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- Convenors:
-
Shweta Krishnan
(George Washington University)
Dana Burton (New York University)
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- Discussants:
-
Dana Burton
(New York University)
Shweta Krishnan (George Washington University)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel invites unconventional presentations anchored in transformative moments. Can it catalyze the speculation of a broader ethics of care and collaboration that transforms both the scholars and the field of STS? Think creatively; we are looking for mixed methods and media.
Long Abstract:
Imagine an encounter with raindrops, sea shells, that first sip of coffee as you dance to a song on the radio. Wayside flowers on the sidewalk.
A moment with your two-year-old, your aging mother, a stranger reading your favorite book on a train, an interlocutor who challenges you, a student who frustrates you.
A haunting presence you can’t quite see, but you feel in your spine. Imagine encountering yourself in a different time and space.
A return to your favorite park bench, or to a canvas to try, once again, to paint.
This panel invites unconventional presentations anchored in transformative moments, however ephemeral they may seem at the time of occurrence. How does that interaction—that momentary partnership with someone else—change how you think about your work? Can it catalyze the speculation of a broader ethics of care and collaboration that transforms both the scholars and the field of STS?
Like the chrysalis stage of a butterfly’s metamorphosis, this panel takes inspiration from the transformative power of collaboration as a becoming with. This mode takes seriously the idea of working with and across difference, and makes possible a space for meaningful conversation, resources, and learning. This panel centers the work of black, indigenous, transnational, feminist, and queer thinkers, artists, and activists to experiment with creative, alternative pedagogical and methodological practices in STS.
We are looking for mixed methods and media. Think of your contributions in the form of zines, photo slideshows, short video clips, sound clips, collages, choreographies, story maps, sketches, diagrams/figures, poetry, storytelling. Through these creative formats, this panel intends to deliberately disrupt normative expectations, explore playful techniques, and transform the scales of our scholarly commitments.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Sandra Zaroufis (University of Amsterdam)
Short abstract:
The application of spatial analysis, photomontage, digital storytelling and story maps is explored through the integration of desktop, ethnographic and participatory workshop data. The mosaic of findings represent the complexity of the field site (Mankweng) and collaborators (small scale farmers).
Long abstract:
As representations of ethnography expand beyond text into multimodal methods and media, opportunity arises for the application of mixed and collaborative methods in the representation of complex field sites. The application of spatial analysis, photomontage, digital storytelling and story maps is explored through desktop analysis and participatory workshops. The findings represent the diversity and complexity of the field and interlocutors.
The site, namely, Mankweng or Turfloop, is a peri-urban, rapidly urbanising township in Limpopo, South Africa and home to the University of Limpopo (UL). In the early days of fieldwork, through a discussion, with a UL lecturer, about the infrastructural development, land use and land tenure, he described Mankweng as a “mosaic of development”. This description stuck with me, more than those of my other interlocutors. Perhaps our common disciplinary background in Landscape Design influenced this, or my appreciation of visual media to understand and explain concepts. In this presentation, I combine methods from Landscape Architecture, such as those discussed in Zaroufis (2020) and Anthropology to describe Mankweng. Material from participatory workshops relay the stories of farmers of within 3 categories: backyard, subsistence and smallholder farming, expressing the diversity of capacities, hopes and dreams of residents.
Through these stories, urban growth and social differentiation are explored at a large scale using maps, whilst linked to collaborators’ individual stories that are represented through audio-visual media and story maps. A mosaic of representations thus emphasize the danger of painting certain field sites and collaborators with the same brush.
Jessie Stainton (Concordia University)
Short abstract:
Drawing on STS, disability studies, and research-creation, I introduce "Craft-based Interviews," ethnographic research through textile co-creation that fosters an ethics of care to address research barriers for participants with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Long abstract:
The haptic vibration when ripping fabric, the hum of the sewing machine, the place where needle, flesh and fabric meet. Each are moments that transform the ethnographic experience into something that cannot be reached through words alone. This presentation introduces "craft-based interviews," an anti-ableist method where ethnographic research is mediated through textile co-creation. Qualitative methods privilege written and spoken forms of communication and self-representation which inherently create participation barriers for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), who often communicate in other ways that words. As such, the experiences of individuals with IDD have been relegated to the margins of STS research, where they are often positioned as passive subjects. Research is completed about them, and technology is designed for as opposed to with people with IDD. Through analysis of fieldwork videography, I introduce "craft-based interviews" as a transdisciplinary research method informed by STS, critical disability studies, and research-creation. Often appearing in micro-moments of relational materiality, textiles are a media that enable a dynamic agency between researcher and participant, disrupting power dynamics and lingual hierarchies of communication. This enables a broader ethics of care demonstrating practices of “crip-technoscience,” to articulate how disabled people and their kin alter and reinvent the material-discursive world (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019). To conclude, I consider how this approach opens new channels of communicating in ways that resist intellectual ableism in research practices.
