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Paper short abstract:

This paper will address how art becomes a methodology that enables reciprocal knowledge production. Cafecito/Coffee art workshops enable Latinx women to share their experiences with motherhood through employing art, literature, and storytelling.

Paper long abstract:

Among Latinx women in the United States, Gender-based violence (GBV) is often present in their interactions with the state, legal and medical systems, migration authorities, and intimate partners. This paper will address how art becomes a methodology that enables reciprocal knowledge production, thus challenging the usual asymmetries present in research. The work is based on community workshops—Cafecitos (little coffees)—that create a space for Latinx mothers to voice and share their experiences with GBV. In Latinx culture, to have a cafecito is much more than having a coffee. It is a ritual, a special moment in which one can discuss meaningful themes in a friendly and supportive environment. Our project in South Bend, United States embraces the communal significance of cafecitos and enables women to share their experiences with motherhood and GBV through employing art, literature, and storytelling workshops led by artists and group members. Art and literature function as languages with which Latinx women can narrate and share their motherhood experiences. This paper will present the ways that participant’s engagement with literature and the visual arts can facilitate deeper knowledge about harm, healing, and prevention in the community and around GBV, and how participants themselves have taken greater ownership of the Cafecito space through their engagement. Building collective channels to make stories visible can lead to better knowledge of the prevalence of GBV among historically marginalized groups, inspire further studies, create spaces for sharing and healing, and create pathways for accountability and restitution.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces the concept of 'artist gaze' and returns it to the artists-in-residence on the border of Europe to explore the motivation, challenges and opportunities artists have when navigating between the art world and the society.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the town of Narva in Northeast Estonia has been receiving increased attention as the fourfold border between East and West. Around the same time, Narva also adopted a new tourism slogan: “Narva — Europe starts here”. As Russian is spoken as mother tongue by 97% of Narva’s population, Europe(anness) does not necessarily have a positive connotation here. Yet, Narva is not a Russian city, as sometimes referred to, but a mix of different ethnicities and backgrounds.

Spectacle-seeking journalists have extensively covered the contrasting opinions of the local people regarding the aggression, re-enforcing a language-based dualism of "us" and "them". Meanwhile, local cultural institutions have been constantly working to overcome this dualism, and emphasise the border not as a divider, but a meeting point of different people and ideas.

Narva Art Residency is one of such institutions. Established in 2015 in a former industrial district, the residency has in recent years evolved into one of the most active cultural spaces in town with a strong emphasis on community engagement. This presentation is based on ethnographic research conducted among the international artists-in-residence in Narva in 2022 and 2023. Their work, inspired by and created in collaboration with the town's inhabitants reveals alternative approaches to (foreign) places and people — an artist gaze. Through participant observation, interviews and photography, I return their gaze to explore the motivation, challenges and opportunities artists have when navigating between the art world and the society.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the work of Pardhan Gond artists from central India, who make a growing contemporary Adivasi art world in India. I share my reflections from long term research in the home-workshops or studio spaces where artists create art works for art fairs, galleries, and museums.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with the work of Pardhan Gond artists from central India, who make a growing contemporary Adivasi art world in India. I share my reflections from long term immersive research in the home-workshops or studio spaces where artists create art works for art fairs, galleries, and museums.

During the pandemic, I worked at the home-workshops, often painting with women and new artists in their home-workshops as they were finishing up artworks. I observed and participated in the making of repeating patterns that fill up the outlines of figures and forms have become a distinguishing style iconic of this art form. I observed and imitated the artists’ body at work, bending down, repeatedly drawing patterns. With a focus on the repeated movements of making patterns, I read art making as a form of history making, a form of knowledge production by the Gond artists which reconfigures colonial histories and contests institutional frames.

Over time, participating in the art making process revealed to the conjoined forces at work – making art is a livelihood, reconfigures colonial histories and contests institutional frames, but also produces hierarchies and power asymmetries. Those who train and work for more established artists as pattern makers often find that the relations that give them access to mobility also constrain them. The repeated labor of making artworks within the home and family produces relations of mutual interdependence and co-existence but can also generate hierarchies and inequalities, wrapping them in enduring relations of constraints, obligations, and indebtedness.

