Paper short abstract:

Multimodal research is to different degrees mobile. Detangling the different media involved and examining their specific realms helps to identify their agencies and analyze the power relations evoked by this unequal mobility. This is especially important in interdisciplinary team-based projects.

Paper long abstract:

Media formats are to different degrees mobile in the sense of their representational realm: an exhibition is experienced 'sur place' while a film may be projected at different places; both may be documented on a website, but they loose their site-specific aesthetic power. This specific mobility of media bears implications for collaboration in interdisciplinary teams and the ways of making multimodal work public. I propose analyzing a recent experience of multimodal research and its restitution that I am part of.

"Re-prises" (2018-) has been an experimental short termed research conducted by a group of colleagues who work together since 10 years as a multidisciplinary network of ethnographers, sociologist, anthropologists, photographers and filmmakers ("Penser l'urbain par l'image"/PUI). In a one week workshop we collected, classified, reproduced and filmed photographs that were taken by students of a photo-school in a French city. We invented a public archive in form of an exhibition and filmscreening, both presented at place at the end of the week. Today a webdoc that documents this experiment is on its way to go online and a research module generated from the one week project is being adapted to different places. I propose to discuss the entanglement of each medium involved in the research and shed light on the power relations evoked by the unequal mobility of multimodal work. In order to enable collaboration it is helpful to analytically detangle the media involved and examine their specific realm so that their agencies can be grasped from the beginning.

Paper short abstract:

Changing channels of film distribution ask for new kinds of anthropological films. It's time to develop a new genre of anthropological filmmaking, which can be viewed and shared on a smartphone: ultrashort and low-resolution.

Paper long abstract:

A new genre of ultrashort and low-resolution films has come into being, meant to be viewed on a smartphone, produced for easy phone-to-phone sharing, with a duration of only a few minutes or even seconds. Such films have attracted much attention for example in India, where they are distributed through social media and have become a source of grave concern because they often promote violence against minorities. Simultaneously, the distribution of longer genres of documentary film, including ethnographic films that previously functioned as a window to minority perspectives, is limited by old and new forms of censorship.

How can multimodal anthropologists respond? Besides studying smartphone usage, media regulation, and violence, can we also engage the smartphone as an alternative venue of knowledge sharing? Can anthropologists, then, appropriate the new genre of ultrashort and low-resolution film?

In my presentation I will share three films of forty seconds each, which I created with a smartphone viewer in mind. These three films are the result of the experimental pilot project "Presence in times of erasure", which I initiated as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University (in 2018) to communicate about insights from research in India. Since then, I have encouraged my students in multimodal anthropology to develop the genre further. With this new genre of ultrashort and low-resolution anthropological films, I align with the journal entanglement's call for a multimodal anthropology that engages the critical and political dimensions of research through visual representations that implicate viewers.

Paper short abstract:

This paper identifies a need to map the relationships between the modalities in multimodal ethnography, and it invites the audience to experiment with a participatory method for doing so.

Paper long abstract:

Multimodal ethnography is inevitably a site for entanglements, and hence tensions and negotiations, between various modalities (Leeuwin 2011; Pink 2008). Anthropological scholarship has responded by acknowledging the multisensory potential in all encounters (Howes 2019), integration of modalities- like video and text (MacDougall 2006), and media as materially and socially constituted (Banks and Ruby 2011).

With increasing multimedia formats (Salter 2018) and possibly more complex entanglements, I argue that there is an imperative to study the relationship between these modalities: how they are entangled, where do they conflict or disentangle, and how and why participants negotiate this relationship. As I discovered while researching Audio Description (AD) for sight-impaired theatre-goers, another reason for mapping the process of entangling modalities is that the process may have immense social implications for those making and experiencing the media.

Borrowing from AD practice, this paper invites the panel's audience to explore one sensory modality in terms of another, such as colour as touch and sound as image, and explain their decisions. Beyond just revealing encounters and media to be multisensory, I propose a method which has previously helped me study how and why this potential for multisensorial and multimodal entangling may emerge in the first place.

Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic research is about sensing a conflicted geopolitical landscape as a digital and virtual reality. It analyzes the entanglement of aesthetics and objective knowledge in visual cultures of remote sensing; i.e., knowledge and embodiment in technologically-mediated sensory perceptions.

Paper long abstract:

Array-based remote sensing has been influencing knowledge practices across many fields, from geology, military planning, and archaeology to landscape architecture and artistic research. These uses have been enabled by declassified image-data and the proliferation of more-than-human sensing technologies, enabling myriad interpretations of a single landscape. Following a series of landscape visualizations created by the author under training and conversation with archaeologists, this article is an ethnography of the techniques of remote sensing for analyzing the impact of militarization on strategically-important archaeological landscapes in Afghanistan. It surveys techniques of image generation using exploratory practices that reveal how obscurity is overcome in the process of image interpretation and visualization. In doing so, it tackles the liminality of digital, image-like worlds where mediated perceptions of landscapes aid the creation of evidence for sites that are physically inaccessible to fieldwork. The entanglement of aesthetics and objective knowledge marks this foray into a landscape of data that is composed of digital, virtual, and computable surfaces with imaginations of territory, topography, and terrain that have a materiality of their own, despite being intangible. This work is both scholarly and artistic in nature, involving a three-channel video installation with a Virtual Reality component; thus allowing the work to be experienced either as an academic text or a video artwork. In doing so, the ethnographic research is multi-modal in method; i.e., it is textual, visual, and aural at the same time. It can be presented as a paper, but the preferred format is an audiovisual presentation.

Paper short abstract:

This talk discuses multimodal analytical methods applied in my longterm apprenticeship-ethnography with the Mexican coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán. I reflect on how creating drawings and mono-prints stimulated the haptic memory required for choreographic analysis of smithing.

Paper long abstract:

This talk discusses the multimodal analytical methods incorporated into my longterm apprenticeship-ethnography with the Mexican coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán. To study coppersmithing diverse performative methods were employed to augment my observant-participation as an artisan-apprentice. Craft observation is a mimetic practice that engages multiple-tiered observation(s) of smithing performance(s) as a participant within the family forge. This also included observing demonstrations for tourists and officials in museums, social and marketing events, such as craft fairs. Training encompassed carefully watching the performance of my primary teachers— my mentor-master and his sons. But, this also included self-observation: watching my body's movements and posture by watching the bodies of others. Normally one cannot move and observe oneself moving at-the-same-time. But, bodily training requires entangling the choreographies of movements to disentangle, re-orchestrate and finally re-attune one's movements. Bodily-knowing is social and involves composites of observation. To understand the effective hammer stroke I mapped these movements through multiple processes. I watched myself perform through the critique of others, as well as carefully observed the changing copper material and evolving object in-formation. Analysis also entailed processes undertaken post-fieldwork, such as producing and reviewing visual archives, photographs, videos, drawings and mono-prints. This talk reflects particularly on how creating drawings and mono-prints can stimulate haptic memory. These methods were used for choreographic analysis of a photograph documenting my master-mentor's dramatic dance-like rhythmic movements when wielding a sledgehammer in collective smithing with his sons.

Paper short abstract:

Audio-visual techniques can enhance reflexivity, and support disseminating insights to wider audiences, including research participants, spurring dialogue. But how does the wide circulation of reflexive research material affect researchers' and participants' power positions and vulnerabilities?

