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- Convenors:
-
Alexa Färber
(University of Vienna)
Anne S. Chahine (Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ)
Karen Waltorp (University of Copenhagen)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel seeks multimodal contributions that address beyondness—practices and spaces beyond singular disciplines, expertise, and perspectives—to foster collaboration, embrace complexity, and dis-engage from a polarized world, and imagine otherwise.
Long Abstract
This panel invites contributions that engage with multimodal practices that go beyond categories, binaries, boxes, addressing “beyondness”. Beyond (op)positions, beyond being one or the other, beyond expert and non-expert, beyond different knowledge systems, beyond disciplines, beyond margin and periphery – the beyondness of a polarised world and how this translates to imagining otherwise.
How can multimodality as a practice and theoretical frame help us pay attention, listen deeply, and share knowledge about existing spaces, as well as enable the creation of new spaces, supporting people and ideas from seemingly opposite ends to come together? Spaces that acknowledge the undercurrent of biases, power relations, and thought-worlds that exist when different parties meet.
From its outset, multimodality aims to embrace heterogeneous meaning-making and is envisioned to be an umbrella for a variety of research modes, methods, and processes. Multimodal work is shaped as much by entangling moments as by disentangling ones. The research interest lies in analysing these very processes, their conditions of possibility, and their effects. Multimodality, understood as transdisciplinary spaces, are often collaborative and thus partially non-expert spaces, generating for everybody involved non-expert moments. How can an oscillating motion and moving beyond (op)positions – refusing to be either or, embracing the grey instead of the black and white – be useful for better understanding and navigating a world made up of countless bubbles and niches, with little or no exchange in between? We encourage contributions that feel comfortable in the uncomfortable space in-between and beyond.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Multimodal collaboration in Tasik Chini transforms hackathons and an i‑doc into relational terrains where Indigenous and academic worlds meet. Through care and reflexive practice, the project gestures toward resilient possibilities in polarised times.
Paper long abstract
The authors reflect on a transdisciplinary research collaboration in the Tasik Chini Biosphere Reserve, Malaysia, where an international team and Indigenous co‑researchers experimented with multimodal anthropology to explore Disaster Risk Resilience (DRR). Through hackathon‑style workshops and the co‑creation of an interactive documentary (i‑doc), the project sought to unsettle conventional research habits and generate shared spaces of knowledge‑making that honour Indigenous epistemologies. Multimodal approaches—combining sound, image, narrative, mapping, and embodied practice—became tools for negotiating difference, revealing assumptions, and enabling forms of dialogue that exceed textual or policy‑driven modes of engagement.
In a context marked by legal constraints, linguistic plurality, and uneven power relations, the team used multimodality not only as a method but as a relational practice. Drawing on informal interviews and recorded conversations, the paper examines moments of awe, confusion, and productive friction through ethics of care. These moments illuminate how vulnerability, reflexivity, and sensory engagement can help researchers navigate polarised worlds where institutional timelines, disciplinary expectations, and community rhythms often collide.
The paper argues that resilience emerges not simply from integrating Indigenous insights into existing DRR frameworks, but from reconfiguring research relationships, accountability, and storytelling practices. By foregrounding co‑creation and multimodal experimentation, the project in the Tasik Chini biosphere offers a positive, situated example of how transdisciplinary teams can work across epistemic divides. The i‑doc is presented both as a research output and as a methodological proposition for building more ethical, imaginative, and collaborative futures.
Paper short abstract
This paper will reflect and share insights on a performative intervention by “Mx. Science” executed at the general assembly of a large-scale EU-funded project in early 2025, aimed at sparking reflective conversations around ethics, evaluation, and community-based inquiry.
Paper long abstract
This paper will reflect and share insights on a performative intervention by “Mx. Science” executed at the general assembly (GA) of a large-scale, international, and interdisciplinary EU-funded project in early 2025. Mx. Science is the brainchild of postdisciplinary scholar Saskia de Wildt and was invited to collaborate on an intervention at this GA by Anne S. Chahine, who focused on developing spaces of engagement, methodological frameworks, and circular evaluation processes for this specific EU-project.
“Mx. Science” integrates drag artistry into scientific research, embodying a form of in-betweenness that aims to spark reflective conversations around ethics and evaluation when it comes to (cross-cultural) community-based inquiry. By employing the aesthetics and techniques of drag, this novel approach creates joyful, sensory encounters that reveal the gaps between the theoretical promises and actual practices of transformative, cross-cultural research. The intervention invited scientists at the GA to engage and reflect on the ethical dimensions of their work through spontaneous, in-person conversations at informal moments during the event—such as coffee breaks and meals. These encounters, designed to be accessible and playful, gently guide participants toward open-ended reflection on inclusivity, diversity, and equity in research. Themes and emergent issues from the project and the GA itself informed the dialogue.
