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- Convenors:
-
Renate Schelwald
(Erasmus University)
Cato Janssen (University of Antwerp)
Roman Giling (Erasmus University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how multimodal ethnography can open spaces for embodied understanding, reflection, and dialogue, challenging polarization through sensory, visual, and affective ways of knowing.
Long Abstract
In an increasingly polarized world, ethnographers face the challenge of creating spaces where diverse perspectives can coexist. This panel invites contributions that use multimodal and visual ethnographic methods (such as film, photography, sound, installation, or theatre-based approaches) to explore how knowledge is produced and communicated through sensory and material engagements. We are particularly interested in the role of embodied and affective knowledge, and the potential of visual forms to open dialogue between researchers, participants, and audiences. This includes works that examine how these methodologies not only deepen understanding of their field of study but also shape the researcher’s own reflexivity and positionality.
By bringing together films, installations, and paper presentations, this panel seeks to bridge not only the gap between analytical and sensory modes of knowing, but also between communities and perspectives increasingly divided by social and political polarization. How can multimodal ethnography foster understanding and connection rather than division? How do embodied, affective, and sensory forms of engagement transform the way researchers relate to their participants, their material, and themselves? We welcome classic paper presentations, but also contributions that experiment with form and that push the boundaries of what ethnography can do and how it can bring people together across divides.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
The Black Box of Policy is a multimodal immersive installation exploring the affective, relational life of policy making around stigmatising skin diseases. Through images, sound, and voice, it brings together diverse perspectives to foster empathy and dialogue across divides.
Paper long abstract
The Black Box of Policy is a multimodal installation emerging from anthropological research conducted with people involved in policy advocacy for stigmatising skin diseases. Drawing on interviews, conversations, and observations with actors positioned very differently within global health, from high-level policymakers to people living with neglected tropical diseases, it explores what lies inside the often-invoked yet poorly understood “black box” of policy making. Rather than treating policy as a purely bureaucratic or technical process, the work foregrounds its affective, relational, and contingent dimensions. The installation combines paintings of real and imagined scenes with layered soundscapes of real, performed, and fictive voices, alongside music and lighting. These elements are deliberately arranged in a flattened, non-linear, “messy” form that gives equal weight to a multiplicity of perspectives. In doing so, the work creates a shared sensory space inviting audiences to encounter policy as something that touches and troubles hearts as much as it governs lives. Observations of audience engagement, including parliamentarians and people directly affected by disease, suggest that this approach can open dialogue, foster empathy, and challenge processes of othering across entrenched social and political divides.
Ideally, the installation would be brought to the conference and presented inside of, or alongside, a conventional paper presentation. The work takes the form of a small tent that can be erected within a room, with an immersive experience lasting approximately five minutes. A short explanatory video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omBbd_vCaKU . I would be happy to liaise with EASA regarding logistical considerations.
Paper short abstract
How can multimodal ethnography create dialogue in polarized museum debates? I present a methodological approach using a collaborative online exchange exhibition that links museum communities in Barbados and Cologne (Germany), tracing affective resonances, frictions, and emerging relations.
Paper long abstract
Polarised debates on decolonisation and heritage often harden into mutually exclusive moral positions, where “rational” institutional authority is set against “emotional” demands for repair, recognition, and belonging. This paper asks how multimodal, collaborative ethnography can open a shared space in which different affective publics can encounter each other with dialogue. Drawing on my ongoing PhD research in Barbados and Cologne, I analyse the making of a collaborative online exchange exhibition as both method and ethnographic object.
The exhibition is co-developed through workshops and iterative curatorial choices with museum-affiliated communities in Barbados and Cologne. Participants respond to selected artifacts, exhibitions, and themes through short narratives, images, audio fragments, and “affective mappings” of museum encounters. By circulating the same prompts across two historically entangled yet different postcolonial contexts, the project makes visible how affects “stick” (Ahmed 2004) differently to museums, collections, and institutional roles, producing divergent claims and senses of belonging.