Paper long abstract:

One of the objectives for anthropologists to work with audio-visual materials, is that it facilitates for their insights to be disseminated beyond an academic, specialized public, reaching wider audiences, which includes not in the least their research participants, assistants, and other collaborators or counterparts they work with. Furthermore, audio-visual methods can be employed to boost researchers' reflexive awareness and engagement, facilitated for example by multimodal entries into their data and research processes, but also by the reactions of their academic and non-academic public (including research participants) on the disseminated analyses and conclusions. What practical and ethical questions does this raise, especially as it affects the power positions and vulnerabilities of both researcher and research participants? I will engage with these questions drawing on ethnographic research that I have been involved in for the past ten years in Tanzanian Maasailand. In this research, I have combined traditional research methods with reflexive ethnographic and documentary filmmaking, increasingly using a dialogic approach. Visiting and revisiting Maasai and Dutch tourists for over a decade, the camera has come to facilitate for conversations between them, and myself as a researcher. Lately, using handycams and WhatsApp has extended the collaborative possibilities for data collection, dialogues and reflections, while internet and social media continue to exponentially expand the dissemination of anything produced. As developments take place faster than their effects can be overseen, this also raises questions about the transformative potentials and effects of doing research, about ownership and sharing of materials, trust, care, responsibilities and freedom.

Paper short abstract:

How can we turn our multimodal research into scholarly multimodal publications? This presentation intends to explore the problematizations emerging while preparing a practice-based scholar's first monograph for a new series launched at Manchester University Press.

Paper long abstract:

The new series entitled Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography at MUP, has launched a growing prospect for multimodal publications of monographs and books. Though quite a few anthropologists have been practicing multimodal anthropology before the term gained recognition, the ways in which researchers can translate their diverse creative processes in the field into multimodal representations through publications is still an uncharted terrain. With the exception of American Anthropologist, with its renamed section Multimodal Anthropologies from the previous Visual Anthropology, the journal Entanglements whose scope is to disseminate multimodal research through multimodal articles, and Toronto University Press, which publishes scholarly graphic novels as part of its new series called ethnoGRAPHIC, it is not a surprise to see MUP editors and authors in an excited state of disorientation, without much guidance.

When my book proposal was recently accepted for publication, I was invited to think of a website to host the research film and other possible multimedia content that will accompany the reading of the book. The ethnography involved collaborative and co-creative research with a group of Egyptian men who migrated to Italy by crossing the Mediterranean. The objectives of this practice-based research were to explore methods that could capture part of my participants' fleeting imaginations and lived experiences, in ways that would prioritise participants' voices and conceptualisations, ethics, collaboration, reflexivity and creative expression. What I would like to discuss with the panel are the practical and theoretical questions and problematizations that have arisen in the process of planning this multimodal publication.

Paper short abstract:

Multimodality encompasses the mediation of ethnographic experience and knowledge production through the entire operational sequence of anthropological practice, in ways that have important implications for sensory perception; field mediations; social connectivity; and publication infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon the foundations of visual anthropology and its long history of making ethnographic film and photography, but recast for 21st century research dynamics that include diverse uses of smartphones, social media, and digital software, multimodality would seem to mark a paradigm shift in the discipline. These changes go beyond technological deterministic developments and the diversification of our toolbox. Multimodality helps us theorize the mediation of ethnographic experience and knowledge through the entire operational sequence of our practice from data collection/production to research dissemination as well as the corresponding artifacts from field notes and drawings, snapshots and social media, audio recordings and transcriptions to ethnographic films and festivals, photo series and exhibitions, soundscapes and installations. By recognizing the conceptual affordances and limitations of all possible research frameworks, multimodality thus offers a reconceptualization of ethnography recognizable to all anthropologists, not just specialists in filmmaking. In order to understand this broad appeal, I will address four crucial issues: a) sensory perception situates ethnography as a practice-based approach to social research that foregrounds the perceptual attunement of the researcher's body and sensory knowledge; b) field mediations addresses the epistemological affordances and limitations when converting or translating lived experience into different modalities; c) social connectivity highlights the relational aspects of multimodality with attention to the ethics of participation and collaboration, particularly with the increased role of social media; and d) infrastructures revisit the challenges facing scholarly work produced in unconventional formats alongside the potential of multimodal publications to realize greater public impact.