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- Convenors:
-
Viola Castellano
(University of Bayreuth)
Olivia Casagrande (University of Sheffield)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Focusing on collaborative ethnography and anthropology, we interrogate forms of knowledge production that engage with and are accountable to multiple communities, asking how these differential proximities and disjunctive reciprocities affect research methodologies and theoretical elaborations.
Long Abstract:
In the current reality of multiple crises, in which a precarious present and an uncertain future demand many ‘undoings’, we ask what the anthropological discipline, which itself underwent a significant crisis during the last decade, can do through and beyond academia. We are interested in two dynamics that characterize contemporary forms of knowledge production. On one hand, anthropologists' life trajectories are more and more marked by diasporic identities, international mobility and intersectional dynamics that articulate various forms of ‘differential proximity’ with research interlocutors. On the other side, there is an increasing use of collaborative methodologies in ethnographic practices as a way to challenge the extractive and colonial epistemic roots of the discipline, and foster forms of public and activist anthropology. These collaborations generate unexpected alliances and conflictive engagements and result in ‘disjunctive reciprocities’.
Moving from these entangled aspects, we interrogate forms of knowledge production that struggle to be accountable to different communities - those to which the anthropologist belongs to and works with. How do these multiple belongings affect research methodologies, subsequent theoretical elaborations and engaged outputs? How living through and acknowledging the many worlds weaved in personal and professional trajectories interrogate ethnographic collaboration and its possible reciprocities? What are the risks of responding to multiple but not necessarily compatible commitments?
Thinking through the concepts of differential proximities and disjunctive reciprocities, we invite contributions that reflect and elaborate on the limits and possibilities of partial connections and frictional ensambles in the context of collaborative ethnography and the anthropologist’s many accountabilities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Carolin Loysa (Freie Universitaet Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper tackles questions on positionality as experienced by a Mexicanized Lebanese-German in the area of tension that is living, teaching and doing ethnogaphy between Global North and South, highlighting questions of access and proximity, and the responsibilities these experiences trail behind.
Paper long abstract:
As Mexicanized Lebanese-German researcher who teaches and lives in Berlin, my biography has been intrinsically connected to my choice of research. This should be reflected upon and developed further to keep decolonizing a discipline that started its history being nurtured through imperial colonial systems of thought and institutions. This paper tackles questions on positionality in the area of tension that is living and teaching in the global north while doing research in the global south. It starts by questioning how our positionality not only has an influence in the way we do research but actually co-constitutes the field itself, highlighting questions of access, responsibility and the accountabilites these experiences of access (should) trail behind, especially for white global-north researchers. In her famous essay, Gayatri Spivak was pushing for the transformation of the colonial gaze in the social sciences and asked the -often overlooked second- question: 'What must the elites do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern?' (Spivak, 1993, p.90). As a a consequence and reflexive practice, ethnography should focus on (white) embodiment and its implications for our research much more thoroughly. Focusing on queer of color scholars like Ahmed, Adjepong or Hooks, this paper delivers a reflection and outlook on ethnographic inscriptions and positionality and the role they should have in contemporary ethnographic research. Furthermore, in a last step, it expands on ethnographic positionality as a pedagogical approach that highlights the creative writing process as structure through which we can challenge assumptions about the world.
Sonja Ruud (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) Marialena Avgerinou (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
Studying the co-production of literary texts in creative writing workshops by and for migrant/plurilingual authors, we investigate collaborative writing as an emic practice, as an ethical and methodological component of our ethnography, and as an aspect of our work in an interdisciplinary team.
Paper long abstract:
Dismantling myths representing both ethnography and literary writing as solitary endeavors, anthropologists and literary scholars are paying increased attention to the ways in which writing is a collaborative process. While anthropologists question the ways in which we co-create knowledge and writings with ethnographic interlocutors, literary and translation studies scholars explore how literature is inherently polyphonic. Our research mobilizes both perspectives in studying the collaborative production of literary texts in community creative writing workshops for and by authors with migrant or plurilingual backgrounds in Europe. In this context, we aim to visibilize the processes and power dynamics of collaboration infusing writing at three levels. First, we consider collaborative writing as an object of study, being a practice utilized within the organizations we are researching. Second, we examine collaborative writing as an ethical and methodological component of our ethnography, as outsiders to the communities involved. Thirdly, we situate collaborative writing as a practice we employ in our interdisciplinary research team, taking an autoethnographic approach to studying our academic milieu. At each of these levels, we explore the power inequalities at play but also the possibilities for forming solidarities based on converging or diverging interests, political aims, and life trajectories (our languages, mobilities, work, trans-nationalities). We engage with questions of accountability to the migrant and literary communities with whom we work as well as to our academic colleagues, and grapple with how to establish modes of reciprocity that foreground the desires of our interlocutors rather than our own desire to “give back.”