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Paper short abstract:

I aim to share how has been the exploration and analysis of the transmission process of dance in spaces where female dancers experience dancehall, such as parties and classes, from the embodied perspective of the dance.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a significant amount of academic research conducted on the topic of dancehall in Jamaica, with a focus on ethnomusicology (Cooper 2004) and cultural studies (Stanley Niaah 2010 and Hope 2006). However, these studies tend to analyse dancehall solely as a phenomenon that takes place at parties, with music being the primary subject of analysis and dance being considered a byproduct of the music.

It is crucial to give ethnographic attention to the analysis of dance as it is a potent symbol that cannot be reduced to any other form of human activity. Dance communicates emotions that cannot be expressed verbally (Giurchescu 2001). Therefore, it is essential to study various spaces where dancehall is experienced by dancers, including parties, dance classes, and competitions, which previous anthropological investigations have overlooked. I consider it important to focus the attention of the dancehall from the embodied perspective because is a phenomenon that was born in a dancing context. Dancehall means dancing in the hall. The hall is the parties takes place in Kingston, Jamaica (Hope, 2006).

That is why I am exploring and analysing the transmission process of dance in spaces where female dancers experience dancehall, such as parties and classes, from the embodied experience. I aim to share an overview of how I tackled this question during my fieldwork in Jamaica in the summer of 2023. To learn and research about dancehall dancers, I decided to participate in dance activities with them as much as possible.

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Paper short abstract:

Using theatre as ethnographic method, Tunisian actors are asked to work as auto-ethnographers documenting their visa experiences, aiming to challenge colonial anthropology. This paper reflects on the ongoing methodological experiment, its current phases and potential future directions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on an ongoing methodological experiment exploring theatre as an ethnographic research method. Beyond traditional ethnography, where a single researcher studies how Tunisian visa applicants navigate Europe's borders, five Tunisian actors are asked to work as ethnographers while applying for a visa to The Netherlands. The experiment aims to dismantle the subject-object dichotomy inherent in colonial anthropology, challenging the distinctions between researcher and researched, often perpetuating colonial relations. Choosing a theatre play over an article arises from a desire to navigate the documentation regime, historically tied to colonial history and the dominance of the 'Man with the Pen' over oral traditions. Theatre can potentially foster different ways of knowledge making and utilization. The plan is that actors collect auto-ethnographic material by documenting their experiences through note taking, photographing, audio recording and video journaling. The aim is that this material constitutes the plot of the theatre play. The paper outlines the phases this experiment has gone through, and what is yet to come. It reflects on what was envisioned and what has happened so far in practice. It will critically engage with the limitations, the obstacles and surprises, closing off with questions and ideas for the future.

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Paper short abstract:

"Good Night" uses the 'fabula method' to deconstruct and reinvent narratives, merging historical and contemporary socio-political contexts with creative stories. This project redefines traditional views of light and darkness, merging reality and fiction in nocturnal environments.

Paper long abstract:

In 'Good Night,' I apply the 'fabula method' to deconstruct story-making and explore alternative narratives. This method culminates in a reflective textual piece, drawing from my research and experiences while weaving in historical and current socio-political events from London and New York. Designed as an adult bedtime story with the potential to be adapted into a play, 'Good Night' invites readers and viewers to engage with complex, nuanced perspectives on darkness. The narrative gives a voice to non-human elements, notably the encompassing darkness and an urban fox, serving as an extension of my work in probing urban night darkness perceptions.