I argue that the exchange exhibition operates as an affective infrastructure that does more than represent difference: it actively reconfigures relations between publics. It makes tensions, attachments, and silences experientially perceptible, enables dialogic encounters without forcing consensus, and reveals both the possibilities and constraints of institutional collaboration. In doing so, it demonstrates how multimodal ethnography can function as a method of inquiry, a space of encounter, and a modest intervention in polarized museum debates.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents an ongoing interactive web countermap that uses glitch as a method to demystify the promise of seamless digital ID. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across Asia, Europe, and Africa, the countermap stages breakdown by design to produce embodied and affective forms of knowing.
Paper long abstract
The imagination of “seamlessness” is central to how digital identification systems are globally proliferated today (e.g. Sustainable Development Goal 16.9; Digital Public Infrastructures). Digital IDs are imagined to place citizens only a few taps, pushes, and scrolls away from accessing services and entitlements. However, our ethnographic fieldwork in Estonia, Germany (and the EU), Indonesia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone shows that the infrastructuring of digital ID is marked by everyday frictions: technical breakdowns, bureaucratic mistranslations, and uneven implementation. We turn to multimodal ethnographic practice to demystify this promise of seamlessness by translating ethnographic insights into embodied and affective encounters. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s critique of neoliberal smoothness, Rosa Menkman and Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism, and anthropological studies of infrastructure, we design an interactive web countermap that intentionally glitches by design. The interface adopts a clean, developmentalist roadmap format and aesthetic as a façade to be destabilized through user interaction. Rather than treating glitch as a technical error to be fixed, we mobilize it as a method to disrupt narratives of seamlessness and to produce embodied and affective forms of knowing. By forcing users to repeatedly encounter breakdown, delay, and fragmentation, the countermap invites reflexivity through disorientation. The project demonstrates how multimodal ethnography can create shared experiential spaces between ethnographic interlocutors and audiences.
Paper short abstract
A decade of work with ‘Canto a lo Divino’ vigils transformed my ways of knowing. From prioritizing symbolic analysis to attending to sensory conditions. I reflect that when the field reveals itself and guides attention, modes of understanding emerge that move the discipline's frameworks.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines an ethnographic trajectory of a decade with the vigils of ‘Canto a lo Divino’ in central Chile; a devotional practice of Catholic roots enacted in mostly rural domestic spaces. In 2015, my first research focused on verses, ritual structures, and cognitive dynamics. I documented altars and recorded songs, but understood them as complements to the symbolic analysis I prioritized.
Upon returning years later, sustained presence in the vigils revealed dimensions I had overlooked. The field disclosed a multimodality that had escaped any methodological decision; song modulating durations, images organizing presences, bodies responding to intensities. Learning to inhabit that sensory density gradually displaced the question about my own relationship with faith. Less relevant than evaluating beliefs or verifying presences was attending to what the practice does: the forms of being together it produces, the temporalities it configures, the spaces it opens.
This reformulation allowed me to take the ritual seriously on its own terms rather than evaluating it from external categories. Moreover, collaborative work with ‘cantores’ and ‘cantoras’ revealed ways of knowing (entonations, silences, spatial arrangements) that tensioned my previous analytical frameworks.
I reflect on this transformation from imposing questions or binary frameworks to accompanying processes of ritual production. I propose that when the field guides our forms of attention rather than receiving predetermined methods, possibilities emerge to understand practices that resist being reduced to systems of meaning or confessional adhesions.
Paper short abstract
Presenting clips from a two-screen video installation that utilizes material from a multimodal ethnography in Lisbon, we hear stories of newcomers to the city as they attempt to find their footing in a place undergoing immense socio-cultural change, and that is urging circulation over settlement.
Paper long abstract
Since the 2011 Troika intervention, Portugal has seen an influx of new residents spurred by a relatively lax immigration policy, tax incentives and a low cost of living compared with the rest of Europe, shifting Portugal’s paradigm from a country of emigration to an immigration destination.
The “floating city” of Lisbon is situated at a point – geographically and socio-economically – that blurs the boundary between the global South and North; a transitory space marked by the rapid movement of people and things from a diverse range of backgrounds. While all in Lisboa must now play in the field of Bauman’s liquid modernity – with locals and newcomers trying to establish a livelihood in the city that they’d like to call home, while trying to understand what that home actually is – there is a pervasive and growing sentiment that the city should belong to some and not others, and a reconfiguration (with eyes towards the past) of what it is to be Portuguese.
