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Paper long abstract:

Collaborative approaches have become a highly relevant mode of research on museum collections from colonial contexts over the past 20 years. Scholars and institutions alike have emphasized the ethical and practical benefits of collaborative research. However, the process of researching colonial collections with so-called "communities of origin" is often far from smooth and easy. Colonial collections are highly charged affective arrangements. They carry a multitude of sometimes conflicting meanings and histories.

Collaborative efforts on collections are permeated by the historically shaped relationships not only between researchers and communities, but also between scientific institutions like the Ethnological Museum and their so-called collections, as well as broader global and economic inequalities. Encounters between researchers, collections, and members of so-called communities of origin are therefore charged with affective predispositions and preconditions on various scales, which can surface in the affective arrangement of an interview. Rather than fostering a clean and ethical research environment, collaborative encounters are highly sensitive, personal, and conflicted sites of contestation. Drawing on research with Maasai objects and photographs in Tanzania, the paper explores some of the affective dissonances and irritations that can arise in these contexts and highlights lessons learned from them. Rather than glossing over these frictions, I argue that it is precisely the moments of irritation and dissonance, and their affective and emotional underpinnings for scholars and their research partners, that allow for a deeper understanding of the complex ongoing relations and dynamics interwoven with colonial collections.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses the problem of adopting a multimodal perspective in the movement for repatriating museum objects of Indigenous people. It proposes to investigate this problem through the notion of equivocation.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, there has been much discussion on collaborative projects in the light of the repatriation of Indigenous artefacts from metropolitan museums back to their communities. Indigenous activists, scholars, and museum curators agree that many objects found their way into museums through unjust actions and as a result of colonial encounters. Returning these artefacts is regarded as an important step in restoring justice to Indigenous communities. Simultaneously, there is limited contextual knowledge about the circumstances under which these objects were obtained due to a scarcity of archival material. This presentation proposes to reflect upon the repatriation movement through a possibility of incorporating ‘voices’ of the objects themselves. Specifically, it discusses the practices of object donation among Indigenous people in Siberia and explores the current approaches to communicating with objects stored in museums among community members. Collected archival material and ethnographic field data reveal that Indigenous people carefully discuss with the objects the possibility of sending them to the museum. Their decisions regarding donation are often based on the objects’ will. This challenges the repatriation of these objects and further poses an interesting methodological question to be explored: how anthropologists and museum curators can incorporate this multimodal perspective into collaborative projects. This presentation proposes to investigate this question through the notion of equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004) as a mode of communication about, with and through the objects.

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Paper short abstract:

Foundational in multimodal anthropology, collaboration is both methodological and ethical. Examining HIV sense-making in Chile, this work reimagines collaboration as a fluid, risk-embracing process, shedding light on nuanced methodological implications for unstable paradigms

Paper long abstract:

Understanding collaboration not only as a methodological but also as an ethical and political stance is fundamental in multimodal anthropology and broader transdisciplinary research. Collaboration's foundational role becomes especially crucial when engaging with decolonial, feminist, and queer paradigms, providing diverse and enriched perspectives that act as catalysts for unconventional interventions disrupting knowledge monopolies. However, when researchers and collaborators come into close proximity, they confront experiences that exceed and challenge utopian fieldsite descriptions.

Drawing on two projects of collaborative HIV sense-making research in Chile within the context of multimodal anthropology, this contribution navigates challenges in ethnographic encounters within sites of suffering and biographical disruption. The objective is to reimagine multimodal anthropology collaboration as a fluid, relational process grounded in sympoietic practices (Haraway, 2016), challenging fixed perspectives. The analysis emphasizes intricate relationships within zones of friction and transformation, with particular attention to what "apparently didn't work" within a relational continuum.

Moving away from idealized collaboration, this contribution envisions an 'ethnographic 'we'' detached from fixed structures, portraying collaboration as a dynamic entanglement permeated by risk and uncertainty. Vulnerable moments, termed 'failure' (Halberstam, 2011), become crucial sites for ethnographic evolution within the realm of multimodal anthropology.

This transformative perspective on collaboration unfolds as a continuous journey of becoming, embracing risk, uncertainty, and acknowledging vulnerability in the multimodal ethnographic process. The approach sheds light on nuanced and unstable methodological implications, fostering a more inclusive and adaptive research paradigm in multimodal anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines 3 hierarchies related to studying (and making) with microbes: ocularcentrism/verbocentrism, human exceptionalism, and sole-researcher politics of knowledge production. These frictions map onto multimodal, multispecies, and multisensory concerns, respectively, which intertwine.

