair; what music they listened to, created, or danced to; who they dated; etc.). Much of my time with them was spent talking with them and hanging out with them and their friends (i.e., eating, running errands, or sitting somewhere and talking). I also visited one participant at work (helping a colleague document his work day on film), attended church with one, and spent time with the family of another on a number of occasions.

After that academic year (their senior year of high school), I visited with each person intermittently, sometimes hanging out at the community college they all attended, or meeting up for lunch or dinner, or hanging out with them in their

neighborhood (a neighborhood with a large Liberian immigrant population). From the summer of 2012 until the summer of 2014, I interacted with them via text, Facebook messaging, or in person at least once every two weeks, approximately. The key male participant, Brian, I saw considerably less often than the two women but I observed his online interactions diligently, as his subjectivity and lifestyle seemed to be undergoing drastic changes in this space (which I explore in depth in Chapter 4).

Awad Ibrahim formalized “hanging out methodology” – a theoretically-driven method of experiencing evidence – in his critical ethnography The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming (2014). Ibrahim’s framework upholds anthropology’s most

fundamental precept and desire that bearing witness to a phenomenon in context and over time provides an invaluable brand of insight, a kind of vision that yields more truth, knowledge, or mere understanding. I work from that same precept and desire and imagine my interpretations of the words and actions of the young people who participated in the project are actually representative of how they wanted to position themselves in relation to present and absent others (i.e., of their dynamic co-constructed intersubjectivities). In other words, I imagine that my time with them and the varying intimacies I developed in some way deputizes me to tell their stories as seen through my eyes.

My secondary group of participants lived in Monrovia and I met and began getting to know while visiting the city in the fall of 2012. I spent one month in Sinkor, a bustling neighborhood in central Monrovia, observing and talking with young people in the area and visiting 10 surrounding schools. I spent most of my time with five individuals during my stay, two of whom were not research participants. The other three I met up with at least five times to sit and talk on the beach or a porch in the neighborhood, have a meal or snack at a local eatery, go for a long walk on the beach, shop at the open-air Waterside market, listen to live and recorded music, or some other activity. We also passed and greeted each other frequently on the street in the small community. I would usually spend 1-3 hours during these get-togethers and on six occasions, spent the entire day with the participant. Upon returning to the US, I would start new relationships with some individuals who I either met briefly while in Monrovia or was introduced to virtually through a mutual acquaintance. Those relationships have developed virtually over the past three years and differ from and correspond with those that began in “real life” in significant ways.

The ethnographic interviews (or conversations, given the symmetric questioning that usually occurred) I conducted were generally semi-structured in that they were initiated by my asking one or two open-ended, minimally-directive questions and went on to generate questions and comments (by all participants) on themes that emerged dynamically in the interaction (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). Because my relationship with the participants was a methodological and analytical

concern throughout this project, I often shared my own experiences and ideas in these interviews, and invited questions from participants. They were plainly aware of my personal investment in the project (which I described as a study about their experiences and ideas so that educators and others could better understand Liberian young people and black youth relationships today) and they also knew my views about blackness, transnationalism, racism, and black diaspora. Most of these ethnographic interviews were one-on-one but group interviews were also conducted at different points in the project.

My focus on multimodal semiotics required analysis of sign usage beyond verbal language (i.e., beyond word-based communication), therefore interviews and conversations were audio or video-recorded, logged, and transcribed whenever possible so that I could attend to non-verbal signs that comprised the context and co-text of verbal content (e.g., intonation, pauses, laughter, gesture, facial expression, dress, hair style, body comportment, etc.). I also noted non-verbal signs in my field notes.

The early stages of analyzing my data included: (1) transcribing selections of audio and video recordings; (2) logging all audio and video recordings; and, (3) recursively analyzing field notes and carrying out discourse analysis of online communication and transcripts.