Based on this case study and experience, the authors will reflect on their attempt to rethink academic meeting spaces, as an opportunity for site-specific embodiment of relational research ethics.
Paper short abstract
This presentation offers a multimodal response to the ongoing debate between critical studies of and technocratic drives underpinning development. It offers a kind of critique that attends to the moments when the binaries enabling both sides of the camp to crystallise yet crumble at the same time.
Paper long abstract
This presentation discusses our collaborative efforts of engaging people in imagining their development futures through imagistic and embodied approaches, focusing on rural Sumba Island in the eastern side of Indonesia as an empirical site. Drawing on a long-term ethnography that is both experimental and immersive, we reflect on the role of multimodal engagement in speaking towards the perennial debate between critical approaches to and technocratic views of development, and the possibilities of reframing what constitutes a critique of development. In doing so, the multimodal insights emerging from our work have illustrated the need of holding development in both affirmative yet negative terms, hence ambiguously. As we will show, people’s everyday forms of imagination allude to the possibilities for development encounters to remould their sense of self in relation to their human and non-human counterparts, resulting in some forms of empowering effects. Yet, those potentialities remain uneven, for which the vision of development continues to be the leverage as well as the barrier for such an otherwise future to materialise in practice. These ambiguous insights, we argue, allow us to pay closer attention to the ethical and moral implications whereby the binaries that make such a critical (and technocratic) pursuit possible, are reified and blurred at the same time.
Paper short abstract
Dreamscapes is a multimodal theater project on addiction co-created by anthropologists, theater educators, and lay actors. It stages addiction as a human experience that unsettles binaries between expert/lay, addict/non-addict, and audience/performer through participatory, reflective formats.
Paper long abstract
This paper presents Dreamscapes, a multimodal theater production on addiction currently co-created by anthropologists, theater educators, and a cast of ten lay actors, including participants from earlier ethnographic research at a rehabilitation center in Vienna. Drawing on “dreamscapes” (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010) – enticing architectures of consumption historically shaped by stagecraft from the 19th-century onward – the piece reframes addiction not as a matter of unruly brains but as a profoundly human experience embedded in commercial, political, and sensory landscapes.
Staged as a hybrid of walking, audio installations, and station theater through Vienna’s 19th century Wurstelprater amusement park, the performance mobilizes theater as a “third space” (Bhabha, 1990), inspired by forum theatre (Boal, 1989), where audiences can intervene in the process. Co-creation invites people with lived, diverse experience of addiction to alcohol, opioids, slot machines, or digital media to engage with ethnographic materials and generate new narratives, thus underlining the commonalities of human experience and unsettling pathologizing othering of “addicts”.
Methodologically, the work embraces multimodality: sound and lighting evoke sensory logics of consumption; loops mirror relapse; interactive formats and digital elements invite participation before, during, and after the performance; and a reflection space gathers responses. Dreamscapes questions who counts as an “addict” and what constitutes “expertise,” playfully unsettling boundaries between artists and audiences, and between those affected and unaffected. It foregrounds nuance – rupture, contradiction, and ambivalence – while using theater’s capacity to shift roles and blur reality and fiction to express embodied experiences that are otherwise difficult to communicate.
Paper short abstract
Vigils of 'Canto a lo Divino' in Chile configure spaces where sound, image, and gesture fold/unfold heterogeneous temporal and ontological registers. Multimodality emerges from the field itself, introducing indeterminacy that blurs stable binaries.
Paper long abstract
This proposal examines the vigils of ‘Canto a lo Divino’ in central Chile; a ritual-devotional practice of Catholic roots enacted in rural domestic spaces that articulates poetic song, memory, collective listening, gesturality, and religious images. Through sensory ethnography, I explore the conditions under which these vigils generate forms of attention and knowledge that resist stable categorizations.
Multimodality emerges from the field itself. The ritual operates as a suture that folds/unfolds temporal registers (past, present, future) and ontological ones (heaven and earth, human and divine), introducing indeterminacy: they coexist without resolving into a single form. Sound, image, gesture and time blur oppositions between extraordinary and everyday, individual and collective. Altars, songs, and gestures converge, configuring thresholds where the divine can manifest through simultaneities that remain open.
Working ethnographically with these practices involves inhabiting forms of listening that attend to multiple registers: embodied memories, community archives, popular theological knowledges, immersive sensory experiences. Sustained collaboration with ‘cantores’ and ‘cantoras’ opens moments where other ways of knowing reconfigure academic analysis.
