Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the current strengths and limitations of critical anthropology in Deaf studies through the experience of conducting research into regional Australian Deaf culture and the accessibility system, and discusses the necessary path forward for research rooted in allyship.

Paper long abstract:

In our current academic landscape where anthropology’s methods, neo-coloniality, and relevance have been called into question, one response is a move towards a collaborative, critical anthropology. This paper advocates for a critical anthropology rooted in co-creation and interdisciplinary understanding through the experiences from my research regarding Deaf culture and accessibility.

Focused on regional Queensland, Australia, my research delves into accessibility services and the underlying paradigms shaping perceptions of d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing [HoH] individuals and cultures. In forming relationships with d/Deaf/HoH participants, I encountered excitement for qualitative research into their lived experience, running contrary to warnings of insularity or hostility of the Deaf community. This was due to the prevalence of quantitative, often medicalised research that is viewed to be culturally dismissive and disrespectful. A further point of intrigue was the practice of critical ethnography, which focuses on analysing and disrupting underlying power relationships, including the power held by academia, and ensuring that research is done in a way that is public, useful, and transformative.

This paper covers the importance of a critical anthropology through the reactions and hope expressed by my participants, along with how the core of community usefulness is practiced in my research. Along with the benefits, this paper discusses the limitations of my attempt at critical anthropology in Deaf studies, from academic limitations to my ability to co-create, to my identity as a hearing individual. Through this, the paper discusses the path anthropologists must take in Deaf studies to be respectful, useful allies.

Paper short abstract:

The shaping of collective memories and forms of representation of a stateless nation, dispersed over many countries, has many challenges. With an arts-based and community participatory approach it is shown how existing multimedia archives of Kurdish everyday culture can be presented in public.

Paper long abstract:

For stateless nations like the Kurds, who have experienced a plethora of wars, displacements and migrations the shaping of collective memories and the elaboration of forms of representation are highly challenging. This presentation is based on a running project entitled ZOZAN, in which the team investigate various forms of migration through art interventions and art-based research.

Starting point are two comprehensive multimedia collections, depicting Kurdish everyday life in rural and urban settings in Turkey for more than five decades (1967 – 20019). The majority of the materials will be digitized and made available open access as a form of restitution.

Enormous transformation processes have happened in this period, ranging from civil war like situations, extreme state violence, huge dam projects leading to refuge and forced migration.

In this community-participatory approach we “study what we co-create” (Michaela Schäuble). Various transnational encounters are organized as art-interventions in which questions of cultural heritage of stateless, marginalized societies, of individual and collective memories, of identity processes, forms of belonging or the role of archives, among others are discussed.

In various Kurdish transnational settings, together with artists and participants we elaborate on forms of artistic representation, to integrate personal and group experiences of displacement and violent developments, to find forms of representation.

In this presentation I will also focus on methodological questions and discuss the necessity to creatively elaborate new methodic approaches.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the rise of creative resistance and community projects in a post-industrial Czech city through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur and argue that the flâneur is a timely tool for anthropologists trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world and its multiple intermeshed crises.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the rise of creative resistance and community projects in a post-industrial city in the Czech Republic through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur. I discuss how I myself adopted flânerie as a method for gathering and analyzing ethnographic data during fieldwork among the city’s urban activists. Finally, I argue that the flâneur is an especially useful tool for (un)doing ethnography in a rapidly changing world and its multiple intermeshed crises.

A former mining town that served as the main motor of socialist Czechoslovakia’s economy during the second half of the 20th century, Ostrava today is still a city in transition, with neglected public spaces, abandoned mine shafts, and disused steel mills. Urban planning and care for public spaces took a backseat to the privatization of city property in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, a nascent community of urban activists is having some success in bringing life to Ostrava’s empty streets and pushing city administration to invest more in the revitalization of public spaces. From guided walks through neglected neighbourhoods to theatrical tours in abandoned industrial sites, I examine how the urban activists rely on movement and embodied experience of the city as a form of critique. Simply the act of noticing and focusing attention on problematic areas becomes a political statement with the potential to transform.

Paper short abstract:

While presenting main findings from my PhD research, in which community groups consisting of Coventry-based women were asked to create joint collage artworks to represent human dignity, I reflect on the main lessons I have learned from the blending of arts-based and qualitative methods.

Paper long abstract:

Where is the place of innovative arts-based methodologies in anthropology? I have often asked this question while conducting my PhD research, in which I asked community groups consisting of Coventry-based women to create joint collage artworks. The aim of these was to represent human dignity and two of its related phenomena, vulnerability and respect, from participants’ perspective. My presentation highlights some of the most relevant findings from the work-in-progress PhD thesis, showing how participants in my research raised rather different concerns about human dignity than the ones present in literature. Instead of, for instance, pondering about the exact beginning or end of human life, or debating on legal and bioethical issues, women rather interpreted human life as a process, and discussed the three phenomena in relation to the various phases of human life. They made rather surprising connections between human dignity and food or drink choices, and raised important concerns, from violence against women to multiple identities and belonging. On the one hand, collage-making as an innovative arts-based method was a crucial component in getting to these findings, but on the other hand, supporting methods (participant observation, focus group and interview recording, autoethnography) have also been unavoidable in the process. The presentation ends with some general considerations about how the blending of arts-based and qualitative research might impact the future of anthropological fieldwork.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores the impact of covid-19, in its temporal scale, on the methodologies that were brought into play in the research of a group of students who developed their final degree projects during the quarantine.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation explores the impact of covid-19, in its temporal scale, on the methodologies that were brought into play in the research of a group of design students who developed their final degree projects during the quarantine. We ask what a variation in the experience of time meant for the projects that were being carried out during the pandemic, how the experience of the world affected the course of the research and vice versa, and whether there is anything we can learn from what happened. It is argued, among other things, that the pandemic generated a slowdown phenomenon that we have related to temporary experiences that can be read as a flight from hegemonic neoliberal regimes of care. We also propose the idea that these temporal distortions were a queer event that led to research that has focused on the doing of its own which relates to the production of process-centred research and the development of self-reflexive practices.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ethnographic animation films as a genre of “visual evidence” which, although arguably visually “fictitious” (by being animated, illustrated, drawn), present a meaningful mode of presencing the real otherwise; through poiesis.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses ethnographic animation films as a genre of “visual evidence” which, although arguably visually “fictitious” (by being animated, illustrated, drawn), present a meaningful mode of presencing the real (Heidegger 1977) otherwise. Rather than being built upon the capture and imprisonment of ocular fragments of what normally appears as the “real”, such cinematographic works, it is argued, make the world “present” to their viewers through poiesis; through a materialization and an artistic bringing into being of pieces of reality that might exist beyond the tangible. This burgeoning filmic genre is hence presented as an epistemological and phenomenological inquiry into the real that moves beyond an ocular notion of visual evidence to encompass mystical, subjective, and imaginative folds of humans’ experience of the real (Taussig 2009). Visual poietics in ethnographic animations, it is thus proposed, can touch and caress the real in a manner that might be truer than what has been proposed by an epistemologically-controlling Occidental modernist thought (Largier 2009), hence undoing a kindred classical anthropological habit of equating “visual evidence” with reality. Furthermore, this paper suggests that the use of visual poietics in ethnographic animation films allows for an embodied filmic transparency with regards to the mediatic object’s subjective framing of reality: while a “filmed” ethnographic film might conceal its subjective framing of reality through its seemingly objective capture of what is ocularly real (Taylor 1996, Carta 2015), an animated ethnographic film is mediatically candid about its subjective constructedness and poietic mode of presencing the real.