Theorising ambiguity: telling deliberately equivocal viral stories

Toft, D.F. (2022)

Doctoral Thesis

This dissertation takes ambiguity as its main theoretical focal point. It illustrates how ambiguity is used strategically from many sides. Further it presents novel approaches to conceptualizing ambiguous content and ambiguous relationships. In addition it is concerned with potentiality and temporality.
The deliberate ambiguity of viral stories and the chaos surrounding them, elaborates on how to create an account while accounting for positioning in time as well as space. It elaborates on the way both ethnographer and informants simultaneously create accounts that are specific to their positions, and that these specificities must be considered as the ethnographer shifts between different modes of ordering while in the field, while analyzing, and while retrospectively accounting for past events. 
The dissertation takes a methodological stance towards embracing conflicts, discontinuity, and messy data as the source of understanding. Deliberately looking for temporalities, potentiality, and ambiguity encourages a focus on uncertainty, open ends, and multiple possible versions. Doing so is crucial when attending to matters that are both sudden, intensive, highly digitally mediated, and subject to massive attention.
The dissertation provides methodological as well as practical concerns, valuable to researchers whose object of study is brief but intense, including the retrospective representation of it.

• Ambiguity
• Temporality
• Potentiality
• Methodology
• Onthology
• Abcense
• Fire objects
• Fluidity
• Mess
• Viral

• All authors: Toft, D.F.
• Supervisor: Wouters, P.F.; Beaulieu, A.
• Committee: Rijcke, S. de; Barendregt, B.A.; Lammes, S.; Woolgar, S.; Shah, N.
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University
• Date: 2022-06-22