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.