Paper long abstract:

For millennia, humans have made foods with the help of microbes, both knowingly and unknowingly. Against this backdrop, a natural sake brewery in rural Japan relies on the endogenous microbes within their brewhouse to transform rice into the alcoholic beverage sake. They do not add bacteria and yeast into their fermentation tanks like the remaining 900 conventional breweries in the country; instead; the brewers must create the conditions for microbes to gather, and only certain microbes, at certain stages, in certain sequences. The brewing process thus epitomises the perpetual and ongoing work of sympoiesis with microbial life.

While most ‘food anthropology’ examines how values, identities, and meaning emerge in affirming or negating manners, this paper scrutinises the methodological limits of conducting ethnographies involving microbes. Based on ethnographic data, I examine the frictions that emerge out of three sets of hierarchies in this research setting: (1) as a multimodal concern, are texts and visuals the only modes for documenting and presenting ethnographic data; (2) in staying with multispecies commitments, how does one account for microbes as an interlocutor without performing a form of ventriloquism; and (3) as a multisensory methodology, how does one attune to and represent microbial encounters without imposing ableist or extractivist parameters to data collection? As anthropologists increasingly conduct complex ethnographies, and, as adjacent fields look to anthropology as guidance for how to do ethnographies well, I argue for multimodal research that always and already attenuates ocularcentrism, verbocentrism, human exceptionalism, and sole-researcher politics of producing new knowledge.

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I have recently been involved in two collaborative research-creation projects, one with 'neoandalusí' musicians and the other with activists for housing rights. Both projects focused on the creation of fictional stories. Can ethnographic fiction aid in managing the frictions mentioned in this panel?

Paper long abstract:

Collaborative approaches to ethnography are based on the idea of the necessity to build knowledge with, and not just about, specific groups of people. However, those who attempt to conduct research by opening up the knowledge construction process – thereby accepting the loss of (some) control over it – are well aware that different loci of enunciation, research hierarchies, discursive authorities, as well as simply the time and energy to invest, create disparities and tensions that often contradict the ideal purposes of collaborative research.

In two recent ethnographic research-creation projects in which I participated, one of the safety devices to facilitate participation and manage conflicts was the use of fictional storytelling. Somehow, fiction and frictions went hand in hand, and in this paper, I will use the experiences lived in these two projects to reflect on how the collaborative production of fictional narratives contributed to the management of some issues that arose.

The first project focuses on the creation of 'ethnographically grounded music videos'—a kind of musical ethnofictions in which musicians based in Granada explore the influences that the Muslim past has on their ‘neoandalusí’ imagination. The second experience involves the production of the first season of a radio drama written, produced, and performed by a group of activists from Stop Evictions Granada 15M (a grassroots social movement advocating for decent housing rights).

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Paper short abstract:

Addressing collaborative challenges in the multimodal ethnography of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, highlighting tensions and resolutions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of the inherent complexities in the collaborative ethnography of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, an early Mesoamerican pictorial manuscript currently in the Liverpool World Musuem. It delves into the frictions encountered when engaging with a diverse array of participants, including Indigenous scholars, museum professionals, and community members in Mexico and the UK. The study reveals how these tensions are not just obstacles but also opportunities for deeper understanding and more nuanced interpretations of cultural artefacts. The research contributes to a broader discussion on the dynamics of power, representation, and collaboration in participatory and multimodal anthropological practices, providing insights into the ethical and methodological considerations in producing digital objects in response to ethnographic fieldwork.

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Paper short abstract:

Giving up power in research encounters can be an uncomfortable and embarrassing experience. By reflecting on specific instances in my fieldwork where I encountered unexpected refusals and personal discomfort, I chart how these moments led to more ethical and more illuminating research.

Paper long abstract:

Creative methods are often embraced as a means of addressing the power imbalance between participant and researcher (Kara, 2020). Committing to this does involve accepting a level of discomfort and risk, however (Lenette, 2019). During this presentation, I will reflect on multimodal arts-based fieldwork with Syrian women in Scotland on the subject of “home”, drawing on two particular encounters. In each case, participants subverted the research process by refusing to participate in a pre-agreed way, although they continued to be warm and engaged. The encounters were further complicated by taking place in Arabic, which is not my native language. This paper considers how these derailments and discomforts affected the research. By simultaneously consenting and refusing to participate, the encounters operated as sites of co-creation that pointed towards richer and more interesting lines of enquiry by considering the role of the body, the unspoken, and refusal in intersubjective narratives (Chatzipanagiotidou & Murphy, 2021). Most importantly, by facilitating refusal and taking place in a language which put the researcher at a disadvantage, the research not only demanded flexibility, embarrassment, and discomfort on the part of the researcher, but required thorough and critical reflection on its purpose as a whole. These supposed failures are thereby recast as productive encounters, albeit unconventional ones, where important knowledge was co-created through a process of mutual negotiation in a way that would not have been possible using more prescriptive methods.

