Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how migrant photographs mobilized after return shape mnemonic ties, belonging, and differentiation among Turkish return migrants, showing how visual practices becomes a productive site of conflict through which transnational identities are negotiated.

Paper long abstract

The bilateral labor agreement between Turkey and Germany in 1961 initiated the Turkish worker migration to Europe. While many migrants eventually returned to Turkey, still return did not signify an end to the migration. This study argues that return migrants forge mnemonic ties to the hostland through visual practices, specifically vernacular photographs produced in Germany and brought to Turkey. Departing from the concept of "travelling memory," this study examines these photographs not merely as carriers of personal memories, but as visual sites of differentiation and tension shaped by migrants' experiences of place-making.

Drawing on life-story interviews and photo-elicitation with first- and second-generation Turkish returnees, the research explores how photographs reconstruct belonging by simultaneously connecting returnees to Germany and polarizing them from fellow Turkish migrants. These images create a contested space where migrants claim to “be like a German,” narrating cultural and social practices that distance them from the collective "worker migrant" history.

In this context, photographs allow returnees to shape ways of seeing the past that articulate selective forms of belonging across homeland and hostland. By foregrounding the afterlives of migrant photographs in post-return contexts, this study demonstrates how visual practices form transnational identities that are continually reworked in the present. Ultimately, this study argues that photographs allow Turkish returnees to navigate the complexities of transnational subjectivity as they negotiate status, difference, and memory within the Turkish social landscape. This visual approach reveals the multiple and polarized layers of the post-return experience.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, biodiversity conservation is polarizing; trying to situate it ethnographically and visually relies on suspending the urge to reach conclusions but instead deal with the polarized tension within conservationism as the dynamic and unfinished ethnographic subject itself.

Paper long abstract

In Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, the practice of conservation is a polarizing topic, and trying to situate it ethnographically and represent it visually relies on mixed participatory methods, understanding local politics and history, as well as willingness to suspend the urge to reach a conclusion but instead deal with the polarized tension within conservationism as the dynamic and unfinished ethnographic subject itself.

I’d like to approach this presentation by discussing (1) the goals in mind while making the ethnographic documentary Lifting the Green Screen, (2) the methods we engaged while attempting to reach those goals, (3) challenges that were ever-present, and (4) how working visually nuanced that anthropological engagement. 80% of the Osa’s geographic space is under some sort of land controls between the national park, forest reserve, and private preserves, which make the Osa a uniquely well-situated place for ecotourism and tropical ecological science. Many residents, however, have other - sometimes competing - interests that demand their time and energy, which often leads to disputes, conflict, and controversy. Visual ethnographic narrative is able to expose this tension by giving participants, local residents of various generations and backgrounds in addition to other interested parties, the space to voice their concerns and the time for debate and reflection. Visual narrative and ethnographic storytelling can also illuminate an affect of everyday life – an aesthetic embodiment – that strikes the viewer in a way that, in best cases, transports them to that field site.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines menstrual taboo in Mumbai. Applying methods gathered from visual anthropology, it shows how images negotiate stigma and moral polarization, moving beyond regimes of invisibility and creating an ambivalent space of knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

In the Indian context, where visual culture plays a crucial role (Pinney, 2004), menstruation remains largely hidden within a regime of invisibility, dictated by cultural norms of purity and pollution. As Camilla Mørk Røstvik (2024) highlights, while visual representations of menstruation have increased since the 1970s, they often generate a dichotomy of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" signs, reinforcing the deep-seated taboo that shapes how menstruation is seen.

With a focus on Mumbai, this paper explores how artists, activists, and filmmakers are disrupting – or, in some cases, unintentionally reinforcing – the invisibility and stigma around menstruation. Drawing on fieldwork involving artworks, films, found visual materials (Pauwels, 2011), and participatory research workshops using drawing as a research method, I address the challenges visual anthropologists encounter when engaging with stigmatized subjects. I reflect on moments in which visual interventions, rather than challenging the taboos, have amplified menstrual stigma, revealing the ethical and methodological tensions faced by visual anthropologists when engaging with polarized moral frameworks.

In this context, images become powerful but unstable media through which artists, activists, and participants negotiate the boundaries of menstrual visibility and stigma. By moving beyond enforced invisibility, images open a contested space where polarized notions of purity and pollution are challenged and sometimes reconfigured. In this sense, polarization emerges not only as a constraint but also as a site for dialogue and situated knowledge production.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This contribution explores the analytical, representational and collaborative potential of graphic novels for anthropologists working in adversarial settings, such as criminal trials, where sound and visual recordings are prohibited.

Paper long abstract

“Criminal defence generally involves defending criminals, I mean, it’s not defending activists (…) it can be very Manichean (…); it forces you to adopt extremely caricatural positions, between the good and the bad guys.” The everyday work of my informant, a criminal lawyer, contrasts with her experience of defending climate activists in Swiss criminal courts. In these hearings, where climate activists are prosecuted for minor violations of the criminal code such as unlawful entry or preventing an official act, black and white positions coexist with more subtle discourses and practices. These discourses and practices, along with their distinctive affective arrangements (Bens 2018) – e.g. judges showing understanding for the accused, prosecutors joking with defence lawyers – are often ephemeral and remain concealed in written legal decisions, while audio and visual recordings are prohibited.

Consequently, this contribution proposes to investigate the potential of graphic ethnography (Bonanno 2025; Thessodopoulos 2022) or ethno/graphy (Atalay et al. 2019) to analyse and represent anthropologically nuanced research findings about sites whose polarised features seem to be exacerbated in text. Building on feminist approaches to courtroom ethnography (Faria et al. 2020; Flower & Klosterkamp 2023) and featuring excerpts from a graphic novel developed collaboratively with an illustrator and my ethnographic interlocutors, this paper suggests that ethno/graphic novels generate deeper modes of engagement and knowledge production by foregrounding the multiplicity of courtroom encounters.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines 360° video through the concept of “polarised presence.” Reflecting on Unquiet Ground, a spherical documentary on memory activism in post-conflict Peru, it argues immersive media situates viewers through politics of placement rather than transporting them elsewhere.

