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Paper short abstract

Drawing on 3 scenes, I reflect on spaces of knowledge-generation: Fieldwork, filming, and the ethnographic lab/studio. From workshops and tarot with township tech entrepreneurs in Cape Town, to filmmaking and incubating in an Afghan/Danish Collective, and to anthropology students in a Copenhagen Lab

Paper long abstract

Drawing on 3 scenes, I reflect on various ‘spaces’ of knowledge-generation: Fieldwork, filming and the ethnographic lab/studio. One scene is set on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa where I have done longitudinal fieldwork. Collaborative and multimodal methods have been part of co-creating knowledge in the field. In recent projects, however, I have with colleagues turned to design workshops – bringing differently situated actors around the table (or circle) across differences. ‘Whose turf is the township - and whose turf is the workshop space’? A tarot deck is part of this first scene. Another scene shows the Afghan/Danish Film Collective ARTlife giving a pitch at the CPH:LAB incubator for non-fiction storytelling across platforms. We have worked together making documentary in a Collective for years. In our endeavour to produce a game, sharing dilemmas for a young woman in Scandinavia with an Afghan background, we found ourselves invited into others’ defined workshop space – still filming. A mock-up is part of this second scene.

The third scene is set in the Ethnographic Exploratory and MultimodalLab, University of Copenhagen. An old library, now filled witth plants and posters, is a space for multimodal experiments. Yet, in a neo-liberal university system that teaches mastery, perfection and focus on grades, how can we truly invite for experimentation and communities of practice? A website is part of this third scene. What do the scenes show about ethnographic knowledge-making between the Studio and the field - politics of inviting and politics of participating?