Paper short abstract:

Reflections on an ongoing project to write a collaborative biography of Anachisale, an “ordinary” Malawian woman and longtime “key informant”. Taking inspiration from feminist scholarship, we are working across difference to analyse the co-creation of ethnographic knowledge and the ethics thereof.

Paper long abstract:

The paper reflects on an on-going project to write a collaborative biography of Anachisale, an “ordinary” rural Malawian woman and longtime anthropological “key informant”. Anachisale’s life story will enrich anthropological knowledge of matrilineal societies and gender relations in Africa, while the feminist-collaborative process of telling her story, including that of our mutual entanglement, is prompting the active reworking of anthropological methods of research, writing and dissemination. Central to this project are methods of reciprocal travel and mutual observation. Nevertheless, clear inequalities, including those of wealth, race, mobility, and education, cannot be easily overcome and must be continually addressed. As we advance the practice of feminist collaboration, we are grappling with longstanding challenges of representation and analysing both the co-creation of ethnographic knowledge and the ethics thereof.

Paper short abstract:

My paper draws on the challenges of co-constructing the unspoken secrets and unsettled pasts of a family ethnography. Is collaboration and co-production enough to adapt to the different ways of looking, listening, and paying attention to our interlocutor's unsettled pasts?

Paper long abstract:

When anthropologists work on life projects that are part microhistory and part memoir, learning how to protect or break research participants’ unspoken secrets remains fundamental. In this paper, I outline the methodological challenges and collaborative opportunities that have surfaced in my familial ethnography between myself, an anthropologist, and my father, my research participant. Studying extended family connections as a field-site, my project pieces together the lived experiences of my father and wider kin as a Chinese-Finnish mixed-race family living in Beijing under Mao Zedong rule at a time when careful monitoring and mutual surveillance geared people’s everyday affairs. Secrets, self-enforced social forgetting, repression and disremembering shapes the biographical narratives of many that grew up in this insulated environment. When conducting fieldwork, I am frequently faced with silence and warnings that undoing, exposing and concealing the unspoken past can lead to fatal consequences. How can I as an anthropologist and daughter help to co-construct my family member’s intimate recollections in these conditions? Rather than salvaging the past of our research participants and waiting for the sudden exposure of the ‘unspoken’, I contemplate whether co-production can help anthropologists adapt to different ways of looking, listening, and paying attention to the unexposed narratives of our research participants.

Paper short abstract:

Together with the Mā‘ohi custodian of a family archive, we aim to enlighten her family story and Mā‘ohi history. Considering the agency given to writing in this context: How can it be shared and translated into a thesis? How is the hierarchy of knowledge experienced and constantly renegotiated?

Paper long abstract:

In Ra‘iātea (French Polynesia, 2024), I found myself involved in my friend Marie-Louise’s investigation into her genealogy. She possesses family archives with lists of names and texts about objects which belonged to one of the ari‘i (chief) families of the island. Several life events led Marie-Louise to these texts she has been attempting to decipher. She asked for me to “write her story” in order to shed light on her past and enlighten Mā‘ohi (Polynesian) history. I accepted at the condition that we would write it together.

Although Marie-Louise insists on wanting her story to be told in a written form, she denies her ability to be a good writer but she certainly is a skilled storyteller. This collaboration thus started with a challenge: how can we make this work collaborative when one of us is not writing per se?

This paper will explore and question the methodological paths Marie-Louise and I are experimenting in working with and on her archives, life and families stories: we read the genealogies and texts together and separately, we recorded ourselves at times, we thought with and through her dreams and experienced the places where she lives. I will provide insights on how we are exploring our roles and positionalities and the ways in which we are building trust with each other. I will also reflect on the complexities of working on such sensitive documents at a time when both genealogical and land claims can provoke conflicts between or within Mā‘ohi families.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on a coproduced project into experiences of online facilitated child sexual abuse. This project produced a survivor-led zine, artworks, and animations as well as collaborative findings. It also explores the entanglements of lived-experience expertise with epistemic flattening.

Paper long abstract:

'Virtual abuse, infinite harm: A coproduced study with survivors of online child sexual abuse'

Trauma caused through online-facilitated abuse and exploitation challenges assumptions of online lives and understandings of trauma itself. Drawing on the expertise and insights of twenty-one adults who experienced online-facilitated child sexual abuse (OFCSA), we identified the centrality of control in traumatic events and the real and lasting harms caused by online sexual abuse. It contributes to understandings of the online in contemporary lives, showing the entwinement of the virtual with the actual. Our research identified key findings across experiences of online child abuse, and developed creative outputs including artworks, a zine, and animations. We embedded trauma-informed and survivor-focused research insights into our research practice, and throughout the project, we were committed to the quality of participants engagement being as important as the findings and outputs. This talk will reflect on our creative and coproduced methodologies and reconsider the concept of trauma through the lens of OFCSA.

