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- Convenors:
-
Angela Torresan
(University of Manchester)
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/017
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
With the global spread of digital technologies, anthropologists who practice audio-visual-sensory research are more than ever challenged by new scenarios. This panel aims to explore concrete "tools, techniques and technologies" for doing audio-visual today and in the future.
Long Abstract:
With the global spread of digital technologies, anthropologists who practice audio-visual research are more than ever challenged by new scenarios. Even in more remote and under-developed parts of the world, they are faced with audiences and research participants who have access to the same means of digital image-making, representation, and dissemination, and who often possess similar sets of technological skills. What does it mean to practice visual anthropology in a world where audio-image making is so widespread? How can visual anthropologists concretely advance their practice in ways that are relevant to both the discipline and those who collaborate with our research? Digital technologies drive us to think about and experiment with the intersection between methods, theory, and ethics in new ways. Sensors, smartphone cameras and apps, VR goggles, trackers etc. have all contributed to offer visual anthropologists new forms and formats to explore different aspects of the world with others and to communicate our research. Considering recent experiments with new technologies, we want to address, in particular, the need for a more practice orientated approach towards methodologies. Questioning the anthropological tendency to provide more meta-methodological reflections than actual methods, we aim to attract contributions addressing concrete "tools, techniques and technologies" (Favero 2019) for doing audio-visual today and in the future.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation develops a series of proposals to enhance the concrete conceptual and methodological underpinning of visual research in the social sciences. Discussed aspects include how to extend our notion of the ‘visual’ and work towards more explicit and practical methodologies.
Paper long abstract:
Visual and multimodal approaches to the study of society seek to take full advantage of a central sensory channel in our knowledge of the world – vision – as well as some of our other senses, supported by rapidly evolving technologies to gather, process and communicate this knowledge. However, more solid and explicit methodologies are needed to help to resolve possible misconceptions and insecurities and to entice more researchers to consider this varied set of research tools as viable and complementary options for doing truly empirical multisensory and multimodal social science research.
Therefore this presentation will develop a series of proposals to enhance the concrete conceptual and methodological underpinning of visual research in the social sciences. Aspects that will be discussed include the need: to extend our notion of the ‘visual’; to expand the array of visual methods and technologies; to support different sources and contexts of visual production; to fully explore different analytical foci of visual research; to clarify the limits and strengths of prevalent ‘visual/image analysis’ frameworks; to work towards a more integrated and inclusive methodologies; to examine the changing boundaries between researcher, researched and publics; to evaluate recent and emerging trends in visual research; to improve visual competencies and forms of collaboration; and to explore new opportunities for presenting visual research.
Paper short abstract:
In our camera ethnographic research on digitalisation in early childhood, we make ‘concrete’ media practices visible. Yet, abstract ideas shape audiences’ perspectives. Our “looking laboratories” invite viewers to exchange their experiences and co-construct (audio-visual) anthropological knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
In our camera ethnographic research on digitalisation in early childhood, we observe and make visible ‘concrete’ media practices. We attend to what our participants do with different kinds of media in everyday life in diverse settings. Yet, the ways that audiences experience our audio-visual productions are shaped by their own (pre-)conceptions about childhood and media, and by their own viewing habits or ways of seeing. Rather than settling back into tired, unresolvable debates that pit (mis-)representation against (mis-)interpretation, we incorporate audiences and participants into our research process by hosting “looking laboratories” (Mohn) in various formats (e.g., exhibitions, interactive platforms, workshops, multi-media publications) where we invite viewers with different perspectives to engage in dialogue and expand their – and our – ways of seeing and experiencing audio-visual work. In the process, not only do we gain new insights into media practices in early childhood, we also explore the performative co-construction of anthropological knowledge and audio-visual experiencing.
The presentation will include camera ethnographic work (Hare, Mohn, Vogelpohl) from the project “Early Childhood and Smartphone” (Wiesemann) within the CRC “Media of Cooperation”, University of Siegen.
Paper short abstract:
The paper describes what happens when an anthropologist uses film and participatory photography in an ethnographic study among 8-15-year-old expatriate children and youth in Finland. The paper describes the visual tools and techniques used as well as the ethical dilemmas encountered.
