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- Convenors:
-
Alisse Waterston
(City University of New York, John Jay College)
Eva van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/026
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The aim of the panel is to examine critically grounded experimental formats in crafting and communicating anthropological knowledge. We examine and exchange creative works grappling with real-world concerns that transform the discipline, inspire hope, and effect social change for the common good.
Long Abstract:
For decades, anthropologists have been participating in a series of interconnected debates centered on the politics of representation, "writing culture," calls to decolonize the discipline, and how to put anthropological knowledge to public use in the interest of a more just world. These discussions have led to the current wonderful moment when anthropologists are again paying careful attention to writing otherwise (Hannerz 2016) and engaging multimodal practices to make knowledge accessible that facilitates interaction with diverse audiences. The aim of this panel is to explore the new use of riveting and critically grounded formats for crafting and communicating anthropological knowledge, such as creative writing, painting, comix, (audio)visual ethnography, performance, and photography. The panel will feature concrete examples of creative works by junior and established scholars that are theoretically driven and grapple with real-world concerns with a focus on any aspect of the creative process from conception and creation to practicalities and the afterlife of the work. Underneath such efforts to transform the discipline and inspire hope and social action arise various questions, such as: How to creatively communicate topics that are painful and complex, requiring historical knowledge and ability to grasp abstract concepts? How to ethically convey the drama of the world in difficult circumstances while revealing spaces of resiliency, creativity, and hope? What is gained and what is lost in crafting works designed to stimulate, disturb and/or inspire? How to effect change in the discipline and its institutions to support experimental formats and efforts to communicate otherwise in anthropology?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Ethnography is how anthropologists know and write the world. In the Covid-19 pandemic, flash ethnography emerged as a genre responsive to this moment. Flash ethnographies are 750-word essays complete unto themselves. Why write such short texts? What communicative power might we find in brevity?
Paper long abstract:
How shall we know and write the world? In socio-cultural anthropology, ethnography is our unique way of knowing. It is also both how and what we write. Over the decades, ethnographic writing has shifted content and form. Sometimes experimental, sometimes conventional, we are able to recognize ethnography across different genres. We know it when we see it, hear it, witness it. In the 21st century, new digital technologies offer us new ways to write as well as to share our writings. Our audiences grow, our styles grow, but this expansion is not only technological. It is also a response to the current political moment and to new senses of ethics in the discipline. One important new ethnographic form is the short essay, usually 1,000-2,000 words. Anthropologists use this form to respond in the moment as events unfold, drawing on ethnographic knowledge to speak to the present. If this form is now well-developed, an even newer form is still emergent: flash ethnography. Building on longstanding genres of flash fiction and nonfiction, flash ethnographies are 750-word essays complete unto themselves. That is, they are not snippets or excerpts from longer works, but instead are brief but whole ethnographies. Why write such short ethnographies and why now? In my presentation, I will discuss the sort of ethnographic potential flash ethnography holds in relation to what it is the world might need. As we continually work to transform the discipline and also the world, what communicative power might we find in brevity?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores learning from game-design-led fieldwork with a young climate activist. It discusses how hope is not created through a fixed vision of utopia. Instead, hope is generated through present action with the knowledge that the present will, in ways still unclear to us, shape the future.
Paper long abstract:
Since the Fridays for Future school strikes began in 2018, young people in the UK have been part of a new wave of climate activism that has activated more people than ever before. This paper explores learning from game-design-led fieldwork with a young climate activist in Lancaster, which asked what motivates us to take radial climate action. The outcome of this fieldwork was a design prototype for Solidarity: a cooperative board game set in a dystopian 2040s Britain that aimed to generate hope and collective action. Designing the game world and its mechanics revealed that rather than being concerned with a fixed dystopian or utopian future, my collaborator’s futurity and hence also their sense of hope was continually fostered in relation to their urban present. I discuss how the collaborative practice of board game design, intended to provide a playful ‘frame’ within which to explore possibilities and make my collaborators' visions of the future tangible, resulted in an experience of mutual discovery and reflection on what lies ahead and the role we may play in shaping it. For both myself and my collaborator, designing Solidarity stimulated our sense of agency to act in the present whilst recognising the uncertainty of the future. I suggest that game design offers a form of ethnographic elicitation that is specifically suited to researching futures as both collective and evolving, due to its capacity for building and playing with uncertain worlds and the nature through which insights can emerge iteratively throughout the game design process.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on a research project on public anthropology in Greece focused on narrative experimentation with stand-up comedy and alternative publishing with handmade books (cartoneras). I discuss the transformative potential, for anthropology/ists, of experimenting with genres and formats.
