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?