Ellis Kokko (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with a network of trans-identified researchers, clinicians and professionals working in transgender healthcare, this presentation reflects on the epistemological, political and ethical questions posed by writing about transgender joy/suffering as a transgender researcher.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I will think through the epistemological, political and ethical questions posed by writing about transgender joy/suffering as a transgender researcher. Drawing on fieldwork with a UK-based network of trans-identified researchers, clinicians and professionals working in transgender healthcare, I interrogate the tensions that arise when joy/suffering is both an object of research that must be made intelligible to wider audiences, and an embodied aspect of everyday lives of researchers. Historically, trans people in research have been subject to what the Puerto Rican intellectual Ramon Grosfoguel (2019) has called “epistemic extractivism” – a logic according to which trans lives and bodies provide ‘data’ for theory and analysis that is reserved for other, non-trans (cis) researchers. Trans scholars’ increasing insistence on making space for trans knowledges and epistemologies echoes calls in anthropology to re-imagine our ways of producing knowledge and to bring in “epistemological elsewheres” (Reese 2019). Focusing on three different sites – a gender identity clinic, a large-scale psychiatry research project, and a private clinic – I explore the strategies, knowledges and affects that get enacted when working with what researchers feel to be intimately familiar but that often evades capture by traditional research methods and categories. I suggest that in this context epistemology becomes above all an ethical practice. At the same time, the very sense of ‘stuckness’ that often characterizes researchers’ attempts (including my own) to reconcile their multiple commitments and identities, can also open up a potentiality for moving differently as anthropologists and researchers.
Magdalena Nowicka (DeZIM Institute) Piotr Goldstein (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Is convivial, arts-based research an opportunity for transformative politics? Based on our research with Polish commuting workers in Brandenburg, we engage with limits of participation, asymmetries of collaboration and ethical responsibility when politicizing precarious mobile work regimes.
Paper long abstract:
By insisting on participatory character of knowledge creation, convivial research wants to enact reflexive and a more ethical and democratic social science in settings which are characterised by power asymmetry. Our research is located in Brandenburg, the region bordering Poland, where many daily and weekly commuters find employment in logistics (Amazon, Zalando) and industry (Tesla Gigafactory). They are attractive, for cheap and flexible workforce whose precarious condition is increasingly a concern to trade unions and counseling services. To understand these workers’ lifeworlds and how they are shaped by migration industries, we use a mixture of creative, multimodal participatory methods. Rather than just documenting their practices, we invite the participants to envision with us their convivial futures using modes of creative expression proposed by themselves. In this contribution, we reflect upon the question whose futures are envisioned through collaborative research. We consider our role as researchers at different stages of professional careers (doctoral, postdoctoral, professorial), interest in our research from local, regional and national politicians, expectations of NGOs and community organizations that our research can make a difference, and the participants’ – both mobile workers and local inhabitants’ - capacities and readiness to engage in politicizing their own current and future situation. We thus address how convivial research could be the moment of opportunity for transformative politics. Our focus therby is on the questions of the limits of participation, asymmetries of collaboration in research, and ethical responsibility in research-based future-proofing contemporary politics.
Panas Karampampas (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This ethnographic paper discusses how collaborative research methods in anthropology may be used when working with scientists, politicians or bureaucrats. I will underline some difficulties and other particularities, highlighting the pros and cons of working with such populations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on six years of fieldwork (I will provide the minimum information about the project to protect the anonymity of my research participants). I had various opportunities to try collaborative methods with my research participants until the collaboration fell apart. I accidentally touched upon a topic they wanted to misrepresent for their micro-political games.
Most anthropologists work with disenfranchised people, people without a voice, or other populations in which multimodal, collaborative methods allow the people to represent themselves and contribute to the analysis, decreasing the power of the anthropologist over them. However, not many anthropologists have discussed the use of collaborative methods with people who hold positions of power or even have PhDs in anthropology or other social sciences.
Thus, in this paper, based on ethnographic examples, I discuss how colleagues can apply collaborative research methods in anthropology when working with scientists, politicians or bureaucrats. I will underline the difficulties the researcher may meet, as well as other particularities, highlighting the pros and cons of working with such populations. Finally, I will finish this paper with some suggestions that may help an anthropological project not to be used for personal interests and micro-political games that the research participants may try to introduce.
Neda Deneva-Faje (Babes-Bolyai University and SYNYO)
Paper short abstract:
Embracing collaborative research in anthropology requires not only conviction but also conscious and ongoing practice of relationality. The paper critically examines entrenched assumptions about the relationship between researchers and 'respondents', drawing on research with migrant women.
