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Paper short abstract:

Taking the research process as its focus, this paper discusses the methodological and ethical tensions that emerge from participation in an interdisciplinary collaborative project, and the implications this has for shaping ethnographic practice and knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I reflect on my participation in an interdisciplinary collaborative project between a national art museum and a UK university, working as a researcher conducting an ethnographic study of cultural diversity policy within the collaborating art museum. Focusing on the research process, I discuss tensions that transpired during fieldwork that shaped the production of ethnographic practice, relations, and knowledge. Collaborative projects challenge the 'individualist aesthetic of ethnography' (Marcus 2008) as research teams with diverse professional knowledge, practices, and networks, seek to collaboratively produce and distribute knowledge to diverse audiences. The discursive potential, frequently promoted by projects and funding bodies, for collaborative research to offer 'innovation' (Strathern 2006) and a 'democratization' of research, hide ambiguities in the research process. These 'buzz' words fail to capture the challenging processes often involved in working within an interdisciplinary team, particularly with members who are also 'subjects' of study. I turn my attention to this invisible work by discussing my experience of working on a collaborative research project that became enrolled into the wider organizing praxis, policy-making apparatus, and power-relations of my fieldwork site - the art museum. This raises questions about the potential for collaborative projects to intervene in, and co-produce, their subjects. Secondly, I provide my account of an attempt to create collective and distributed knowledge amongst members of the research team with often competing professional practices. I conclude by outlining important ethical and methodological implications for conducting ethnographic practice as part of collaborative work.

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Paper short abstract:

Challenges arising during collaborations between researchers from diverse disciplines, local government officials and informal settlement residents.

Paper long abstract:

The Water Research Commission of South Africa has, for some years now, supported cooperative research studies involving partnerships between engineering, environmental studies and social anthropology researchers. They have, in turn, attempted at times to bring both local government officials and residents of informal settlements, and sometimes NGOs into the process. The paper documents some of those experiences in order to comment on the challenges that have arisen. Its goals are to reflect on the dynamics of those relationships and to indicate how such partnerships might best be structured.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider co-construction and civil society implications of anthropologist in the case of the mining conflict in Peru. The presentation will be based on our fieldwork in the Cajamarca region.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will propose a series of considerations based on fieldwork in the Cajamarca region in Peru where strong mining disputes occur.

Two main issues need to be considered. First, in this conflictive context, the researcher is immediately confronted with the denial of neutrality by his interlocutors. Co-construction is wanted but takes the risk of an 'ideologization' while not doing it can be interpreted as a form of arrogance with local spokesmen. Secondly, when deaths or rights violations occur and information is relatively controlled, personal or humanist reasons can also push the researcher to take a public position. Silent such facts could seem as an abandon of his informants.

In this context, we discuss and reflect on the links that have united our own scientific research work with European and Peruvian civil society. For us this meant privileged access to a range of actors who were opposed to mining project as well as the lack of access to mining stakeholders. It has also meant the need to extend the research to the international actors we were part of (NGOs, networks and platforms), related to our area of "return", that were also involved in local conflicts, removing any distinction of times and spaces in our work. This specific place in the glocal game can finally consider the problem of a deterritorialized anthropology related to new technologies of information and communication and the ethical implications of any anthropological work.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a description of a pilot project of sex workers peer educators implemented in Portugal. The main purpose of the project was the integration of sex workers as peer educators in intervention projects. We also reflect on the collaboration between sex workers and other participants.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a description of an innovative project of sex workers peer educators implemented in Lisbon. For the first time an NGO promoted a training course for sex workers aiming their integration as peer educators in harm reduction projects or health promotion projects. Also the project intended to empower the community in order to encourage the development of an association of sex workers - not yet existing in Portugal. Thus, if the training of peer educators was the most obvious and immediate aim, this process also enhanced the importance of promoting activism and militancy of sex workers.

This project consisted on the development and testing of a model, so it had an investigative nature. Therefore, a link between the promoter entity, the training organization, the research team and sex workers was essential for suggesting, negotiating and introducing reformulations in what had been planned in order to produce improvements in its design. As this was a project for training peer educators, which requires a community-based intervention and a participatory approach, we choose a qualitative methodology of action research.

The paper sets out strengths and weaknesses of this pilot project, questions the limits of collaboration between sex workers and other participants, and also reflects on the possible links between scientific research and socio-political intervention.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects upon an evaluation of the implementation of pilot projects for the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions (DEBI) in Brazil. The process evaluation, based on ethnographic methods, was ordered by the Brazilian Ministry of Health and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Paper long abstract:

In the context of the Cooperation Agreement (CoAg) signed between the Department of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, AIDS and Viral Hepatitis of the Ministry of Health of Brazil, the National School of Public Health / FIOCRUZ and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC/USA), centered on capacity building and technology transfer, Brazil tested a set of DEBI (Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions) interventions. The main goal was to test the application of three models of intervention for the prevention of HIV / STD in Brazil. Therefore, a first level of collaboration in the process described involved two national governmental agencies, where one was the recipient of both funds and technology and the other, the donor, whilst a second one was between the AIDS Department and the NGOs.