Presenting clips from a two-screen video installation that utilizes material from a three-year multimodal ethnography, we encounter the trajectories of newcomers to Lisboa as they reckon with a city undergoing immense change; uncovering how sensory-affective-embodied modes are implicated in the navigation of frictions and opportunities in a new lifeworld for people on the move, disentangling the divisions between “local” and “global”, “us” and “them”, and “belonging” and “estrangement” in the lives of the interlocutors, and complicating polarized media and political rhetoric with regard to migration.
Paper short abstract
We explore how animations can convey sensory experiences and narratives of study participants as an engaging medium of reporting intangible cultural heritage associated with physical sites. The animations are grounded in ethnographic analysis of walking interviews, storytelling and archival data.
Paper long abstract
This presentation discusses how embodied, multisensory, and narrative knowledge generated by multimodal ethnographic methods can be translated into immersive audiovisual narratives that afford space for multivocality. To target the need for developing methods of reporting narrative inquiries through narrative representations, we introduce immersive installations of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) associated with sites, captured through multisensory methods combined with storytelling.
In the INT-ACT project, we are exploring emotional, experiential, and environmental dimensions of ICH related to cultural heritage sites. We use our multimodally generated ethnographic material for creating site-related audiovisual eXtended Reality (XR) exhibitions, used with local participants in case studies on different social challenges. In Scotland, we conducted on-site walking interviews at Calanais stone circles, and a transgenerational storytelling workshop about personal experiences of megalithic sites. In the Koli National Park in Finland, we combined recorded nature walks with artists and archival folklore data. In both sites, the resulting narratives were thematically analyzed for the creation of compilations presented multimodally. Here we focus on how the medium of animation can be used to narrate and convey different sensory experiences identified through personal narratives, as well as mythical stories into an affective mode of engagement.
We will show short animations created to communicate different perspectives to ICH, including feelings of timelessness, fears and hopes for the future, and environmental moods, related to ancient standing stones and extra-ordinary natural sites. Our aim is to better understand how such representations can make site-related ICH imagined, felt, experienced and shared across time and place.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents “Tactile Fieldnotes”, a multimodal ethnographic method made during fieldwork to record encounters with interlocutors in a quilting community. I reflect on how “making” shapes “knowing”, asking how apprenticeship and sensory practice can cultivate understanding and connection.
Paper long abstract
This paper presents my visual and sensory research, a stitched book of “Tactile Fieldnotes” made during long-term ethnographic research (2018–2025) with a quilting community in South Manchester, Northwest England. The quilting group is a collective of older women who come together each week to show, make, and talk about quilts. Methodologically, the stitched book is both a way of documenting the community and a creative ethnographic method. It is a practice-based, experimental approach to recording, created alongside (and at times in place of) fieldnotes. Each square is produced within the group, and the ethnographic experiences are congealed, stitch by stitch, into a collection of fabric pages.
Making is, on one level, a technique of fitting in. Apprenticeship becomes a tactic employed by the researcher to bridge a common ground. It grants a shared conversation topic and a practice-in-common through which to better comprehend the rules and praxis of quiltmaking. Making as a method enables the ethnographer to reach into the more-than-representational. As such, apprenticeship within communities of making is not merely a case of technical transmission but, as Trevor Marchand describes, the “formation of person” (2008).
I show how making, as a creative research method, celebrates the mode of knowledge production in which my interlocutors work. Using a multimodal approach to fieldwork that combines ethnographic enquiry with the embodied, this sensory form of engagement offers the researcher a way to cultivate understanding and affinity within the community of practice.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on community recipes, counter-maps and artworks, we explore our 'recipes for disaster justice' project in which we creatively collaborate with diverse communities across Lombok island, Indonesia to mobilise intersectional and inclusive disaster risk reduction.
Paper long abstract
This multi-modal presentation shares recipes, lived experiences and artworks from our Resep Keadilan Bencana (Recipes for Disaster Justice) project, an arts-led collaboration with multiply marginalised communities in Lombok, Indonesia. It reflects on our creative feminist praxis to shift narratives, centre care, and transform power relations around climate change and disasters. We ask how applied and creative ethnography can centre local communities in disaster management and prioritise their lived experiences, epistemologies, and embodied knowledges.