Fabulation, a key component of this method, stands as a creative tactic in negotiating narrative forms. It aligns with literary anthropology, an interdisciplinary field that leverages literary works to examine and reinterpret socio-cultural experiences, beliefs, and practices. 'Good Night' engages with and reimagines encounters with darkness, challenging the idea of human supremacy. It fluidly intertwines historical and political realities with conjectures on nocturnal lightscapes, blurring the lines between environmental perceptions, reality, and fiction. The story encourages reflection on storytelling methods and the portrayal of darkness. Ultimately, 'Good Night' seeks to reshape our imaginative processes and assumptions.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses adivasi arts programming as decolonising practices at the intersection of cultural politics, performance, and anthropology. Self-produced dance videos document, educate, and entertain, problematising distinctions between empirical and theoretical interventions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the circulation of self-produced adivasi dance videos in Andhra Pradesh, within a wider movement of arts programming that I argue constitutes a form of decolonising salvage ethnography at the intersection of cultural politics, community performance, and applied anthropology research. Adivasi cultural heritage research incorporates small-scale, self-curated ethnological exhibitions, dance performances, public showcases of rituals, alongside ambitious, though often underfunded, projects of language revival. In the context of community identities represented as polarised cultural groups, and widespread state and religious intervention in the exhibition of adivasi life, this paper explores low-budget, self-produced dance videos as a medium that transcends the challenges of the nationalist-imperialist binary in decolonisation theory. Equally, these productions defy a sharp distinction between exoticised representations of indigeneity, and mass consumption of popular culture. Through the medium of mobile phones, Koya adivasi dance is constructed as a both a mode of participation in identity-making for young people, and as ethnographic documentation for cultural activists. While noting the context of heightened nationalism, ethno-religious discourse, and the stratification of adivasi communities, the paper foregrounds the role of local convenors and producers who conceptualise their work explicitly as an anthropological practice. Reflecting on the challenges of labelling, external analysis, and collaboration, the paper argues that while Koya adivasi dance videos are part of a wider trend of cultural revivalism or “re-tribalization”, they can be considered as decolonising forms of salvage anthropology, as they re-appropriate and transcend state-ethnographic and popular modes of representation, yet remain open to spontaneous youth participation.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on two cases of co-creation in the field - with a group of ceramic makers in China and a network of contemporary artists in Japan - we explore the emergent nature of both artistic practices and research methods, opening up a space to rethink ways of knowing in academia and beyond.

Paper long abstract:

How do artistic practices arising in the field become research methods for anthropologists? In what ways do anthropologists’ research processes animate the practices of our friends in the field? In this paper we explore the emergent nature of artistic practices and research methods alike by comparing two instances of co-creation with interlocutors in the field - a group of young ceramic makers in Jingdezhen, China and a network of contemporary artists in Osaka, Japan. Zihan’s research explores how, against the backdrop of an increasingly anxious social atmosphere in contemporary China, young migrant ceramic makers ‘craft’ wellbeing in creative practice and everyday life. As Zihan’s interlocutors learn to ‘articulate’ their creative inspirations and life stories through their daily conversations and interviews, she learns skills of capturing the ‘inarticulable’ by drawing, photographing, and making ceramics with them. Iza’s work with artists in Osaka entailed many encounters of co-creation, sometimes led by artists, at other times inspired by Iza’s invitation. The artists’ own engagement in various forms of research and experimentation in both material and verbal forms of expression troubles any neat opposition between verbal and non-verbal articulation of ideas, and traces the process of arrival at insights. While these emergent and co-created methods aim to better represent and evoke experiences in the field, they also, in turn, pose challenges for integration into academic discourse. Such arising issues offer an opportunity not only to adopt a more open-ended approach to methods, but to rethink the epistemological underpinnings of anthropological academic endeavour.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on an experimental methodology which used craft processes to research with Malagasy craftswomen. I explain how I developed craft-based tools to analyse research methods. Using participants’ own creative languages revealed how methods shaped their agency to contribute.

Paper long abstract:

The front and back of an embroidery can tell very different stories. One side may be smooth and even. Turning it over can reveal the history of the work: the chronology of stitches, the placement of an embroidery ring, the embroiderer’s thrifty adaption as thread ran out. In this paper, I would like to turn over the substantive findings of my PhD and tell the story of the methodological workings on the back: the starting point and the evolution, the tangles and loose threads.

I used an experimental methodology in research with embroiderers and reed-weavers in Madagascar. Craft practice is central to participants’ ways of knowing, being and communicating. A methodology built around participants’ own languages of craft resonated with craftswomen, leading to greater agency to shape the research. The research design evolved, for example by incorporating filmmaking to enable participants to speak directly to the wider discourse beyond Madagascar.

My commitment to an experimental methodology led me to question what tools we have, as creative researchers, to analyse the efficacy of methodological decisions. I developed craft-based tools to analyse the usefulness of the research methods themselves, utilising the benefits of generating knowledge through embodied processes. In this paper I reflect on the methodological findings that this approach revealed, including the ways that the sequence of research activities, symmetries of skill fluency, and technical processes shaped conversations. I consider the challenges of drawing on alternative hierarchies of knowledge within the constraints of PhD research.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on the reflections of two practitioners-academics, the paper charts out the political and conceptual challenges in the use of Arts-based methodology as a decolonial strategy, with a focus on the (un)commensurability of knowledge forms.

