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- Convenors:
-
Sabine Mannitz
(Peace Research Institute Frankfurt PRIF)
Birgit Bräuchler (University of Copenhagen)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Jan Anderson (E101A), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
As ethnography and participant observation have become popular in various social sciences, the ways in which these are engaged need reconsideration. To that end we ask what implications cross-disciplinary leanings render, and want to reflect on the value which - maybe only - our discipline can add.
Long Abstract:
Over the past years, scholars have experimented with interdisciplinary methodological encounters and research designs and ethnography and participant observation have become popular tools outside anthropology. At the same time, social anthropologists have adapted their methodology or adopted research methods from sociology or political science to complement (or even replace?) ethnographic research. This is particularly the case in the study of global
connections which has prompted novel ways of accessing social facts and fields. Concepts such as "ethnoscapes" (Appadurai), "non-local ethnography" (Feldman), "global macroanthropology" (Erikson) or "the field site as network" (Burrell) mirror this development. Anthropologists and other social sciences scholars alike study, for instance, international organisations, global-local dynamics in political mobilisation, postcolonial conflicts or peacebuilding; they all develop theories about global flows and their interlinkages with 'the local', and they increasingly work together in multi-disciplinary teams.
This panel seeks to open up space for reflection on experiences with as well as potential and costs of interdisciplinary endeavours. We invite contributions that address theoretical problems, methodological considerations, or challenges related to certain thematic fields: Which anthropological theories travel easily across disciplinary boundaries, and which value may be gained from this? How do researchers from neighbouring disciplines conduct ethnographic fieldwork, and what are the implications of these adoptions for anthropology? Can anthropological theory and methodology be separated at all? What research questions and social phenomena call for, and benefit from, interdisciplinary approaches? Where are the limits to this and should anthropologists insist on the value that only anthropology can add?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 2 December, 2019, -Lucas Marie (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the value of multi-sited ethnography, both for anthropological and interdisciplinary studies of global socio-cultural fields. Through my work with hip hop dance practitioners I address some of the merits, challenges and limits of employing multi-sited ethnographic approaches.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the value of multi-sited ethnographic approaches, both for anthropological and interdisciplinary studies of global socio-cultural fields. Through my experience working with hip hop dance practitioners across different localities, I address some of the merits, challenges and limits of employing multi-sited ethnographic approaches. My discussions illustrate the importance of the researchers' position, their questions and the field itself, with regards to the merits of this approach. This contributes towards contemporary debates, within anthropology and sociology, about the limits of empirical research within globally interconnected (and disconnected) cultural fields.
Leela Ford
Paper short abstract:
Based on research methodology developed for the study the Rojavan Women's Protection Units (YPJ)'s social media, I show how anthropology has the unique potential to contribute to understandings of both alternative future ways of being, and test some of the crucial ontological theories of our time.
Paper long abstract:
The Kurdish revolution in Rojava Northern Syria, and its all-women militia known as 'Women's Protection Units' (In Kurmanji: Yekîneyên Parastina Jin or YPJ), present us with two core research challenges. Firstly, they have secured space for their revolutionary politics to decidedly rupture the fabric of dominant social understandings. Secondly, it is a prime example of the increasingly common fields of precarity and unreachability with which the modern ethnographer must contend, problematising ethnographic tradition. This area, I believe, provides an example of fertile ground in which anthropology can provide understanding of alternative possibilities for a 'politics of hope'. This is through its methodological capacity to understand 'difference' arising from transformative projects, in ways that theories for understanding dominant political realities may be limited. This contribution has a seemingly unlikely marriage to the emerging field of non-emplaced virtual/visual ethnography. Here, the anthropology of 'futures' and the anthropology of 'presents' (or 'presence'; the essence of 'being here') meet on the precipice of the discipline's radical new frontier: the experiential plane. This plane connects the philosophy of the existential turn with the methodological developments arising from the spatial and sensory turns. Reflecting upon the methodological lessons taken from research into the YPJ's self-documentation in social media, I argue that not only can these intersecting developments strengthen anthropology's ability to contribute to political research, but it allows the discipline to provide a unique, material application and testing of modern philosophy's most significant developments in ontology as they relate to agency, revolution, rupture and 'event'.
Sabine Mannitz (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt PRIF)
Paper short abstract:
My presentation addresses frictions between the international knowledge regime of 'good security governance' - with a special focus on the concept of human security - and context specific conditions and understandings of security in selected arenas of international security assistance policies.
Paper long abstract:
My presentation draws on a research project conducted from 2012 to 2017 with a team from different disciplines (anthropology, political science, psychology). Our research addressed frictions between the international knowledge regime of 'good security governance' and local context conditions by studying Security Sector Reform (SSR) programs and their practical implementations. Special attention was given to so called 'localization efforts' and 'ownership' on the one hand, and to the ways in which 'human security' was described, understood, and practised on the other. All of the team members conducted ethnographic research as part of their case studies. While we were foremost interested in studying the interactions between norm entrepreneurs, national stakeholders and local reform arenas and the dynamics that unfold between them, the multi-disciplinary composition of the project team also brought to light gains and frictions that result from disciplinary positionalities. I shall present result from both levels: SSR and the experience of directing a disciplinarily heterogeneous team.
Birgit Bräuchler (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Critical peace scholars increasingly endorse anthropology as research partner, but do not go far enough yet due to reductionist notions of anthropology and ethnography. The paper explores how to overcome conceptual and methodological challenges of ethnographic peace research.
Paper long abstract:
Mainstream peacebuilding interventions often fail because of the refusal of local agency and eye-level participation. The local turn has not delivered the wished for results either. Culture and the local are often reified and denied its flexibility and heterogeneity for better understanding and control. Given such continuing deficiencies, some critical peace scholars began endorsing anthropology as important partner in peace research. This is a welcome turn in a research field dominated by political sciences, but as I argue in this paper, such appropriation does not go far enough yet, either taking anthropology as an auxiliary science, reducing it to the ethnographic method, or dealing with the local only as part or legitimation of larger international efforts. In this paper, I aim to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and provide suggestions how anthropology can help to overcome conceptual and methodological challenges of ethnographic peace research.