Paper long abstract:
Audio-image making is widespread in the contemporary world. Children and teenagers in particular are very familiar with visual representations and tools used to make them. In this paper, I discuss my experiences as an anthropologist who used film and participatory photography projects in an ethnographic study among 8-15-year-old expatriate children and youth in Finland. I argue that in addition to being very familiar with audio-image making, the children and youth were very familiar with questions of anonymity, privacy and ethics related to visual representations. This caused several challenges for the research process utilizing visual tools. In addition, it is not necessarily easy to involve children and teenagers in a research project that requires them to use their free time. In this paper, I explain how I managed to proceed with the research. I also describe the concrete tools and techniques that I utilized in order to create and gather visual data. In addition, I discuss the various challenges, disappointments and failures as well as the joys and excitement that I encountered during the fieldwork. I also elaborate on research ethics and on how the visual aspects of my research were nevertheless useful and enriching in my study.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will introduce four dimensions of digital visuality in tourism studies (spatiality, temporality, sensoriality and materiality) that can help us, as researchers, study the influence digital mediation can have on our (ethnographic) research.
Paper long abstract:
Digital technologies are increasingly intertwined in everyday aspects of life across the globe, not leaving behind the tourist of today. The relative accessibility of digital technologies has, in a way, made everyone into a tourist of some sort. Tourists can travel physically, or completely virtually in the case of VR tourism, but in any case their experience is always mediated by digital technologies. This poses not only new conceptual but also methodological concerns in the study of tourism.
In this paper I will discuss the methodological opportunities and challenges of my PhD fieldwork on the Camino de Santiago. I will do so by introducing four dimensions of digital visuality in tourism studies: Spatiality, Temporality, Sensoriality and Materiality. Together these dimensions can help us reflect on how we, as researchers, can study digital visuality, and the influence digital mediation can have on ethnographic relationships.
Paper short abstract:
Within a series of case studies, the authors explore how emerging ecosystems of mediation, tools, techniques, platforms, practices, and social ideas offer potential to speculate on the material today as a process of developing shared futures and critical future thinking.
Paper long abstract:
The prevalence of digital technologies and processes within numerous contexts of life provides a unique opportunity for social research to benefit from innovations and to recontextualize or exploit existing ‘mundane’ processes, technologies, or information sources. When consulting a map on a mobile device the processes which filter and display meaningful locative data are usually not a direct concern of the user. Viewing and uploading images to social networks are complex negotiations of data transfer, organization, analysis, distribution, and visualization, yet seem “easy”. The techniques and algorithms used to produce the abstracted visualization of city streets on Google Street View are not often in the minds of users as they traverse the virtual terrain.
The ability to translate and re-contextualize aspects of material landscapes and first-hand experiences through processes of intermediation have led to new ways in which the world is represented and seen (Uricchio 2011). Using shared tools and techniques (from stock photos to VR worlds) explorations contest material structures, reuse, misuse, remix, or otherwise engage with processes of resemiosis to imagine new values and social realities. Methodologies exploring the visual and material production of speculative futures offer potential for contexts where producing data is difficult or impossible with more traditional ethnographic approaches, as is the case with complexities of future thinking.
Paper short abstract:
This talk addresses how shoddy, low-res DIY images are an intrinsict part of the car-commons phenonmenon known as hitchhiking.
Paper long abstract:
Historically, hitchhiking is inherently connected with the arts and literature. This paper will present several auto-stopping illustrations. By showcasing a range of pictures alongside some pop-culture examples, it offers a visual depiction of certain poetic, political, filmic and literary themes related to the alternative modalities of experience involved in thumbing a ride. This allows us to continue questioning in more depth what the relationship is between this practice and larger economic transformations such as neoliberalism, the gig economy and recently transforming eco-synergies? Where do 'slowness' and sharing fit in? Who are the a(e)ffective characters in designing new economies (financial and moral) instilled by riding with relative strangers?
The talk explores a number of events since 2017 that were part of a concerted effort in the early 21st century to keep this practice alive, despite many public discourses advocating the contrary. Such an auto-stop/hitchhiking revival exists through race competitions, hitch-gatherings, art events, online publications, museum exhibitions and other audio/visual/textual accounts. Through a range of quite unprofessional pictures, I intend to present a few issues which mirror hitchhiking's DIY character.