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Paper short abstract:

Post-war memory landscapes are defined by notions of victimhood, often with little space for ambiguity and nuance. This paper examines the possibilities and limitations of engaging with silenced stories through multimodal research interventions.

Paper long abstract:

How to handle stories shared by research partners in confidence, off the record, and with the intention to remain hidden from official memory narratives? A decade ago, I began my research in the Peruvian highland town of Ayacucho, collaborating with mainly female indigenous leaders and memory activists. I have supported their demands for truth and justice by making films and writing stories about the violence inflicted by insurgent groups and state forces during the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980-2000). I also learned that not all suffering is shareable. Some people’s stories of guilt, shame and regret remain unspeakable. And yet, these stories may be part of a more complex memory landscape that I, as a researcher, am committed to portraying.

In this paper, I would like to consider the (im)possibilities of narrating what so often has appeared in my research without warning, tripping me up and making me think more carefully about what is going on. I call it the impossible story; the kind of story that upsets the neatness of contemporary memory regimes, defining who and what is to be remembered. It’s the story that sits uneasily amidst declarations of loyalty, assumed positionalities and collaborative approaches because their impossibility imposes innocence as the necessary condition for victim-survivors to be granted victimhood before the state and retain their right to claim truth, justice and remembrance.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores a multimodal performative memoir in the study of grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that collaboration can be a valuable approach to the memoir creation process, mobilizing public feelings of grief to constitute a practice of ethnographic worldmaking.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores the potentials and challenges of collaboration in multimodal ethnographic research. I focus on my current project, which employs multimodal performative memoir in the study of grief and traumatic loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multimodal performative memoir is an approach to research-creation, situated at the intersection of anthropology, performance studies, and the creative arts. My project bridges elements of memoir, ethnography, live theatre performance, and post-performance audience discussion to study the social, political, and ethical implications of extensive individual and societal grief following the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on ethnographic field notes and diaries recorded between 2021 and 2024, documenting my lived experience of traumatic grief following the death of my three close relatives from COVID. This presentation includes a performative reading of excerpts from my memoir and reflections on the role of collaboration in its development – from inception, through writing, to public presentation. While memoir is typically considered to be a solitary creation, I argue that collaboration can be a valuable approach to the multimodal memoir creation process that can provide important ethnographic insights into how individuals experience, imagine, and act on their grief. The frictions of collaboration can also constitute a generative force that mobilizes public feelings of grief as a practice of ethnographic worldmaking.

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Paper short abstract:

This research speculates with brain-injured women artists in Canada more accessible healthcare scenarios that complicate "rehabilitation." It discusses how we might use multimodality to "crip" our research methodologies and replace ethnographer-informant relationships with "epistemic partnerships."

Paper long abstract:

Brain-injured people usually struggle with the inability to recall words, meandering thoughts, cognitive and sensory challenges, as well as a differential experience of time. This paper is based on years of collaborative, multimodal, and digital exchanges between the co-authors Linda Hawkins (a white, brain-injured woman artist-scholar) and Rana El Kadi (a brown, Mad woman scholar) and is part of a larger project to speculate with brain-injured women artists in Canada more accessible healthcare scenarios that complicate the notion of “rehabilitation.” Our paper explores how we might address the complexity of negotiating diverse visions of the future and “access frictions” (Hamraie, 2017) between co-researchers with different body-minds. We discuss some ways in which we might use multimodality to “crip” (Fritsch, 2012) our research methodologies and replace ethnographer-informant relationships with “epistemic partnerships” (Dattatreyan & Marrero‐Guillamón, 2019).

We first draw a parallel between the extractivist nature of traditional research methodologies (such as interview guides) and the inaccessible, discriminatory approaches that healthcare practitioners use in their medical assessments of brain injury. We then describe our asynchronous, multimodal exchange that involved various digital and artistic modalities, as well as reenactment and role play (Sjöberg, 2018). We demonstrate how we drew upon the different access practices that Linda uses while creating her art (such as “cheat sheets”) to develop a critical, collaborative research methodology. We argue for the importance of co-creating radically self-reflexive and imaginative (Elliott & Culhane, 2017) research methodologies and placing them in conversation with critical access (Hamraie, 2017) practices like slowness and interdependence.