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- Convenors:
-
Christos Varvantakis
(Athens Ethnographic Film Festival)
Melissa Nolas (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
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- Chair:
-
Olivia Casagrande
(University of Sheffield)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We invite contributions that address practices of commoning in multimodal ethnographic research. We especially welcome submissions from collaborative and networked multimodal ethnographic projects within and beyond the academy.
Long Abstract:
The inaugural panel of the EASA multimodal ethnography network aims to provide a collegial space for dialogue and reflection between ethnographers who experiment across modalities and media in their research practice. The panel constitutes a space for the growing international and interdisciplinary network of multimodal ethnographers, within and beyond the academy, to address issues pertinent to the nurturing of this rapidly expanding circuit of practice including but not limited to the role of the following in multimedia and multimodal anthropological compositions: the role of production, collaboration, curation and re-presentation; the appreciation, re-view and feedback of audio-visual compositions; the sites of knowledge and power; the collaborative, transformative, and unfolding temporalities of pre- and post-production; the live event and its afterlife; the role of audiences, publics, and other collectivities.
In particular, for this inaugural meeting and in line with the conference theme, we would invite contributions that address meanings and practices of commoning in multimodal ethnographic research. Multimodal ethnography is not a one stop shop practice (although, sometimes practiced as such). It involves, if not requires collaborations, commoning and public creations. How might thinking about multimodal ethnography take us beyond inherited notions of the 'auteur' in ethnographic practice? How might interlocutors and research participants be involved in the production and interpretations of our multimodal artifacts? How might multimodal ethnographic practice enable us to imagine different futures both for the discipline but also for the topics we research? What sort of audiences and publics do multimodal ethnographies produce within and beyond the academy?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Karen Waltorp (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Student work in a course on Multimodal Anthropology: Audio-visual and Digital Experimentation suggest multimodal anthropological practice across research, teaching and dissemination might be commoning the classroom beyond the academy, allowing it to be the most radical space of possibility
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses multimodal projects shared in a course on Multimodal Anthropology: Audio-visual and Digital Experimentation. Building on theories of learning from Bateson (2000), pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire 1970), Vygotskyan proximal learning, developed into legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger 1991) and not least feminist notions of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988), I invited the students into my research projects. With a common point of departure in ‘media ecologies’: investigating how (digital) images circulate globally and in specific empirical contexts we focused on the diasporic condition as it relates to flows of images (Waltorp 2021, Waltorp & ARTlife Film Collective 2021).
In short fieldworks over 14 weeks, the 40 students in the course practised formulating questions and researching them through multimodal methods (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019). I present examples of their work in this paper: An exquisite corpse emerging out of the collaboration between 6 anthropology students and 8 young Sahrawi activists; a website evoking sensorial memories shared by Afghans in Denmark; and a snippet of a radio montage around racism in Denmark as explored through the Instagram account #ParttimeArab. Could multimodal ethnographic practice enable them/us to imagine different futures both for the discipline but also for the phenomena they/we research as well as possible new constellations of collaboration? This paper asks: Might multimodal anthropology and practice across research, teaching and dissemination be a way toward commoning the classroom beyond the academy and allow it to be the most radical space of possibility, as bell hooks reminded us it could?
Olivia Casagrande (University of Sheffield) Claudio Alvarado Lincopi (Universidad Católica de Chile) Roberto Cayuqueo (15971851-4)
Paper short abstract:
Moving from different positionalities and disciplines, the paper elaborates on ethnographic and performative methodologies of co-creation, exploring the possibilities and challenges multimodal compositions and claiming for ‘indiscipline’ and baroque knowledge making.
Paper long abstract:
In between collective creative work and academic research, our collaboration started in 2017. From different positionalities and disciplines – as an Italian anthropologist, a Mapuche theatre director and performer, and a Mapuche historian - we addressed indigenous urban diaspora through collaborative multimedia and multimodal methods involving artists and activists.
With the elaboration of decolonial epistemologies and aesthetics, the MapsUrbe project resulted in artistic representations (art exhibition and performance) and the writing of a book in co-authorship with the research participants. This process has prompted us to redefine both our roles - as ethnographers, artists, curators, activists – and changing relationship throughout the different phases of the project. Especially significant has been the production of audio-visual and textual compositions, entailing an extensive process of review/feedback/translation; as well as shifts back and forth collective and individual creation and writing. Including the key issues of authorship, positionality, and curation, the afterlife of our original research has taken a life of its own, expanding into new partnerships and projects and still shaping our unfolding dialogue.
