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- Convenors:
-
Asiya Islam
(London School of Economics)
Niharika Pandit (Queen Mary University of London)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract:
This roundtable will bring together editors, authors, and readers of Otherwise Magazine, a platform for ethnographic storytelling, to discuss the politics and potential of ‘writing otherwise’, while highlighting emerging interventions that are opening up space for storytellers.
Long Abstract:
This roundtable will bring together editors, authors, and readers of Otherwise Magazine, a platform for ethnographic storytelling, to discuss the politics and potential of ‘writing otherwise’. While academic writing is constrained by standardised formats, theoretical frameworks, and jargon, there are emerging interventions (of which Otherwise Magazine is one) that are opening up space for storytellers within and outside academia, activism, professional writing, and visual arts. The roundtable will highlight these interventions in engaging with the specificities of this ‘creative turn’ in ethnographic research, asking why here, why now, and what next. In particular, it will focus on the potential of storytelling about the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’ to envisage other possibilities – other ways of living, of understanding, of imagining the past, present and future – which is significant for a ‘world in motion’. It will also delve into the ethical considerations and challenges associated with ‘writing otherwise’, including issues of representation, voice, and authenticity. The roundtable will question established positionalities of storytelling, and consider how to create spaces for the researched—and not only the researcher—to tell their stories. As such, the roundtable will, through a focus on ‘writing otherwise’ which is a call for rethinking the ways in which ethnographers shed light on the world, engage with the conference theme to reimagine anthropological horizons and map new possibilities.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Ethnographic tools can bring a different dimension to journalism—one that can help with the mounting challenges faced by journalists. Plus, in identifying the methods ethnographers employ that can help journalists, social scientists see their skills in a new light.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic tools can bring a different dimension to journalism—one that can help with the mounting challenges faced by journalists. Journalism is recognizing a need for reform and modernization. News producers and journalism schools are reckoning with the lack of diversity in news products, in the newsroom, and in the classroom. Working journalists are increasingly facing distrust from the communities they cover, leading to decreased engagement from readers and interviewees, as well as online harassment, particularly experienced by journalists of color and women. A history of legacy media not covering, or misrepresenting, marginalized communities has journalists trying to repair relationships with communities and trying to engage rather than extract. However, although representation, empathy and subjectivity help increase trust in news, these approaches also increase the odds of being accused of bias. Newsrooms, J-Schools, and journalism foundations are looking for solutions.
We see ethnographic methods in many of the “new” methodologies being promoted to solve the journalism industry’s challenges.
In my experience and research there are four major problem areas for the individual journalist: finding emerging stories; finding diverse sources; conducting meaningful interviews; and gaining trust. For each of these challenges there exist solutions pulled from ethnography.
And in reviewing the ethnographic methods that are helping journalism's modern challenges, the ethnographer will also see their skills in new light, and the possibility of contributing to media themselves. This offers researchers opportunity to get their work in the public eye.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I will reflect on the relationship between ethnography, comics and storytelling and focus on the methodological and epistemological implications of creating an ethnographically informed comic.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the growing body of theoretical reflections on the contributions of graphic anthropology to anthropological scholarship—both methodologically and epistemologically—there is still little discussion on the potential of comics as a medium to transform not only the way research is communicated but also how it is conceptualised, designed and conducted.
In this presentation, I will reflect on the relationship between ethnography, comics and storytelling, and explore how the process of making a comic can actively shape and enhance the research process, ultimately raising two key questions.
The first concerns narrative: how can ethnographic material be transformed into a compelling story, and what form should that story take? While this might appear to be a technical concern, it actually opens up two more questions: how is knowledge created? And how can the process of knowledge production itself be made visible through visual representation, storytelling and the creation of comics?
Paper short abstract:
Ethnography is the narration of the ordinary. As such, ethnography potentially belongs beyond the remit of academic anthropology, to encompass multiple forms of knowing, narrating and acting
Paper long abstract:
As Anna Tsing put it, our ability to generate and tell stories is central to living in a dying world. “To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method,” she wrote. Storytelling is a way of staying with the trouble, to borrow Donna Haraway's phrase—a way to uncover the multiple ways we are connected and related, while also reshaping those connections and relations that render our present world unsustainable.
Sharing stories that generate more stories can be both a practice and a profession—one that thrives not only in magazines or workshops but also in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and within struggles for a more just present and future.
Ethnography has an important role to play. It is the narration of the ordinary. As such, ethnography potentially extends beyond the remit of academic anthropology, encompassing diverse forms of knowing, narrating, and acting.
In this presentation, I will draw on my experience with OtherwiseMag to reflect on how ethnographic storytelling can serve as a practice for questioning entrenched positionalities of authorship and representation. This practice, I argue, has the potential to generate journeys of struggle, empathy, and solidarity. It is a method too vital to be left to the whims of the neoliberal university or confined within the narrow grids of academic anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will consider what we can gain by bringing together creative writing as research method and creative writing as research output with reference to a long term feminist ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
Creative writing is writing ‘differently’ or writing ‘otherwise’ that offers freedom from the conventions of academic writing (Dahl, 2023; Kinnunen et al., 2021; Nash, 2024), enabling writing in a compelling manner. Academics are increasingly exploring creative writing to tell persuasive stories that can influence public opinion and policy (Jacobson and Larsen, 2014; Lawless, 2019; McNamara, 2009). There has also been considerable academic discussion, particularly among ethnographers, about creative writing as research method (Foster, 2007; Lister, 2003; Mahoney, 2007). Feminist scholars have further highlighted that women welcome the opportunity to craft their own narratives – this has been widely discussed with reference to the method of interviews (Finch, 1984; Oakley, 1981, 1981) and storytelling (Foster, 2007; Lawless, 2019; Mahoney, 2007; McNamara, 2009). However, most researchers approach the use of creative writing as research output and creative writing as research method as two separate processes. In this roundtable discussion, I will consider what we can gain by bringing those two modes of creative writing together. I will offer insights from the design of a project which uses story writing as a collaboration between the researcher and the research participants, with the aim to de-center the researcher as the author/narrator and enable direct expression of interlocutors’ voices. This project emerges from my longitudinal ethnography with young women workers in Delhi, India.