I was hired as an external member with qualitative and evaluative research experience to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the three interventions selected to compose DEBI Brazil. The process evaluation focused on both suitability and adaptation of the interventions to the national context and was carried out in three capitals (Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza). Ethnographic fieldwork identified factors that conditioned, both positive and negatively, the results of the three pilot projects , including different power relations in the collaborative relation between the three NGOs and the national governmental body. The cooperation also involved a certain tension between recipient and donor in the appropriation and adaptation of DEBI, seen in discourses that referred to the ideas of colonialism, autonomy, dependency, and empowerment.

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Paper short abstract:

We study the dimensions of representation and acting among circus-theatre artists by filmmaking process, in an etnographic research. Here I reflect about my experience in the production of an ethnographic film called Circu’s loves, an etnofiction played by a troupe of circus-theatre artists.

Paper long abstract:

Here I reflect about my experience in the production of an ethnographic film called Circu's loves, an etnofiction played by a troupe of circus-theatre artists.

In this film, our aim were to put together the acting of different people , their points of view about marriage, acting and the life in the circus.

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Paper short abstract:

Starting from the results of a public art experience realized in Almada, Portugal, this paper approaches the relevance of anthropological contributions to the development of participated public art practices in which the creative process is shared with local communities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper intends to demonstrate the relevant contribution that Anthropology can give to participative, multidisciplinary processes in public art, based on an experience of a public art project developed between July 2011 and July 2012 in Almada, Portugal. This project consists in the installation (in Autumn 2012) of three sculptures in the newly constructed Fróis Urban Park, located in the Monte de Caparica district, a residential area marked by low incomes and a very diverse cultural composition. The Park - part of a larger urban regeneration project - includes several municipal equipments (library, pool, associative centre) and intends to be a place of leisure which will qualify the public space, promote inclusiveness and connect this neighbourhood with the surrounding urban area.

The social and cultural diversity of this area led the municipality to propose the construction of an artwork inspired in the concept of multiculturalism. An interdisciplinary team comprising artists, anthropologists and educators developed an open methodology in order to promote a common space for different groups and allow the effective involvement of the population in the creative process. Based on this experience, we want to discuss, from the viewpoint of public art, the relevance and usefulness of the anthropological perspective to this type of methodologies, focusing especially on the interdisciplinary dialogue about the relational space of this community and it's significations and on it's translation into feasible and effective processes of participation.

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Paper short abstract:

Lisbon neighborhoods traditionally associated to low-end commercial sex are now sites for urban renewal with multi-partner collaborations. I will bring ethnographic data on the different actors’ perspectives about interventions (food, comm. sex, drugs, housing) to discuss the scope of collaboration

Paper long abstract:

A recent wave of urban intervention in some of the most rundown neighbourhoods in Lisbon's inner city included the moving of the Mayor's office into the square of Intendente -- a hub of street hustling, hostals-cum-brothels, low-end bars and assorted informal businesses through the 20th century - plus coordinated actions both there and in the adjacent Mouraria, a medieval neighbourhood that fed the imagination of many Lisbonners as the repository of vice and low life, and also as the birth place of Fado. At the turn of the 21st century, the area was also one of the most ethnically diverse square miles of Lisbon and a vibrant center of commerce, with a strong presence of Asian-run business (mostly from China and Bangla Desh), a mosque, halal markets, and some African gathering points and stores.

Claiming to have learned from previous processes of urban renewal in other European historical neighborhoods, the city intervention in Intendente/Mouraria presents itself as a highly collaborative project; from the beginning, it promoted a number of actions involving the residents, bar owners and other business holders, prostitutes, street inhabitants, and other frequenters of the area.

In this paper I will bring perspectives of different actors involved in, and affected by, the interventions (participated photo exhibits, street music festivals, community kitchens, support for local businesses, debates around prostitution and drug use, housing policies) in order to contribute to the wider discussion about the effects, shapes and modes of collaborative projects.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the challenges of interdisciplinarity in disability studies in India.

Paper long abstract:

Study of disability in Indian context is largely informed by international discourses and political disability activism. I trace my efforts to study disability by grounding it in anthropological and feminist perspectives. Learning lessons from both anthropology and feminism on one hand and disability perspectives on the other, this paper attempts to deconstruct the discourses on disability in India and also emphasize the need for ethnographically grounded understandings of lives of people with disabilities. The challenges that one faces within university structure and the disabilty rights movement as a temporarily abled academic have been discussed. Questions about interdisciplinarity and identity politics are also raised in the contexts where both activists and academics participate. The paper makes a case for learning from movement and also contributing to it by foregrounding the voices from the margins.