This talk will also explore the knottiness of trauma with epistemologies of testimony and witnessing. While trauma can constitute an existential divide between those who have lived experiences of trauma (and within these, those who have a particular type of experience - for example, online as opposed to 'contact'), at the same time survivors experience epistemic 'flattening.' This flattening emerges as a hyphenation of knowledge through which their expertise as trauma survivors inflects their contributions as 'survivor-artists,' 'survivor-participants,' and 'person with lived experience.'

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we draw on a collaborative ethnography with asylum seeking participants living in temporary accommodation which took place during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study was a two-year collaboration with ‘Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment’ (MORE), a grassroots organisation based in Glasgow advocating for human rights and dignity for asylum seekers and refugees living in Glasgow. We describe how this collaboration was built in practice and what key methodological challenges and opportunities emerged in the course of the study and beyond. In doing so, the talk offers a critical reappraisal of principles and practice often associated with participatory methods and co-production, calling for an understanding of these methods that centers around care and relationships. In conclusion we argue for an approach that sees co-production as a humble form of ethnographic inquiry rather than a 'messy' and complex methodology as it is often understood in the current literature.

Paper short abstract:

Is it possible to democratise ethnography? We reflect on the term ‘citizen ethnography’ as a possible answer to this question. We define this as an approach that recognises multiple contributions to fieldwork, analysis and authorship, albeit with a number of inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

Is it possible to democratise ethnography? We reflect on the term ‘citizen ethnography’ as a possible answer to this question. We define this as an approach that recognises multiple contributions to fieldwork, analysis and authorship, albeit with a number of inequalities, where academics work with non-academics. We reflect on longstanding debates around the uses of research assistants and other devices that have distanced the analytical contributions of non-academics in published ethnographic work. We also reflect on the terms ‘local’ and ‘indigenous’ and why the authors of this article resist these ascriptions in thinking about their ethnographer identities. We also demonstrate, through a series of examples, how citizen ethnography means working both within, and away from, home areas, and how it involves responding critically and reflexively to academic texts as part of the process. In understanding ethnographic analysis as ‘intersubjective practise’ we see opportunities for opening up questions around who gets credit.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ethical, methodological, and practical implications of incorporating 'community researchers' in a research project on irregular migration. It examines the benefits of participatory research, including 'experiential advantage' and 'para-ethnographic consciousness'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ethical, methodological, and practical implications of incorporating ‘community researchers’ in the I-CLAIM project, which investigates the living and labor conditions of migrants with precarious or no legal status. The study employs participatory research methodologies, engaging community members as co-researchers in ethnographic fieldwork.

This approach is founded on the belief that knowledge is shaped by lived experiences and that everyone can contribute to its generation. This participatory model offers two key advantages: the ‘experiential advantage’, where community researchers share similar identities with participants, providing deeper insights, and ‘para-ethnographic consciousness’, which grants them expertise through experience. These factors create an ‘epistemic advantage’ that can uncover blind spots and challenge biased interpretations, enriching the research process.

However, including community researchers presents complexities. Their involvement may reveal power imbalances within the researched community and pose challenges in addressing the ‘positionality problem’. Additionally, the creation of community researcher roles may inadvertently reproduce structural inequalities, as they are often hired on temporary contracts with low wages, handling the most emotionally taxing aspects of fieldwork. Furthermore, while community researchers facilitate access to hard-to-reach populations, their involvement also risks becoming an extractive practice, depending on their status and the roles of senior researchers in the project.

To address these concerns, this paper aims to reflect upon strategies, concepts, and protocols that balance the benefits of community involvement with the need to address potential ethical and methodological pitfalls.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the Anishinaabemowin distinction between a research relationship framed by the value of the scholarly work, jiigi-aya'ii ji-wiiji'ad awiya, and one characterized by equality and mutual benefit, owiisookaagewin, suggesting new paths to the production of anthropological knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

There is a unique history of Anishinaabe people on the Upper Berens River in Manitoba participating in collaborative anthropological research, particularly in the famous friendship between American anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell and Chief William Berens in the 1930s, an excellent example of a whole-hearted academic relationship, jiigi-aya'ii ji-wiiji'ad awiya. While Hallowell’s relationship with William Berens was about insightful translation of Anishinaabe ideas into a scholarly discourse, our engagement over the past twenty years with these people and these communities has been more open and mutually beneficial, owiisookaagewin. My collaborators include Omishoosh, Charlie George Owen and Jaamash, Jacob Owen of Pauingassi, Margaret Simmons (granddaughter of William Berens), and most importantly Anishinaabe linguists Roger Roulette and Carol Beaulieu. Since 2006, we have been involved in writing academic papers in support of the bid of four Upper Berens River Anishinaabe communities including Pauingassi, who wanted to secure their tribal lands as a UNESCO world heritage site. Now that the Pimachiowin Aki bid has been successful, we have turned to making those academic papers useful in the communities; making the information available in Anishinaabemowin for schools so that the children in communities will benefit. Over the last five years we have produced 6 bilingual Anishinaabemowin/ English books for the schools that bring the UNESCO research home. In the process, we learned that making books for rather than about Anishinaabe peoples, is a very productive kind of collaborative anthropological project.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will explore the ways that interlocutors engage with, damage, or even destroy physical objects and surfaces to enact material rupture when no alternative communication seems viable/legible to those around them.

