Abstract
There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which uses TikToks to facilitate a reflexive encounter, drawing on three areas of scholarship: media ethnography and elicitation, researcher reflexivity and duoethnography/collaborative autoethnography. We describe how we, as a donor-conceived adult (Giselle) and a queer woman who would need donor sperm to have a child (Clare), employed TikToks from #donorconceived as prompts to facilitate a sensitive conversation and elicit situated insights. We explore three central insights from applying our method: (1) discomfort as a productive tension; (2) unresolved dilemmas; and (3) discovering parallels in experience. Using TikToks as stimuli, ‘Situated Talk’ contributes an innovative method for generating grounded social media insights.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 66-80 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Media International Australia |
Volume | 186 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2023 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- digital ethnography
- donor conception
- LGBTQ +
- qualitative methods
- TikTok