Paper long abstract:
Embracing collaborative and participatory research in anthropology requires not only conviction but also ongoing, conscientious practice. This paper critically examines entrenched assumptions about the unidirectional relationship between researchers and 'respondents', recognising that successful collaborative methodologies require ongoing, self-reflective engagement. It also interrogates the possibility true reflexivity about the positionality and situatedness of researchers trained in classical methods. Drawing on recent research from the ReIncluGen project on reconceptualising gender empowerment among Muslim migrant women, this paper presents the methodological challenges for collaboration. Photovoice was used as a technique for capturing the expression of ideas beyond language through images aiming to transcend the pre-determined impositions inherent in language defining abstract but deeply personal concepts. However, the power relations inherent in traditional research are easily reproduced on both sides. I argue that in order to transcend this, it is not enough for the researcher to question their own positionality and the situatedness of knowledge production; allowing researchers to experience vulnerability, relationality and consciously establishing proximity is crucial to creating a shared negotiated space for newly emerging concepts. By exploring our own team's different constructs and concepts of gender empowerment, our own situatedness of foreignness and difference, and our own privileges, and by sharing at least some of this with the women we were researching with, we aimed to construct a shared space of relationality. However, in order to truly develop collaborative research, we need to constantly reframe the questions we ask. It is in this space of uncertainty that this paper is situated.
Izabella Main (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
Paper short abstract:
I will discuss my multiple involvements (as activist, researcher, expert) and collaborative efforts in connection with CSOs and municipality. l reflect on the conflictive engagements and limits of collaborative ethnography when attempting to untangle healthcare sector for migrants.
Paper long abstract:
Public healthcare sector in Poland has been under continuous crisis in last decades (Watson 2006; Sowada et al 2019), and patients faced many challenges when seeking medical treatments. The situation had been far more difficult for foreign patients, both these with none (or very limited) and these with advanced knowledge of Polish language. Migrants and refugees encounter a complicated system of mixture of public, co-payed and private sectors, with employment-based or private insurance-based system of access, lack of information and confusion about the system, as well as lack of multi-cultural education of healthcare professionals and sometimes prejudices and discrimination. This has impacted both economic migrants coming to Poland from countries across the globe and Ukrainian families that have been escaping Russian aggression since 2022.
My long cooperation with civil service organizations in Poznan resulted in active involvement in attempts to improve access to information about healthcare system through preparing leaflets and workshops. Collaborative work with CSOs aimed at producing knowledge based on narratives coming from migrants and CSO employees about migrants’ experiences with healthcare. Recently I have been invited as “an expert” to cooperate with municipality’s department for health and social services which put me in a different context.
During my presentation I will first outline my multiple involvements (as activist, researcher, expert) and collaborative efforts in connection with different social actors. Second, I will reflect on the conflictive engagements, challenges and limits of collaborative ethnography.
Miriam Verhage (Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing) Jolanda Lindenberg (Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the complexity of collaborative ethnography when working with older adults with a lower SES. It highlights the power of collaboration in breaking barriers and respecting participants needs, yet reflects on ethical concerns like relational trust and hierarchical reciprocities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the evolving landscape of collaborative ethnography and its complexities by presenting our experience of participatory research with older adults of lower socioeconomic status (SES). In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on collaborative research methodologies in ethnographic studies, moving away from the traditional anthropologist-as-observer model towards joint exploration through participatory (action) research and co-creation. Particularly when dealing with older adults of lower SES, a group often characterized by distrust and disappointment towards institutions and researchers due to complicated methodologies and procedures, this approach, driven by reflexivity and creativity, appears promising. In this paper, we reflect on three years of fieldwork focusing on social inclusion among older adults with a lower SES in the Netherlands. Our findings show that collaborative ethnography reduces barriers and establishes a research methodology that has the potential to genuinely respect the participants' needs and wishes. The approach prioritizes a safe and supportive environment built on trust and practical guidance, empowering participants to have their voices heard and thereby fostering a reciprocal relationship where both the researcher and informant learn from each other. Simultaneously, we raise questions about the limitations of collaborative ethnography and the implications of relational trust. For example, what if informed consent is based solely on this trust? Is this ethically sound? And to what extent is the process truly reciprocal? As inherent hierarchies in knowledge, skills, and financial aspects persist. In this paper, we reflect on this complexity, our own role, and our accountabilities as researchers.
Katalin Parti (Virginia Tech) Susanna Rinehart
Paper short abstract:
Engaging older individuals in research on scam effects, we created an interactive theatre prevention play, tested its impact via ethnography, and confirmed its community value.
Paper long abstract:
This study embodies the ethos of collaborative ethnography, engaging directly with older adults as partners in research to understand the nuanced impacts of scam victimization on their mental health and their hesitancy to seek assistance. Through a series of participatory interviews involving 35 older individuals, we co-created narratives that illuminate the lived experiences and the personal and systemic barriers faced when dealing with scams. These conversations not only informed the research outcomes but also contributed to the co-development of age-sensitive intervention strategies. Together with the participants, we crafted an experiential, community-centric scam prevention initiative: an interactive theater play. This innovative approach fosters open dialogue among older adults, their social circles, and caregivers, empowering them to recognize and respond to scams. We utilized ethnographic methods, including observation, to assess the impact of this interactive play, thereby validating its effectiveness and community acceptance. Complementary to this, surveys completed by 200 audience members post-performance demonstrated the practicality of our collaborative, community-based program. Our presentation will delve into the methodological intricacies of exploring scam tactics and evaluating the influence of our program, all through the lens of collaborative ethnography that values the expertise and agency of older individuals.