Moving from a first, heated discussion on a bus in Santiago’s rush hour, the paper critically elaborates on methodologies and epistemologies of co-creation, exploring multi-vocal representations, collaborative writing and the possibilities and challenges of a layered authorship. Coming from different disciplinary perspectives, we claim for ‘indiscipline’ - rather than interdisciplinarity - and for a making of knowledge that engages with the motley and the ‘baroque’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 2018; Echeverría 2010) as crucial practices of commoning in multimodal research.
James Cerretani (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on participatory ethnographic research with transnational networks of Rohingya media makers to look at how multimodal practices work to intervene in contemporary crises of genocide, protracted forced-migration, and COVID-19.
Paper long abstract:
This paper emphasizes the processual and inventive nature of multimodal practices by transnational Rohingya networks as a means of mitigating the effects of contemporary crises. It draws from my fieldwork and participatory research as a visual artist and anthropologist-in- training by means of multimodal and multimedia methods such as participatory youth cinema, graphic ethnography, photography, ethnofiction, and collaborative social media activism.
The Rohingya communities I collaborate with build and maintain creative digital communities that connect individuals in Myanmar with those seeking refuge across Southeast Asia and those living in the diaspora. The communities’ processes and outputs include films, poems, photography exhibitions, and an array of multimodal creations that exemplify the agency of these creative networks to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge production.
The labor of Rohingya communities works to spread vital information across displacement-affected networks through creative means such as short films on COVID-19 safety and photo exhibitions documenting and raising awareness of the quotidian experiences of displaced Rohingya. The multimodal practices of transnational Rohingya networks are not limited to strictly realist representations. Collaborations in ethnofiction such as drawing, filmmaking, photography practice, poetry, and painting undertaken during my engagements with Rohingya communities in Europe, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Bangladesh speak to how ethnofiction engages with the past and present in order to (re)imagine futures. It is necessary to view collaboration through a critical lens, looking at the politics, ethics, power hierarchies, and ambivalences (Alvarez et al., 2021) of participatory research during unprecedented times.
Rebecca Wall (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Ignacio Farias (Humboldt University of Berlin) Felix Marlow (Humboldt University Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
In our research with Haus der Statistik (a civic-led urban development project in Berlin), we work towards producing para-ethnographic effects among public and civic actors via an on-site scenographic device. We argue for commoning processes in multimodal research to be carefully infrastructured.
Paper long abstract:
Haus der Statistik in Berlin is branded as a ‘model project for cooperative commons-oriented urban development’. Social housing, long-term affordable sociocultural spaces and city administration offices are to be planned and developed by a public-civic partnership. This partnership involves a myriad of public and civic actors, each dwelling in disparate worlds held together by not always very well "controlled equivocations" (Viveiros de Castro), thus losing sight of many intended and unintended misunderstandings.
In our research, and by means of an on-site scenographic fieldwork device, we aim to stage this situation as an idiotic ecology of misunderstandings and alternative definitions of the common (Stengers 2005). In designing our staging device, the ‘Zauderbude’, we aim at a twofold alteration of the scenographic: Firstly, ‘Bude’ meaning cabin or booth, the stage is not a public platform (Marrero 2019), but an intimate interior space for ethnographic encounters. Secondly, ‘Zaudern’ means to waver or to hesitate, in the sense of 'not (yet) acting'.
Commoning in multimodal projects needs to be carefully and multimodally infrastructured. The Zauderbude, we claim, works as an infrastructure for producing para-ethnographic effects. In the ‘Zauderbude’, commoning is not the result of a collaborative 'doing', but takes the form of commoning reflections on collaborative worlding.
Rajat Nayyar (York University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper highlights the ways in which rural north Indian women might use the camera, film screenings and digital communication tools to exchange, rehearse and digitally share their songs.
Paper long abstract:
This paper highlights the ways in which rural north Indian women might use the camera, film screenings and digital communication tools to exchange, rehearse and digitally share their songs.