Virtual ethnography : Placing emotional geographies via YouTube

Perry Carter explores the concept of virtual ethnographies using YouTube videos of African-American visitors to Cape Coast slave castles in Ghana. It is at these traumatic sites that emotional geographies, racial identity construction, and a sense of the sacred converge. This chapter argues that visual and spoken narratives emanating from these videos can be used to understand the motivation behind both their creation and the decision to share them online. More importantly, Carter also examines how this data source can help us understand the anger and anguish, remembrance and re-membering (making whole) that occurs in and through such traumatic and sacred sites.