Paper long abstract:

The articulation of the decolonial impulse in neoliberal academy in Europe and its settler colonies often operates a reduction of the post-colonial project to a process of ensuring that reading lists have a representation of people who are of racially diverse backgrounds. Unreconstructed extensions of coloniality thus pass as radical texts for being produced by brown and black folk in western academia. This strategy of superficial aesthetics (for as we see with Art based methods, aesthetics can be profoundly radical) thus protects academic discourse from any fundamental rearticulation – ontologically, epistemologically, materially or indeed geo-politically. Based on the reflections of two practitioner-academics who use film and theatre as research methods, the paper charts out the political and conceptual challenges in the use of Arts-based methodology as a decolonial strategy in an attempt to make these challenges collective, tangible and actionable.

Primary amongst these is what we call the challenge of the knowledge form - i.e. the form required for something to be legible as knowledge itself. The move, for instance, from a journal article to a forum theatre piece requires a reimagination of knowledge itself. Related to this is the gendered genealogy of the notion of ‘evidence’, marked by the dominance of claims taking the quantifiable form over the qualitative, the ethnographic and the narrative, extending into the exclusion of the artistic itself. A third challenge is that of ontological articulation especially in contexts where arts-based methods begin with an irreverence to ontological assumptions that underlie normativity.

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Paper short abstract:

My paper presents a collaborative arts-based research project centred around an overlooked collection of rocks in the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. Upending traditional approaches to object labelling and classification, the project critically examines the colonial legacies of this collection.

Paper long abstract:

This paper outlines a cross-disciplinary arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist. The work centres around an unusual collection of rocks found in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden. The rocks were gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiöld, a well-known Swedish anthropologist who specialised in South American indigenous material culture and history. Kept alongside many other indigenous, colonial-era artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they have been sitting undisturbed in the museum’s storage drawers for over a century.

My paper describes our ongoing process of re-engaging with this overlooked collection of rocks. While there is scant information in the museum's archives about their provenance or cultural significance, their history is clearly connected to the larger institutional and political narratives of so many existing ethnographic collections linking the projects of anthropology and colonialism, connecting the organisation and management of archives to the administration of order in the world.

Our project calls attention to such practices through upending traditional ethnographic approaches to object labelling and classification. We engage with ‘storied’ forms of knowledge that reveal the rocks’ significance not through established taxonomies, but through acknowledging their entangled and shifting relationships and encounters over time. We employ exploratory methods of archival research, use Surrealist practices such as collage, automatic writing and ‘involuntary sculpture’, and playfully experiment with the genre of the exhibition catalogue to both theorise and operationalise decolonising practices within the contemporary ethnographic museum.

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Paper short abstract:

Through body mapping with children and focus groups with parents, this study explores lived experiences and perceptions of resilience in Black and South Asian children from Muslim families in East London. We will reflect on carrying out body mapping with children as an embodied and creative method.

Paper long abstract:

Many children are considered ‘at-risk’ of failing to thrive due to chronic stressors occurring within their environments. Understanding resilience in pre-adolescence is important to inform interventions that support psychosocial wellbeing. However, there is limited research on children’s interpretations and diverse experiences of resilience, with research historically using quantitative instruments tailored to White, middle-class Western adults and adolescents. Embodied and arts-based methods, such as body mapping, can complement traditional approaches through their focus on visual and symbolic processes to understand subjective, embodied experiences of resilience.

Our paper presents the results of a study we conducted using body mapping to explore lived experiences and perceptions of resilience in Black and South Asian children aged 7-12 from Muslim families living in East London. East London’s Muslim community represents a diverse, growing population. Despite being disproportionately affected by deprivation and racial and cultural discrimination, this population is underrepresented in resilience research. This study consisted of a one-day workshop including body mapping with children (n=12) and focus groups with their mothers (n=9) to capture multiple perspectives on children’s socioecological resilience factors.

Whilst systematic visuo-textual analysis is ongoing, initial analysis suggests that a range of factors are perceived as important for children’s resilience, including family and community bonds, religion and team sports. Here, we will report preliminary findings and methodological considerations for using body mapping with children for creative and non-verbal engagement and to deconstruct power imbalances between researchers and children. We will also discuss how this research informs culturally-relevant, strengths-based interventions to improve children’s resilience.