Paper long abstract:
The research project "Anthrobombing: Narrative Experimentations for the Design of a Public Anthropology Platform" was conceived as a way to explore how anthropology as a mode of problematizing one's place in the world and relations with others, its epistemology and politics, that is, could be introduced to non-academic publics. Since academic writing is highly specialized and difficult for non-anthropologists to access, our team decided to foreground experimentation with alternative narrative genres, through the design and carrying out of interventions in non-academic social spaces. In this paper, I provide a roadmap to these experimentations that centers on how the affordances of the two narrative forms we chose (stand-up comedy, cartoneras publication) were crucial in shaping our interaction with the respective audiences.
The embodied experience of performing and publishing in an "anthropological way" outside of spaces of academic communication led to insights about the potential of humor, multimodal forms and performance for anthropology, as well as about the hierarchies of knowledge production; to questions like "who is anthropology for" and "what makes knowledge anthropological", and an emergent concern for becoming-with publics.
This research was co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) through the Operational Programme "Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020" in the context of the project "Anthrobombing: narrative experimentation for the design of a public anthropology platform" (MIS code 5048954)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses three anthropological interventions aimed at evoking empathy which were carried out by anthropologists from the Centre for Migration Studies in Poznań to challenge the anti-refugee rhetoric in Poland during the first crisis of receiving refugees in Europe.
Paper long abstract:
During the first crisis of receiving refugees in Europe, Poland refused to participate in the solidarity scheme of relocating asylum-seekers between different EU countries. As anthropologists working in the Centre for Migration Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, we observed the escalating anti-refugee and Islamophobic public debate in the country. To challenge this rhetoric and evoke empathy towards refugees we carried out three anthropological interventions, namely: (1) “We’re All Migrants. (Re)covering Migration Memory,” a project comprising an exhibition of letters sent home by Polish emigrants to the US and Brazil at the end of the 19th century, an educational programme for secondary school students, and ethnographic research in those migrants’ villages of origin which aim was to move away from reducing the figure of migrant/refugee to the category of the Other and to speak of ourselves as migrants instead; (2) “Adopt a Lifejacket,” a social campaign in which lifejackets worn by refugees when crossing the sea were placed in public urban spaces in Poznań to evoke discussion about the absence of actual refugees among us; and (3) “A Gallery without a Home,” a campaign addressed to primary school students, who during a series of workshops on exile prepared postcards for children from the refugee camps in Serbia, Greece, and Italy (the postcards then made up a virtual and mobile gallery). In the paper, I critically examine these interventions, their potential for an academy of hope, as well as limitations.
Paper short abstract:
In 2021 in the digital journal Edgeeffects I published a multimodal essay entitled “Attuning the Senses.” In drawing on aural, textual, and visual writing, and in examining the current controversy between beauty and critique, here I show how multimodal narrative can assist us in fights for justice.
Paper long abstract:
In 2021 in Edgeeffects, I published a multimodal piece entitled “Attuning the Senses,” which had emerged out of an ethnographic desire to bring nature – trees, lichen, leaves, rocks, ants, snails, wrens, etc. – to life. By integrating aural, visual, and textual materials that made perceptible the sound of water, storms, and trees, healing power of walking, and the grace one can find in narrative and writing I created a sensory weave. Once published, the piece received more than 27000 hits, and colleagues responded to let me know how beautiful the essay was. Here I am interested in tracing the afterlife of “Attuning the Senses.” In particular I want to better understand the significance of beauty in creating narratives that support well-being and politically just life.
In the current conceptual controversy between the proponents of art and narrative’s sensory qualities (Scarry 1999; Felski 2020) and critique (Stuelker 2022; Foster 2020; Fassin et al. 2019), beauty is often maligned by the latter. At the heart of their argument lies a question regarding the significance of beauty, which is seen as either too sentimental, romantic, or politically naïve. In arguing for a conceptual space that brings together beauty and critique, I begin by introducing a short excerpt from “Attuning the Senses.” I then move on to present some of the arguments formulated by beauty’s critics to show some of their misconceptions. I end by delineating how multimodal narrative and ethnography can assist us in the fight for environmental and political justice.