Paper long abstract

For more than a century, anthropology has pursued the promise of “being there” as a way of approximating the lived experiences of others. With the rise of immersive media, particularly 360-degree video and virtual reality, this promise has been reanimated through claims of heightened presence, empathy, and sensory proximity. Drawing on media and visual anthropology, this paper offers a reflexive, practice-based examination of 360° video as an ethnographic method. Framing placement as a new form of authorship in spherical filmmaking, I reflect on the making of Unquiet Ground (postproduction, 2026), a 360° film project on memory activism in post-conflict Peru. I argue that 360° video neither dissolves authorship nor transports viewers into other worlds; instead, it situates them. Immersive ethnographic practice, I suggest, is less about “being there” than about the conditions, politics, and responsibilities of getting (the audience) there.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on hospital ethnography, this paper examines polarisation as a productive tension between regimes of medical visibility. It explores how collaborative visual practices render uncertainty visible and generate alternative forms of knowledge in visual anthropology.

Paper long abstract

In contemporary hospital environments, polarisation rarely appears as explicit ideological conflict. Rather, it emerges through ongoing tensions between regimes of visibility: what can be shown and legitimised as medical evidence, what remains invisible or unspeakable, and whose experiences are rendered intelligible within dominant visual cultures of care. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in hospital settings with patients affected by conditions marked by diagnostic and prognostic uncertainty, this paper examines visual practices as sites where such tensions are negotiated rather than resolved.

Building on perspectives in visual anthropology that understand images not merely as representational tools but as relational and ethical spaces, I analyse a series of collaborative visual experiments developed with patients, healthcare professionals, and artists. These practices—ranging from participatory drawing to experimental visual forms of restitution—do not seek to overcome conflict or reconcile divergent perspectives. Instead, they sustain what I conceptualise as an hospitality of uncertainty, in which polarisation is approached as a productive tension that reveals the conditions under which representation itself becomes possible.

In a visually saturated medical environment dominated by imaging technologies that claim objectivity and transparency, such alternative visual languages create space for affects, ambiguities, and forms of knowledge that resist textual or diagnostic translation. By foregrounding the ethical and methodological challenges of making uncertainty visible without instrumentalising it, this paper argues that reflexive engagements with polarisation can generate new visual grammars of care. These grammars do not aim at consensus, but at sustaining attention, negotiation, and co-presence in polarised worlds.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

My paper proposal focuses on the making of an ethnographic film as part of a PhD in anthropology and questions, through feedback and collaborative cinema, how images can be used to negotiate the aesthetic and ethical issues of representation in a polarized and visually saturated world.

Paper long abstract

“It's our story, but it's your work.”With these words, my field partner T. pointed out a core issue when I suggested that she co-sign a film partly based on her story, as part of my thesis.

Researchers are more and more confronted with a proliferation of images in their fieldworks and must therefore take this visual ecology into account. How can we overcome this polarization between the production of a situated narrative and anthropological knowledge? Faye Ginsburg has called for a decolonisation of documentary cinema, inviting filmmakers to revive the principles of Rouch's “shared anthropology” in what she calls “relational documentary,” grounded on a “responsible aesthetic” (Ginsburg, 2018).

Faced with an increasingly abundant vernacular visual production – created and shared on social media, documentary or fictional creations by the “informants” – what place and status should be given to the images and sounds that the ethnologist-filmmaker produces her- himself ? What dialogue should be established between these different audiovisual and discursive registers, and what aesthetic choices should be used to encourage this dialogue?

If good images in anthropology are the result of a good ethnographic relationship and engage in dialogue with the iconographic conventions in force in the fieldwork (Leon-Quijano, 2022), the reflection about when and how to “take images” – or even to not take them at all – is not only aesthetic but eminently political. How then can we find a good balance between these two poles, and who should have the final say on the ethnographic narrative?

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Understanding polarization as a basic questioning of the status quo, this paper seeks to make a contribution from a media anthropological perspective and embarks on a postcolonial journey of conflictive seeing in the context of global genocidal politics, from Gujarat/India, 2002, to Gaza, 2023-.

Paper long abstract

Polarization is usually seen as negative and is almost always leveled as an accusation against a political Other, who is identified as a threat to an inherently assumed unity. In this way, polarization has been used both by right-wing (indivisible ethnicity/homeland) and left-wing (divide-and-rule) as well as, especially, by liberal political forces who have been most convinced of the reasonability and unquestionability of their world view of a shared humanity.

I will discuss the relation between the challenges of this status quo and the challenges that arise when visual evidence becomes conflictive that concerns the truth of a crime against humanity. From a media anthropological perspective, I will follow the trajectory of liberal TV journalism in postcolonial India, during the 2002 pogrom against the Muslim minority in the regional state of Gujarat through Hindu-nationalist forces, and in post-Holocaust Germany, during the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza through the Israeli government. In both cases, the tension between what could clearly be seen to be happening, in different media, and its interpretation on the part of the perpetrating and complicit forces constituted a visual method in itself. In India, liberal journalism eventually failed to convey their evidence of a pogrom, accusing the Hindu right of (successful) polarization, while in Germany, liberal journalism largely denied the evidence of a genocide, accusing the pro-Palestinian left of (antisemitic) polarization. This constellation throws up questions both for increasingly complicated conditions of existential truth-establishing and for polarization as a productive means of truth-seeking.