Anthropological and ethnographic studies related to the internet in educational research: an integrative review

Abstract

Despite a renewed interest in the field of education regarding the impacts of the internet and digital technologies in various educational contexts from an anthropological perspective, there are not many literature reviews discussing the main contributions of these research studies. Therefore, in the present review, we examined articles published in education journals with a Qualis A3 or higher rating that explicitly employ the frameworks of anthropological and ethnographic studies related to the internet. To do so, we followed the guidelines of Gregg B. Jackson (1980) and Harris M. Cooper (1982) for integrative literature reviews. The search terms used were “digital anthropology,” “anthropology AND cyberspace,” “anthropology AND cyberculture,” “digital ethnography,” “virtual ethnography,” “netnography,” as well as their equivalents in Portuguese. In searches conducted in the Periódicos CAPES and Scopus databases, after filtering by field and quality rating, along with other exclusion criteria, we identified 42 relevant works. For an overview, we highlight that some of the works that do not focus on anthropological issues do so because they focus more on other educational aspects, while another subset of works does not emphasize educational issues due to their theoretical frameworks or because they address more general topics such as research methods.