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- Convenors:
-
Roger Canals
(University of Barcelona)
Camilo Leon-Quijano (CNRS Aix-Marseille Univ. Amidex IDEAS)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 22 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to reassess the potential intersections between ethics and (visual) experimentation focusing on the idea of "communing imagination". We encourage proposals that engage critical thinking on visual experimentation based on non-linear, multi-vocal or anti-authorative narratives.
Long Abstract:
Since the so-called phenomenological and sensory turn, transmedia experimentations have grounded the transformations of ethnographic practices in visual and multi-modal anthropology. This panel seeks to reassess the potential intersections between ethics and visual experimentation at a methodological, aesthetic and conceptual level focusing on the idea of "communing imagination".
For instance: collaborative and participatory strategies involving different media (image, sound, material infrastructures) and methodological strategies (as the use of fiction) may help us not only to better understand of how other people lives' transforms in a context of incertitude and increasing precarity but also to weave more ethical and deep relationships with participants in the research. In a similar manner, non-linear, multi-vocal or anti-authorative narratives may account of the instability of life in today's world -by reflecting at the same time the plurality of agents that intervene in an ethnographic research. Finally, in this workshop we establish an intimate link between the concepts of "hope" and "experimentation", since both point to the future and most precisely to the idea of "the unexpected". How can formal and methodological experimentation address issues related to the expectations, fears and reliability of the future? We encourage proposals that critically address the relation between ethical concerns and visual experimentations and transmedia practices in current anthropology. Our premise is that imagination is not solely an individual faculty but rather a common good which is enacted in our life with others. "Communing imagination", understood as a collective exercise of experimentation, is indispensable to build a more fair future.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
he 'Ask us' method utilizes filmed monologues based on ethnographic research to encourage reflection on dilemmas in the care relationship. We analyze the process of creating these monologues and reflect on the specific affordances of creative methods for quality improvements in long-term care.
Paper long abstract:
Vulnerable clients (e.g. people with intellectual disabilities and serious mental illness) often experience difficulties in influencing the care they receive, and to make their problems central to the care process. The research method, "Ask us", focuses on opening up dilemmas in the care relationship (e.g. autonomy vs safety, talking about sexuality) by translating ethnographic fieldwork in long-term care into filmed monologues that aim to aid the process of experience based co-design for care improvement. Videos include the perspective of clients, healthcare professionals and informal carers, in which monologues highlights ethical tensions. We collaborated with an inclusive theater company, working with actors with and without a disability, to further develop and recite the monologues. (See https://www.eur.nl/en/eshpm/research/ask-us/videos for the videos)
In this paper we critically analyze the process of making these videos and the effects generated by them in the co-design processes. How does the collaborative process of translating the fieldwork data into filmed monologues impact the representational value of the research? In which way do the films create affect in their audience and influence their ability to reflect on ethical tensions? Following the concept of 'loose translation' (Gugenheim 2015) we discuss the specific affordances and limitations of using creative methods, such as film and theater-making, to include more voices and values in the discussion of quality improvements in long term care.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines how participants' reflexive practice can lead to ‘activate’ images exceeding self-representation to disrupt their own context. I examine image production -in different formats- as a conscious process of self and world-making, as participants create their own biomythography (Lorde, 1996).
Paper long abstract:
This article explores the use of different forms of reflexivity within a collaborative research project, as a device to ‘activate’ the images from the field to the screen. Drawing on a research project centred on exploring autobiographical image-making with people living with HIV in Chile, I suggest that embedding reflexivity within a participatory visual project can lead participants to ‘activate’ images and their’ process of creation.
By activating images, I refer to a type of ethnographic engagement in which participants embrace authorship in ways that are meaningful beyond the research practice, sometimes even leading to disruption of their context. In this project, by embedding reflexivity as an integral part of the process, collaborators ended up challenging silence and invisibility, on which stigma is rooted. The article seeks to invite reflections around the concept of ´activating´ images through reflexivity, so to understand ethnographic image production as a conscious process of self and world-making. Furthermore, this research seeks to contribute to current debates about the status of ethnographic images, research and activism and interventionist forms of visual anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
In my contribution I suggest, through a specific case, that the codes of the family film- expected norms, subjects and locations- drawing on specific aesthetics of relatedness, can constitute a becoming-minor of a historicized filmic gaze that questions authorative narratives and authoriality.
Paper long abstract:
Through the analysis of the films and the words of an elderly Italian amateur filmmaker and the reference to the Italian national family film archive, I wish to propose an ethno-anthropological approach to home movies as a specific archive characterized by the dimensions of repetitiveness, self-referentiality, fragmentation and fractality. A marginal genre almost by definition, family films as minor, private and unpretentious productions are defined by negation: not commercial, not professional, not documentary. If in the last decade home movies have shifted from representing a marginal field to a special area of reflection, this shift has mainly occurred within history of cinema and media studies. Nonetheless novel anthropological approaches and ethnographic sensibilities represent the chance to give a new sense to this specific archive. The specificity of home movies brings them significantly closer to the unedited work of field diaries, to experimental ethnographic practices, in their "excess of detail" - flash, intimate, deep and so on. I suggest that the codes of the family film, by the attention to naturalistic detail and the production of personal narratives, draw on specific aesthetics of relatedness and constitute a space for reflection on the becoming-minor of a historicized and specific filmic gaze. Referring to the everyday and the “already known”, home movies are testimony of a view in which the personal (often paradoxically minor and at the same time masculine and naturalized in its genealogical role) presented itself as co-aesthetic to the small format itself, the instrument through which they were produced.
Paper short abstract:
The communication offers a glance back at the author’s journey in the writing of a PhD thesis. It delves into very practical aspects of available textual solutions and their contested legitimacy for dissertations as basis for a personal career and for knowledge production in a disciplinary field.
Paper long abstract:
In this contribution, I offer a critical glance at my journey in the writing of my PhD dissertation about cultural translation and mediation in a globalized periphery, in southwestern Ethiopia.
My attempts to compose a pluralistic picture made of contrasted viewpoints -of lowland and highland Ethiopians and of foreigners, of men and women, of upper-class educated actors and less-privileged ones- may run against standardized manners of constructing and presenting a dissertation in social anthropology.
In dissertations, research students affirm their unique contribution to the discipline. While there is room for innovation, institutional validation sets clear boundaries, that are the scientific standards within which dialogue between peers can happen. Building on the idea of “communing imagination”, I use communality and imagination as two themes to assess possibilities and barriers on experiments in the writing.
Fieldwork-based anthropology PhD is usually presented and experienced as a solitary work. How one could make science out of what is common, or make it a common thing? Often, co-authorship initiatives happen only later in careers. Could alternative ways of presenting bibliographical resources with informants and other contributors’ name provide a middle way?
It is common in a PhD dissertation to account for the imagination and imagined desires and realities of the people studied, but much less to "seriously" account for the writer's imagination - even lesser to their imaginations combined. The use of fiction and oral genres such as jokes can provide an entrance door into their imaginations, but with which basis for peer-reviewing?