Paper Short Abstract:

We often celebrate the affordances of multimodal anthropologies but we rarely mention the amount of labour needed to make multimodal anthropologies possible. I suggest that discussing labour is crucial to keep our theoretical debates & methodological euphoria about multimodality real and realistic.

Paper Abstract:

While academia celebrates the affordances of multimodal anthropology and encourages scholars to engage in experimental, creative and collaborative modes of knowledge production, a crucial dimension is ignored: the amount of labour that multimodal approaches and outputs require but very often remains invisible and goes unnoticed.

In this paper, I suggest that bringing labour into the conversation is crucial to keep the theoretical debate and the methodological euphoria around multimodal anthropologies real and realistic: doing multimodal anthropologies, I argue, does take a lot of labour – as in intellectual commitment and reflection, time and resources. Crucially, time and resources are often not readily available/accessible to ECRs who are, on the one hand, increasingly pressured to publish not to perish and are, on the other, invited to engage with multimodal approaches to pitch their research in fancy, creative and aesthetically appealing ways.

Drawing on my long-term engagement with the multimodal subfield of graphic anthropology, I argue that multimodal approaches/outputs are not creative outbursts which, as such, do not require any labour. Creating a multimodal output- an ethnographic comic, for example- takes a great deal of labour, which is often solitary and accomplished beyond our "official" working hours, during which we must prioritise writing. If we pay more attention to the relationship between labour and multimodal anthropologies, we might avoid creating another anthropological turn, another idealised theoretical bubble for a few, resourceful scholars and, I dare suggesting, we might even be able to prevent multimodal anthropology from becoming another field of academic exploitation.