Working with over 150 participants including women, fishers, farmers, former migrant workers, youth, people with disabilities, teachers, LGBTQIA+ people, activists and child marriage survivors, in partnership with 17 civil society organisations, and a collective of artists, our collaboration has generated 131 community-led 'recipes', 123 creative artefacts, four counter-maps of hazard multipliers, and a community archive of local innovations and everyday practices of care, repair, and mutual support. Drawing on these co-produced multi-modal materials, this presentation explores how creative feminist and decolonial praxis and grassroots solidarities open new vocabularies and inclusive infrastructures for disaster justice - combining a focus on climate, social and environmental justice. It explores how disaster management - and disasters themselves - reproduce and exacerbate inequalities and exclusions, particularly for women, people with disabilities, and rural communities, while everyday local adaptations, innovations, and creativity articulate alternative visions of safety, solidarity, and care. Counter-maps and inclusive infrastructures arising from our creative collaborations point toward practices that can expand epistemic justice, enabling communities to shape the policies and priorities of state agencies, emergency responders and local authorities
Paper short abstract
This paper presents multimodal projects that combine/juxtapose analytical and sensory modes of knowing, exploring how diverse expressive forms can create (long-term) dialogues between researchers, participants, creative practitioners and audiences, including people with visual impairments.
Paper long abstract
This paper presents two experiments in multimodal ethnography that combine and juxtapose different analytical and sensory modes of knowing and collaboration. The first builds on ongoing ethnographic research started in 2020 that investigates how the pandemic has influenced the lives of migrant women in (Northern) Ireland, both during and after the end of the global health crisis (Svašek 2023a and b). Layered outputs and improvisations include online and face-to-face interviews (2020-2026), paintings from a distance (2020-2021), painting-poems (2021-2022), musical compositions by the British composer Tristan Sparks (2025-2026) and dance improvisations by the Chinese dancer Liuliu (2025-2026). The second project is a collaboration between anthropology students from Queen's University Belfast, the Royal National Institute of Blind People Northern Ireland, the British singer-songwriter Joe Kenny and composer Tristan Sparks (2025-2026). The outputs include multimodal practices of discussion, a multisensorial walk, and music production. The paper critically explores how diverse expressive forms and embodied and affective knowledge can create (long-term) dialogues between researchers, participants, creative practitioners and audiences.
Svašek, Maruška 2023a ‘Ethnography as creative improvisation: Exploring methods in (post) pandemic times’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 13(1): 101-127.
Svašek, Maruška 2023b Pandemic times: Nine acts, Anthropology and Humanism 48(2): 1-13.
Paper short abstract
This paper reflects on collaborative multimodal ethnography in a mental health therapeutic community in Portugal, showing how photography, video, and digital storytelling open sensory, affective, and dialogical spaces that challenge moralising binaries and foster co-produced knowledge.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the potential of collaborative multimodal ethnography as an experimental practice in a mental health therapeutic context marked by institutional tensions, disciplinary regimes, and polarised narratives about addiction. The ethnographic field is traversed by institutional logics that oppose ill and healthy subjects, addicted and recovered, producing moralising binaries structuring care regimes, temporalities of recovery, and normative expectations. This research adopts the notion of "individuals with addictive behaviours and dependencies" as an analytical, ethical, and methodological strategy to unsettle stigmatising categories and reinscribe addiction in lived, relational, and contingent experiences. Based on fieldwork in a therapeutic community in Portugal, I developed collaborative photography, video, and digital storytelling workshops with residents undergoing social reintegration. More than data collection tools, the workshops functioned as experimental devices for co-producing knowledge, in which images, sounds, and narratives activated sensory, affective, and dialogical dimensions of experience. I argue these multimodal practices make visible micro-forms of everyday resistance (Scott, 1985), understood as narrative, aesthetic, and relational gestures challenging clinical categories and therapeutic moralities. The creation of collaborative narratives produced methodological and subjective shifts. Throughout the process, experimental ethnography opened spaces for situated experiences, affects, memories, and forms of existence escaping logics of normalisation and pathologisation. From this perspective, multimodality is not only a research technique but a form of care (Mattingly, 2014) and an ethical practice of attention to the ordinary (Das, 2007). The paper discusses how ethnographic experimentation can foster dialogue, reflexivity, and understanding in deeply polarised worlds.