Tracing the infrastructural unfolding of (edtech) events through hybrid team ethnography

This article contributes to expanding discussions on the rising hybridity of (edtech) events and, in conjunction to that, of ethnographic (edtech) event research. With hybridity, we point to the increasing postdigital condition of contemporary society. Even though such hybridity, and its methodological consequences for ethnographic research, are increasingly discussed, few attention has so far been put on how this hybridity manifests in, and is mediated through, orchestrations of data infrastructures. This article presents hybrid team ethnography as a way to study, and at the same time be intricately interwoven with, such infrastructure-mediated hybridity. Concretely, we report on an ethnography in which we studied an event in the edtech startup sector. Our findings showcase how researchers co-construct and are shaped by events, not just through dynamic interplays between physical presence-absence, but equally through data infrastructures and research(er) presentation. Moreover, they simultaneously showcase how edtech events unfold infrastructurally over space and time.