Paper long abstract:

A broken window. A boot-crushed through a frozen puddle. An ethnographic drawing defaced to include symbols of hate. A shopping cart crashed into public art. Amidst experiences of anger, trauma, a new country, a new school, fear, apathy, and/or ambiguity about what lies ahead; children seek to be acknowledged, but often not through discussion. In this paper I will explore the ways that young people engage with, damage, or even destroy physical objects and surfaces to enact material rupture when no alternative communication seems viable/legible to those around them. I will think through this specifically within the context of my work in London primary and secondary schools as both physical spaces and as specific kinds of social ecologies, places in which – as part of ethnographic enquiry – I support young people's development of multimodal ethnographic methods in the aim of helping them to tell their own stories, in their own ways. The aim of this paper is to examine the value of disruptive communication. How does learning the weight of one’s own perspectives and ambitions for various futures impact on young people’s modes of engagement? How can ‘we’ (adults/decision-makers/witnesses) learn how to listen to more-than-verbal messages?

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the process of writing an ethnography of/as apprenticeship into a book, using dialogic and collaborative methods. It examines different ways of integrating in the text reactions and comments by the teachers whose knowledge forms the basis for the research.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2010 I have been studying the ecological knowledge of initiated donso hunters in Burkina Faso, as an anthropologist and as an apprentice of donsoya. In the feature-length documentary that accompanied my dissertation, Kalanda – The Knowledge of the Bush, I have found space to collaborate with my hunting teachers through feedback screenings, re-creating with them the experience of an apprentice for the viewer. In this paper, however, I reflect on the experience of writing that research in an academic monograph, and on the differences and obstacles that this format presents compared to a film. Specifically, whereas in the documentary I could narrate from the point of view of a student, giving authority to the master hunters who explained things to me and to the viewer, a monograph tends to treat their teachings as data and my interpretations as upper-level knowledge – thus starkly inverting the hierarchy. Conscious that, as Tedlock reminded us in 1979, anthropology starts out as a fieldwork dialogue but anthropologists often present us with monologues, I am experimenting with dialogic editing (Feld) to make the phase of theorising open to my teachers. After having extensively discussed my manuscript with them, I examine several possibilities for writing their feedback into the text, inspired by recent examples of collaborative ethnographies. In the process, I reflect on issues of censorship and secrecy of initiatory knowledge, of authorship and responsibility, and on the role of a multimodal website that will accompany the book.

Paper short abstract:

A collaborative multimodal ethnography based on photography and digital storytelling workshops with residents of a therapeutic community in Lisbon. By promoting shared trajectories and identity reconstruction, this study proposes new inclusive and transformative directions for anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This study investigates a collaborative multimodal ethnography conducted through photography and digital storytelling workshops for residents of the Ares do Pinhal Association Therapeutic Community in Portugal. The collaboration created in the workshops reflects the possibilities and challenges of a shared ethnographic practice, where the anthropologist serves as a mediator and the participants are active in the research process. Each session involved the participants in creative processes through multimodal ethnographic recording techniques, promoting an exploration of their trajectories and future perspectives with a direct impact on mental health.

The research questions the hierarchies of knowledge in anthropology, suggesting ethical and epistemological alternatives in which anthropologist and interlocutors act as co-explorers of new directions. The themes addressed - ‘Recovery and Treatment’, ‘Social Reintegration’ and ‘(Re)Construction of Identity’ - illustrate the transformative potential of this collaborative ethnography for reorienting anthropological practice.

By expanding the role of participants beyond research subjects, this approach investigates the limits and possibilities of an Anthropology focused on social reintegration and identity transformation, contributing to the future of ethnography with an innovative and engaged perspective.

This research questions the ‘prescribed routes’ of conventional anthropology by proposing an alternative path, where the anthropologist and the participants emerge as co-explorers of new epistemological and ethical directions. This practice proposes an anthropology guided by principles of empathy and inclusion, promoting the construction of collective and ethnographically aware horizons that promote social reintegration with an impact on the mental health of people in the process of treatment and recovery.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of contemporary hunter-gatherer youth in using multimodal methods to co-create knowledge and reflect on their ongoing process of "Becoming."

Paper long abstract:

Every contemporary hunter-gatherer community faces the same challenge: a rapidly changing world that profoundly disrupts their survival system of "Becoming." This research aims to highlight the role of the Orang Rimba youth in using multimodal methods to assess their experiences in complex situations. Ultimately, the study evaluates how this approach contributes to co-creating knowledge. The research was undertaken for 18 months, during which multimodal methods were used, and it ended with a stop-motion workshop. Co-creation activities offer a broad space for independent leadership to shape their stories into short animations and then brought to discussions. I documented these processes as a vital part of my research.

The focus is on analyzing the stop-motion creation process and the agency of children and youth within it, as well as to what extent this approach allows them to be co-researchers of their own community. The study also determines whether these cultural and technological factors contribute to collective understanding and co-production of knowledge.