I propose that these contemporary ritual practices cultivate forms of collective relation that operate from logics distinct from dominant linear and productive temporalities. By sustaining spaces where ambiguity remains open and opposing categories coexist, the vigils offer modes of weaving worlds traversed by polarizations, keeping encounter possible without demanding synthesis or definitive resolution.
Paper short abstract
This paper argues how performing, conversing and doing theatre based workshop reveals queer stand-up comedian's relationship with censorship. The use of multimodal practices allows for understanding censorship as an embodied phenomenon enabling knowledge production with heterogenous meaning makings.
Paper long abstract
Being on stage, sitting in the audience, facilitating workshops, I take multiple subject positions as a researcher studying humour and politics. In this ongoing ethnographic research with queer stand-up comedians in India, I experiment with multiple practices such as performing stand-up comedy myself, being a spectator, having in-depth conversations with the comedians and conducting collaborative workshops with them borrowing from theatre of the oppressed, somatic research methods and participatory research. The multimodal repertoire becomes crucial in generating insights on humour and politics, more specifically on how queer comedians, including me, experience humour. By being both researcher and performer, I explore, the relationship, which queer stand-up comedians have, with censorship. In the paper, I do not view censorship as only suppression of speech, but tap into visceral ways in which censorship is felt and experienced – in the body and through the bodies. I examine how these experiences reshape the architecture of performance and rearticulate queer politics. The paper ultimately argues how multimodal practices emerge out of active listening to and in the field and shaped by constant frictions. These entanglements unfurls possibilities of knowing and relating with each other in myriad ways. Consequently they open up avenues for knowledge production with heterogeneous meaning-makings.
Paper short abstract
Moving beyond binaries such as researcher/subject and expert/non-expert, the research argues that multimodal, embodied fieldwork can function as a practice of beyondness by creating transdisciplinary spaces where difference is not resolved but held in tension.
Paper long abstract
This contribution draws from Embodied Echoes, a multimodal and embodied research project that conceives fieldwork as a collaborative artistic endeavour rather than a bounded site of data collection. Researcher and interlocutors are engaged in the same research question, co-producing knowledge through shared experimentation. Situated at the intersection of visual anthropology, contemporary dance, and immersive media, the project unfolds through long-term collaborations with Afro-Brazilian dancers and choreographers whose artistic and personal trajectories are shaped by transatlantic movement.
The collaboration began during fieldwork in Senegal, where shared engagement with movement, memory, and diasporic histories opened an initial space of encounter. A year later, we met again in Brazil to continue the research through immersive experimentation with virtual reality as an embodied method. VR became not a representational tool, but a space for exploring the interlocutors’ inner world lives—their sensory memories, affective states, and embodied reflections on the journey of return to West Africa, and its impact on their ongoing processes of self-making and world-making as Afro-Brazilian artists.
Moving beyond binaries such as researcher/subject and expert/non-expert, the research argues that multimodal, embodied fieldwork can function as a practice of beyondness by creating transdisciplinary spaces where difference is not resolved but held in tension. By centring transatlantic movement and collaborative experimentation, Embodied Echoes proposes multimodality as a way of imagining otherwise through sustained, embodied encounters across bodies, technologies, and histories.
Paper short abstract
This paper proposes 'aporetic devices'—multimodal practices combining idiotic disruption with poetic attunement— for ethnographic work that resists premature closure. Drawing on fieldwork in neurosurgery and speculative prototyping, it develops 'sketchy logics' as a way of thinking from the middle.
Paper long abstract
Ethnography in a polarised world faces pressure toward premature position-taking: declare your framework, know what you will find, be engaged. This paper proposes a different set of (dis)positions, drawing on the figures of the idiot and the poet (Wilkie and Michael 2024). The idiot slows thought, troubles our authority to possess the meaning of what we know. The poet attunes us to the richness that consensual critique forecloses.
Through three sites of multimodal ethnographic craft— sketch-based fieldnotes in neurosurgical operating rooms, collaborative prototyping at the Speculative Realities Lab, and building AI-based ethnographic side-kicks—I develop "aporetic devices" as practices combining idiotic disruption with poetic attunement. These devices cultivate a capacious imagination, holding multiple possibilities open until something unanticipated emerges. I call this "sketchy logics": provisional, responsive, comfortable with its own revisability. It is how ethnographers can learn by embracing vulnerability, by thinking "from the middle"—"not rooting itself in the soil of a truth that it would unfold, nor aiming for an ideal that would give thought its vocation" (Stengers 2017).
To disengage—to say "no thanks" to the posturing labour of engagement—is not to withdraw but to hold space for the richness of the world. Such spaces cultivate interdependence, not only between practitioners but with the beyond that holds them.