Gloria Lauterbach (NODUS Sustainable Design Research Group, Aalto University)
Short abstract:
This contribution presents and discusses the concept of more-than-human karaoke as a collaborative tool. It stirs the question if post-anthropocentric perspectives can be practiced through our voices that bring us closer to the environments we are part of.
Long abstract:
Today's environmental challenges require a deepening of collaborative skills at all levels of society. The arts not only provide creative tools for renewed collaboration between knowledges and worldviews, but also push boundaries through playful explorations of in-between territories.
The concept of more-than-human karaoke, as proposed for this session, invites reflection and experimentation with a creative tool that aims to bring humans and more-than-humans closer together. Through the performance of sounds of nature and wildlife, the work raises questions such as: could more-than-human karaoke contribute to shifting our attention towards a more holistic perception of our environment? And may the exploration of more-than-human sounds allow for a closer connection with our environment?
The more-than-human karaoke will be presented as a video work (without sound), featuring more-than-human encounters. The participants of the session are invited to dub the video work. The performance is a multi-dimensional experiment that incorporates and merges the voices of the karaoke singers and the various environments shown in the video installation.
The karaoke itself was exhibited at a more-than-human festival as well as a research conference where insights were collected from the singers through a simple questionnaire. Both the discussion of these insights and the exploration of the creative tool itself will be part of the presentation at EASST.
Carolina Cuevas Parra (Wageningen University) Jimena German Blanco (University of Granada (Spain))
Short abstract:
Sparked by the encounter with a glacier lagoon in Andalucía and the classical Arab archive, we attempt to weave an audiovisual speculative conversation on the memory of water, Islamic water symbolism, and present-day caring practices in the fragile territory of Southern Spain.
Long abstract:
This is a conversation between two Mexican researchers studying water as a disputed material-discursive entanglement. Departing from the improbable encounters with a dying glacier lagoon in Sierra Nevada in Andalucía, and the classical Arab heritage, this conversation explores watery alter-imaginaries (Neimanis, 2018) and unlikely collaborations to be found in between two seemingly distant worlds. In doing so, we attempt to weave an affective, critical and speculative conversation around the historical archives of Islamic and Arab imaginary and thinking with water, specifically in Al-Andalus, and the day to day experiences and concerns of people trying to revive the seemingly lost memory of water in present-day Andalucía. “Holding still” our subject of study —water—, we attempt to cross back and forth in-between worlds, memories, affects, geographies and times, and our own seemingly out of place embodiments, to speculate on the (im)possibility of building relations of care and radical collaboration with bodies of water in a severely damaged territory. Presented as an audiovisual conversation, we interrogate the possibility of distant, yet partially touching, worlds to learn from each other ways of attending and caring for waters.
Satu Aavanranta
Short abstract:
Choreographic Encounters is a new explorative and embodied research method combining design probes with choreographic prompts. In this study, Choreographic Encounters was utilised to research the experience of darkness and how the experience changed during the research process.
Long abstract:
“Finding a beat was exciting, it came so easily: the bird and the wind, doing movements. It was easy to move with them” (participant, 2024).
This paper examines Choreographic Encounters, a new research method, combining design probes with choreographic prompts, that was utilised for researching the experience of darkness. As a choreographer, I recognised an unexplored potential in design probes: an enhanced creative embodiment could deepen the results. This new version of design probes, Choreographic Encounters, is based on creaturely knowing and multisensory improvisation (East, 2019; Ashley, 2019). Also, Choreographic Encounters incorporates a multispecies perspective to darkness, including a human, a bat, a pine, and a planetary point of view.
First, Choreographic Encounters was created through integrating learnings from literature, specialist interviews, and darkness walks. Second, Choreographic Encounters was tested by the participants. Third, incorporating evidence from the completed Choreographic Encounters and micro-phenomenological interviews, this study demonstrates that Choreographic Encounters enabled participants to explore the experience of darkness and consequently advance the relationship with this atmospheric phenomena.
”I extended my arms completely horizontally and began to rotate them slowly as if the wind were pushing them. I felt like I was the son of the tree trying to do the same things that "my dad" tree did … I felt so much love … the darkness embraced both me and the tree.” (participant, 2024).
As a contribution, I am offering to facilitate a Choreographic Encounter for the participants, lasting between 10 – 20 minutes.