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- Convenors:
-
Alana Brekelmans
(University of Queensland Charles Darwin University)
Diana Romano (Deakin University / University of Queensland)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Vitality
- Location:
- WPE Anglesea
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
In this panel we engage with affect and emotion as tools for anthropology. We ask how the discipline can better address trauma in fieldwork, respect empathy as central to ethnographic practice, and represent emotion in ethnography.
Long Abstract:
Researchers' bodies and emotions have long been regarded as central to the construction of ethnographic knowledge. And yet, long after the reflexive turn, ideals of 'ethnography without tears' (Roth 1989) persist, with many ethnographic accounts omitting the emotional experiences of the ethnographer. In many cases, ethnography continues to be imbued with a colonial and patriarchal rationality that rejects the researchers' emotional experiences or demands a 'sink or swim' and 'grin and bear it' approach to difficulties during fieldwork.
This has implications for well-being, recruitment and retention in the profession. Moreover, it overlooks the fundamental role of emotion in anthropological practice. Ethnographic attention to researcher emotions, mistakes, traumas, and vulnerabilities can be crucial in building rapport, illuminating and overcoming prejudices in the researcher's interpretations, and understanding complex social relations, sometimes enabling researchers to explore aspects of social life they would not have otherwise understood.
In this panel we ask, what does it mean to think with emotion in anthropological practice--that is, to do ethnography with tears? What knowledge does this thinking with construct?
We explore how the discipline can better address trauma in fieldwork, respect empathy as central to ethnographic practice, and represent emotion in ethnography. We invite contributions from anthropologists working in applied, academic, and creative research. Our aim is to initiate discussion and reflection on the role of emotion in anthropological work and what this means for anthropologists as subjects, scholars, and activists, as well as for a community of practice and the anthropological project at large.
Discussant: Professor Anna Hickey-Moody (RMIT)
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 November, 2022, -Kelly Ka-Lai Chan (RMIT)
Paper short abstract:
The paper draws attention to doing ethnographic work during multiple crises. My study explores recent creative and collective responses to the erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong. I make a case for a renewed consideration of the shifting role of activists, artists and researchers.
Paper long abstract:
In July 2020, the Chinese Communist Party introduced the National Security Law, one of the most restrictive measures taken to tighten its grip over the former British colony, known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997. The Law not only poses threats to academic freedom in and outside Hong Kong but has drawn international condemnation. Moreover, the ongoing exodus from Hong Kong presents growing fears and uncertainty for the city's future.
Undertaken during the pandemic and political unrest in the city, this visual ethnography explores recent creative and collective responses to the erosion of freedoms through the perspectives of six Hong Kong artist-activists.
As a Hong Kong-born and trained artist and educator, I undertake this study of my home city while removed from it. Throughout the protest movement, the pandemic, and radical changes in Hong Kong, I have been an international student living and working in Melbourne, Australia, a city that has experienced the longest accumulated lockdown for any city in the world. I have experienced racist encounters and witnessed the Australian government's privileged treatment of migrants from Hong Kong. The ethnography is presented alongside autoethnographic reflections on disruptive historical events amid the pandemic. These events exposed deep-rooted issues of post-coloniality before decolonisation and surfaced conflicting ideologies that further divided many cities. The paper draws attention to my reflections on doing ethnographic work during multiple crises. I make a case for a renewed consideration of the shifting role of activists, artists and researchers.
Alana Brekelmans (University of Queensland Charles Darwin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on improvised art as a means of critically engaging with the ways bodies are implicated in colonial violence through attention to that which exceeds patriarchal and colonial ordering and that which emerges as an affective ‘something’ that demands attention.
Paper long abstract:
This article charts the question of excess in colonised places and in anthropological practice. In particular, I draw to on the work of Lauren Berlant to reflect on the potentiality for improvised art and performance as a means of critically engaging with the ways in which individual, disciplinary, and national bodies are implicated in colonial violence through attention to that which exceeds patriarchal and colonial ordering and that which emerges as an affective ‘something’ that demands attention. I show how improvisation, as a feminist methodology, responds to excess by producing excessive potentiality and unrehearsed emotion.
Yang Zhao (University of Queensland)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from a digital ethnography of performative masculinities on TikTok, this paper examines the methodological and ethical implications of doing digital ethnography during COVID-19 as a TikTok video creator who has various positionalities and identities.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I examine methodological innovations in social science research by focusing on the opportunities and challenges in doing digital ethnography as a TikTok video creator. The increased reliance on the digitalization of daily life makes the boundary between our real life and digital spaces increasingly blurred. Ethnography, as a set of participatory and observational methods studying everyday life, is experiencing significant epistemological and methodological restructuring in light of the digital age. Drawing from digital ethnographic fieldwork on TikTok as part of a doctoral ethnography of performative masculinities in Uzbekistan during COVID-19, this paper examines the methodological and ethical implications of doing digital ethnography as a video creator. TikTok videos created by the researcher and online interactions were thematically analyzed and reflected to revisit the methodological and ethical implications to ethnographic and qualitative studies. The analysis draws out my positionalities and identities (e.g., Chinese, Muslim, international student in Australia, middle-class, unmarried, millennial, cis-male) which contrasted the population. Different positionalities and identities of the researcher as a TikTok blogger expanded research opportunities and helped reach out to a more geographically, economically, and culturally diverse group of interlocutors. Furthermore, reflecting on myself, as the researcher who was also an object in the field, also worked to reshape the traditional top-down research relationship. The paper concludes by considering how doing digital ethnography on TikTok could be greatly subject to the local political, cultural, and social contexts and cause potential physical and emotional sufferings to the researcher that need our further attention.
Erin Gates (The Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the impacts of sexism, misogyny, and general lack of early career support for female anthropologists, using Dr. Marie Reay’s career as a case study. Whom did the anthropological orthodoxy encourage and whom did it thwart?
Paper long abstract:
Over her career spanning more than five decades, Marie Reay came to be regarded as a well-respected figure in her field of Melanesian anthropology. However, Reay’s experiences with authority figures in academia are emblematic of a period during which, by simply existing within the department as a woman, her career in anthropology was radical, and during her lifetime her work was subsequently undervalued and undermined by many of her male colleagues. When Reay’s career began, while a female anthropologist was legitimized by male patronage, she was also, to varying degrees, both benefiting from and constrained by male protection. Reay certainly would have felt the pressure to conform to current norms within the discipline, or risk repercussions from her supervisors. This paper will investigate some alternative routes her work may have taken, document some instances of abusive treatment from her superiors and the long-term traumatic impacts of this poor conduct on her mental health, and, finally, articulate the complicated positionality of what it was to be a female anthropologist at the ANU during Reay’s career.